There was a reason, Tommy told me. He’d been in this hellacious crash last year in Don Stroud’s Pro Modified Corvette at a track near Lexington, Kentucky. The throttle hung open and he ran off the end at more than 250 mph, ending up in some trees 40 feet high. Payne hit one oak tree at more than 200 mph, square-on.

He was conscious throughout it all, sort of the way that “Big Daddy” Don Garlits was when he got his foot sawed off at Lions Drag Strip all those years ago.

“It broke my back in four places, took my left leg off, my retinas were detached,” Payne told me. “It broke all my ribs, broke my left pelvis, tore my left foot off. It took them an hour and 47 minutes to get me out of the car. The first six months, they didn’t expect me to live. I couldn’t get out of bed for nine months.”

Wife Louann, married to Tommy since 1996, tended to him daily, through those nine months of recuperation. When race promoter George Howard, another old friend, heard about it all, he sent a plane up to the hospital in Ohio to bring Payne back to Montgomery. Racers pitched in to do what they could.

“The power of prayer is the only thing that got me through,” Payne said. That and wife Louann.

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There’s more. The doctors sewed his left foot back on, but it is now placed 33 degrees to the left, outwards. “It works, though,” he says. All the toes in his right foot were broken, and they look it even now. “The doctor said, ‘Tommy, we would have fixed them, but we didn’t know that you were gonna make it,’” Payne said. Now 61, he walks with a noticeable limp. “The racing community and God are the only reasons I’m here,” he said.

He is now retired from the transportation business that he has had for so long, but surprisingly, Payne said he is not 100-percent disabled. At Huntsville at the Bama Nats, he was tuning up “Crazy Horse” to that 3.90-something elapsed time, and he and his Brad Anderson hemi didn’t skip a beat. Driver John Sullivan was a good friend of his, and when he got hurt, Payne stuck him in the “Horse’s” driver’s compartment. “I wanted to put the best driver I could in the car,” he said. “Now it’s all in the family.”

That “Crazy Horse” moniker, by the way, goes back at least three decades, and Payne said there is a good reason he chose that for his series of southern Funny Cars. “I’m a direct descendent to the chief himself. He was the Sioux leader who did Custer in. Now ‘Crazy Horse Racing’ is patented,’” Tommy said. He has even had some of the Sioux people journey over to Alabama and bless the Funny Car.

That wreck in the Pro Mod probably did in his driving. But Payne still has a few ticks and tricks left. “I’ve been doing these motors so long that I can feel my way through them. I’m gonna race ‘till the day I can’t race no more,” Payne said. His tuning prowess paid off at Huntsville Dragway when John Sullivan not only set low elapsed time for the whole meet, including alcohol Funny Cars, but also won the race, beating Monty Todd’s stretched ’55 Chevy, now driven by Jim Phillips of Evansville, Ind., in the final. The “Horse” ran a 3.99 at 184.46 mph, only a tick off that 3.96-second low elapsed time shot. Payne had to pull out a reserve engine before first round, to replace the one he “holed” in qualifying. But then, he has been in the same place and the same situation before.

wilson@dragracingonline.com