"I wouldn't want anybody else to suffer through what I have," Mast says. "That's one of the reasons I went to NASCAR. After I got the final diagnosis of my illness, I told (NASCAR President) Mike Helton that the media had been pretty patient with me, that I needed to make a press announcement about my illness, and I wanted to tell the media what NASCAR was doing about carbon monoxide. Immediately, Mike instructed his people to put a program in place. They took the ball and ran with it."
In March of 2002, Mast, driving for car owner Junie Donlavey, began to experience symptoms-nausea, severe headache, dizziness, and weakness. "Imagine the worst hangover you've ever had in your life," he says. Typical of race car drivers, Mast tried to hide his illness, for illness and injury are signs of weakness in the garage. For five weeks, he suffered as symptoms worsened and he was forced to stop racing. Although he lost 33 pounds in 30 days ("I had to force myself to eat a bowl of soup per day"), his condition improved somewhat after getting out of the race car in May. He thought his illness to be viral in nature. Then, he was sick for a week after riding a tractor on his farm in Rockbridge Baths, Virginia, and again after riding on the back of a convertible as grand marshal of a parade.
"For six months, I had no idea what was wrong with me," Mast says. "Some of my racing buddies had me dying of cancer and at the time, I couldn't dispute that." His family physician, David Ellington, suspected correctly an environmental and/or job connection. He went to a Mayo clinic, to a specialist in Michigan, and finally to a clinic in Colorado, where doctors told him that through long-term exposure his body had become intolerant to carbon monoxide. "I had been around the stuff in garages and race cars since I was a kid," he says. "We don't know how that affected my case. The gas affects different people in different ways, but there is enough research to know how serious the illness is."
Mast says that about 75 percent of the Winston Cup drivers have contacted him since he became ill, some just to chat, but that "there is genuine concern among a few guys who are much younger than I am and have had some symptoms. When I was 30 years old, I could breathe the stuff all night and not even get a headache."Because of my deal, drivers are beginning to understand that carbon monoxide symptoms are not a weakness," Mast continues. "They've done a turnaround with NASCAR's medical team. They've opened the door to their condition after a race and for testing. The medical team is very happy about this response."
Mast was physically fit from an aerobics regimen before illness struck and has always been safety conscious. "I look at my illness and am 100 percent certain there is not one single thing I could have done to cause it to happen," he says. "I don't care who you are or how fit you are, if you get enough of this stuff in your system, it will kill you."
Mast is the only Winston Cup driver documented who was forced to retire because of carbon monoxide. "The transition from racing to whatever I can do is tough. It's hard to walk away," says Mast, who served as a pit reporter, avoiding direct contact with engine exhaust, for a Busch race broadcast at Nashville in June without ill effects. "I can live without racing and with my condition. I'm not going to brood with bitterness.
"The good part that's come out of this for me is that nobody else in Winston Cup has any excuse now to come down with carbon monoxide poisoning. It takes years to develop a name into a Winston Cup star. What a shame to lose one to a preventable illness."