IndyCar’s Charlie Kimball: ‘There’s no gas in the gas tank’
The thirst was unbearable. Seemingly, unquenchable.
Charlie Kimball was downing 12 bottles of water a night and, still, he was parched.
A nagging rash had spread on his arm. The doctor gave him a cream to clear up the outbreak. Then, he put Kimball on the scales.
The number was alarming.
Kimball had dropped 25 pounds — in five days. Twenty-five pounds the already svelte Kimball didn’t have to lose.
“Being 22 meant I was 10 feet tall and bulletproof, right?” Kimball recalls thinking.
He wasn’t bulletproof. This up-and-coming race car driver got the diagnosis: Type 1 diabetes. His body wasn’t producing enough insulin, or in some cases, any insulin at all.
“The best analogy, being a car guy, with Type 1?” said Kimball, who drives for Chip Ganassi Racing, “There’s no gas in the gas tank.”
Then more car analogies.
Instead of having an automatic transmission pancreas like the rest of the world does, Kimball has a manual transmission. He has to manage his pancreas with insulin and a strict diet.
Everything about diabetes now makes sense to Kimball, 30, eight years later. But he had plenty of questions the day of that diagnosis. He had been racing in Europe with dreams of the U.S.
Would he ever be able to race again? Would his aspirations be shattered by a disease he knew virtually nothing about?
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