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Back
from the brink
In 1989, northwest Super Gas/Super Comp racer Steve Federlin predicted in a racing magazine that he would one day race a Top Alcohol Dragster. He even gave the date of when this would come to be. In 2001, his prediction proved to be true. He nailed it almost to the day.
It was a tough season for Federlin, not only racing-wise but health-wise. While Federlin was racing for points and all that goes with winning an NHRA championship, he was also battling for his very life. Let’s begin at the beginning. Federlin, who owns two Aamco transmission shops and is also a dealer in Jim Hughes Performance (Phoenix, Arizona) racing transmissions and converters through his Impatience Racing, begun his racing career in earnest in 1988 in Super Gas and Super Comp. He finished racing in those particular classes in 2000. He has been a divisional champ many times, driving both a ’34 roadster and a dragster. In his first year of competition, he won a class crown. Federlin can’t even begin to count the number of times he won division races in both cars. “It’s been a lot,” he says modestly. He met Jim Hughes about the time that Hughes was beginning his performance line of transmissions and converters, and actually helped him refine those specialty products. a d v e r t i s e m e n t
Federlin, Hughes says, is one of the best “leavers” in the class. “I’d put his driving against anybody. In any other year, he would have won the championship with his points run, but Steve Torrence had a dream year, and Steve finished second. As he and I look at it, he’s 2005 the champion of the blown cars. And as a person, I can’t find a more loyal, honest friend. He’s like family,” Hughes said. “Alcohol dragster has been a goal in my life, ever since I got into drag racing,” Federlin says. “I honestly wanted a new challenge.” He and wife Patty, married for 25 years, teamed up for his first effort in TAD in 2001. Their first car was not competitive, so the Federlins went to an all-new Brad Anderson supercharged engine for power in 2002, and suddenly they were hitters. Federlin’s dragster finished No. 3, No. 10 and No. 2 in points, respectively. He was leading the 2005 championship points until the last two races, when Torrance put a run together that ended in his winning nine races out of 10 to clinch the TAD crown. Federlin won five, three nationals and two divisionals, finished runner-up twice and went to the semifinals three times. All that with a crew that consisted of, in addition to himself, his wife Patty, Joe Adams, one of his Aamco technicians, and Tom Cole, a volunteer. When the smoke cleared just ninety points separated the two Steves. Federlin finished with 698 to Torrance’s 819. Federlin’s digger has gone a best of 5.32 at 265 mph, off a 5.26 supercharged record. a
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The doctors sent him home for recovery from the infection, but by the end of January 2003 (“The only year that I have missed the NHRA Winternationals.”), it became worse. Doctors made the decision to go in and cut out all of the infection, “basically to save my life, because my body was giving up,” Federlin said. “I told them that I was a racer, so do everything you need to do, because I’m a racer.” They cut out a section of his colon, parts of his large and small intestines, a section of his liver and a section of his stomach lining. He recovered, beating all the odds against him. “I walked in and walked out,” Federlin said. But then, six months later, he began having severe back pains, with his left leg going numb. In that time, he had shrunk two and a half inches in height. “The antibiotics and steroids and all the other medications I was taking, they thought, caused degenerative disc disease, all the way down my back,” he said. Doctors then operated on Federlin’s back. They radiused the vertebrae and cut all the bone spurs away, to relieve the pressure. That was in November 2003. Federlin also had raced the entire ’03 season. The surgery was a success. But in the race at Topeka, after a tire-shaking run, Federlin got out of his dragster just barely able to walk. “I remember talking to the late Shelly Howard about some medications,” he said. Federlin still raced, then flew home and went immediately to the emergency room, where doctors found that three of his lower back discs had deteriorated completely, and his vertebrae were pinching a nerve. “They told me I needed emergency surgery and I said, ‘No, I have six months to finish the season.’”
Doctors found a tumor on his spinal cord that they thought was cancerous, and they told Steve that that was causing it. Another specialist said no, we did the tests; you need to look somewhere else. “This was in February 2005, and I’d be in the emergency room once or twice a month, bloated, and every time I went in, they said I had an infection in my blood, you need antibiotics. I ended up getting an operation for a tumor growth on my stomach lining. It was non-cancerous, and they said, ‘We took care of that, but that’s not your problem.’ I was so frustrated that I began thinking, ‘Maybe it’s in my head.’ I told Patty, I’ve been cattle-prodded, cut on, probed on, I’ve seen five or six specialists, and nobody could tell me what’s wrong,” Federlin said. a d v e r t i s e m e n t
“This MRSA stuff is deadly-dangerous. It’s like it has a brain,” Federlin said. “If you quit an antibiotic treatment early, it builds an immunity to that antibiotic. The doctor told me that the four times that I came to the emergency room, they had given me every antibiotic known to man, and that the infection had become resistant. He said that there was nothing they could do for me, that they could admit me and make my stay comfortable, and that was it. He said that these infections can get very bad and very painful. I told him, ‘No, just get the paperwork ready, check me out, I have a race to win.’ I checked myself out of the hospital at 3:30 Sunday morning, got to the track, was No. 1 qualifier and won the race. Then on Monday, I went back to my personal doctor, who took one look at me and said, ‘Steve, in all likelihood, you’ll lose your leg.” By this time the MRSA had grown through the roots of Steve’s hair, and what had just been a pimple on the inside of his right knee a short time earlier had by 10 a.m. that Monday enveloped his whole leg below his knee. His own doctor, Dr. Steven Cook, did the operation, which was extremely painful because the anesthesia was local and the removal of the infected flesh was long and involved. After it was done, Dr. Cook drew a circle around the infection and told Federlin that if it grew an inch further, his leg would have to be amputated. He went home. It grew a quarter-inch past the drawn circle but stopped. a d v e r t i s e m e n t
In between races, he would get infections, and the doctors treated him with an experimental antibiotic that doesn’t even have a name yet. It’s so strong that six out of 10 people die from it, from kidney, lung and heart failure. It kills everything, good and bad. “My liver and kidneys wouldn’t work to their fullest, I was constantly getting sores all over my body … I took two treatments of this, for 21 days. After the (2005 NHRA) World Finals, on November 6 --- my birthday; I turned 40 … I got real sick, and the consensus was to operate on my back, clean up the infection, get me off all these drugs and give me a chance to beat this thing,” he said. Four days later they operated, took all the hardware out and cleaned the infection out. “The minute I woke up from the operation was the best I have felt in a year. I feel great. At the (recent) PRI show, I walked through nearly everything. Since Monday (December 5, 2005, when this interview was conducted), I have not been on any drugs. I was taking up to 19 pills a day. “Your life changes. With an illness like this, you’re afraid to go to sleep because you might not wake up the next morning. The thing about this MRSA is that, there are a growing percentage of people who can’t be helped, and they pass away. A lot of newborns die from it, and a lot of older people who get hip replacements get it and lose the fight. “This racing is what I’ve always wanted to do. I knew that (racing) alcohol dragster was my goal back in 1988, and I have a story on me from a magazine in 1989 stating when I wanted to go alcohol racing, and I did it almost to the day,” Federlin said. “I wanted to go to Top Fuel some day, but nowadays, I don’t have that kind of money. I’m looking for a sponsor for my car in 2006, we finished in the top 10 the last three years, and I’ll be back, trying to make my hot rod a little faster. I think if I had the backing for 2006, I could have No. 1 on the side of my car by World Finals time.”
Got a comment? Drop us a line at comppluseditor@aol.com.
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Since
then, Federlin, of Portland, Oregon, and NHRA’s Division 6 and
7, has finished in the top five in TAD points, and this past season
barely missed taking the alcohol dragster world championship, losing
to another Steve, Steve Torrence, by 90 points. Some say that Torrence’s
California-based A/Fuel Dragster, tuned by past TAD world champ Tom
Conway of Oklahoma, had a definite elapsed time advantage of a tenth
of a second over other cars like Federlin’s Brad Anderson supercharged
setup. Torrence won nine events, both national and divisional, while
Federlin won five in 2005.
Hughes,
who was NHRA Super Comp champion in 2002, recalled his first meeting
with Federlin. It happened 10 years ago, when both were racing Super
Comp. “I’d heard about him through a friend,” Hughes
said. “I’d heard about this guy who had a Vega fall on his
head, and as I was talking, he said, ‘That was me.’ We’ve
been friends ever since,” Hughes said.
Federlin’s
round of sicknesses nearly did him in. It started about three years
ago with a stomach pain right after the Pomona World Finals race. The
diagnosis was diverticulitis, and it had ruptured his colon. It turned
into peritonitis, and bacteria flooded his stomach lining. That was
on a Thursday. Federlin says the doctors at Adventist Hospital in Portland
“pretty much gave me my last rites and said I wouldn’t make
it past Friday morning,” he said. He made it through that day
and through the following month, thanks to an “induced coma around
my stomach,” he said, and some very strong antibiotics. “I
beat all the odds, I walked out of there with them giving me less than
a five percent,” he said. “When you have a rupture like
this, you have a 25-persent chance, period.” 
After
the World Finals, Federlin underwent a spinal fusion on his last three
vertebrae, with titanium rods, pins and cages as part of the surgery.
“Immediately after I got out of the hospital, in November 2004,
things began to go wrong. I was basically paralyzed from the waist down,
I didn’t get my right leg back to normal until six days after
surgery, and I actually went to the PRI (Performance and Racing Industry)
show at Indianapolis with a walker. My left leg was like spaghetti,”
he said. At the same time, Federlin began getting fevers and sweats,
increased heart rate, nauseated all the time, “24/7,” he
said. He also gained so much weight that no one could recognize him,
at least an additional 50 to 60 pounds. He went from specialist to specialist.
In
May at the season opener at Woodburn, a Chicago-style TAD match race,
Federlin showed up for a test ‘n’ tune on Saturday and found
that his blood pressure was really high. Patty checked him into an emergency
room, and luckily, there was a doctor on call who had training with
a “new” disease called MRSA, Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus
Aureus, and after a brief talk had Steve quarantined in a special room.
There was good reason --- MRSA is a staph infection that once was contracted
mostly in hospitals and some in nursing homes; now it is increasingly
being found in the community at large. Newspapers and medical journals
have dubbed it the “super-bug staph.” It can quickly become
immune to a treatment of antibiotics if the full course of the medicine
is not followed. Then, if another antibiotic is taken but not to its
fullest course, it can become immune to that antibiotic. It also can
lay dormant in a person for up to six months. MRSA could become incurable.
But the doctor told Federlin that about 60 percent of the people who
get MRSA are treatable. He also told him that he contracted the disease
four months earlier, when he had the back surgery. 
“I
went to work every day and raced every race I needed to (18 in all,
both divisional and national). I didn’t want people to treat me
differently, to feel sorry for me, so I kept it to myself,” Steve
says. “Now I want people to know about it.
© Competitionplus 2005
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