The blunt force of the head-on impact knocked the wind out of him, but that wasn’t anything Michael Annett hadn’t experienced before. His steering wheel wasn’t bent, his belts weren’t broken, his helmet didn’t have a mark on it. It wasn’t until he climbed out of the car, walked to the ambulance and unzipped his firesuit that he realized something was wrong.
“Honestly, it felt like there was a golf ball right in the middle of my sternum,” the Richard Petty Motorsports driver said Wednesday. “I knew right away — my sternum’s snapped.” Although it would take a few more days to diagnose, that would indeed prove the case — Annett’s sternum had been fractured and dislocated by the force of his accident in the Nationwide Series opener at Daytona International Speedway, an injury that would require surgery and a recovery period as long as two months.
In the meantime, the 26-year-old Iowa native has turned his #43 car over to friend Reed Sorenson, worked to figure out why he was hurt in the crash and made plans to return to the track as a spectator this weekend at Bristol. If all goes to plan, Annett could be back by the May 4 event at Talladega, although he holds out hope of returning a week earlier at Richmond. The sternum is shaped roughly like an upturned dagger, and Annett said his snapped where the blade meets the hilt, with the bottom fragment protruding over the top part by about three-quarters of an inch.
He had surgery Feb. 28, where doctors repaired the damage using screws and a metal plate. (NASCAR.com)
