After Texas Motor Speedway crash, wife of injured driver waits
10:19 AM CDT on Tuesday, June 1, 2010
By AVI SELK / The Dallas Morning News
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She was a wanderer, detouring through Texas between a ranch in Wyoming and a new job at sea.
He was a racer – a blur in a turbocharged Subaru.
Their lines finally crossed on a speedway in College Station. He made a pit stop. She helped change his tires. He got out and made fun of her "grandmother's dress."
She looked at him across the hood of that silver-blue WRX: tall, skinny, big grin. He had 15 years on her, and not much in common but a South African accent.
She married him six weeks later.
"You just know when it's right," Belinda Vandenberg says.
Nine years later, on May 15, the race caught up to Andre Hercules Vandenberg. As an instructor with Texas Driving Experience, he was giving an 87-year-old man named Don Krusemark a ride around Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth. They crashed somewhere on the far end of the loop. Krusemark was killed. Andre hit his head and fell into a coma.
Now 38, her wandering years long behind her, Belinda sits every day in a hospital room and waits for her husband to wake.
She'll wait as long as she has to. She fell in love with a racer and has loved him through one crash already.
That time, it was he who waited for her.
Andre's first love was motorcycles. He started riding as a boy in South Africa, circling the track at the motor rallies his father drove.
In 1983, at age 26, he immigrated to the United States to race internationally – almost impossible in South Africa because of sanctions against its government.
He had been in Texas less than a year when word came from home that a truck driver in Johannesburg had run a stop sign and killed his father.
Andre raced and raced, paying his entry fees with profits from a motorcycle shop he opened in Garland. He raced Kawasakis and Hondas across Texas and the country. He raced despite spills and broken bones – until 1990, when he skidded on an oil puddle on a track in Birmingham, Ala., got run over by another rider and came to with his leg in front of his face.
It took him two years to walk again. After that, it was strictly cars for Andre Vandenberg. He bought the Subaru in 1998.
About two years later, Belinda Dekker came across the ocean. A tomboy from a small town outside Johannesburg, she had left South Africa at 22 for the fields of England. For the rest of the '90s, she had worked on farms, ranches, railroads – anything to avoid an office job – but she didn't know a thing about cars.
In the spring of 2001, she was on her way to Mississippi to take a job on a cruise liner when an old friend from South Africa invited her to see this racecar driver in Texas.
Another accident
The Subaru was gutted by burglars just a few weeks before their wedding – its turbo stolen, its engine disabled. The Vandenbergs bought a house in Lewisville and stuck the car in the garage, where Andre would endlessly delay repairing it.
The next year, word came from South Africa that Andre's brother had died in a fender-bender. Authorities called it a heart attack, but Belinda says witnesses saw the other driver get out and smash his brother's head against the car door.
The quickly wed couple drew close over the years. Belinda always wanted to move to a ranch, but Andre joked he'd go into withdrawal for lack of neighbors. She learned to take apart an engine and ride a motorcycle. He filled the garage with other cars, sometimes poked around at the Subaru, but never got it running.
For herself, Belinda drove a 20-year-old Volkswagen Vanagon – "a flower-power bus." She loved the sound of it.
They were driving the van back from a friend's house in Granbury one Sunday night in 2004. Belinda's father was in the back seat, visiting from South Africa.
Andre had just passed a little airport when he heard Belinda scream. He looked down the road and saw the headlights of a wrong-way driver. He swerved, but not soon enough.
He came to a minute later, to the screams of a passerby: "Stay where you are!"
He looked through the shattered windshield and saw Belinda's father lying in front of the van. Jan Dekker, 59, would be pronounced dead a few hours later.
He looked to his right and saw Belinda with one leg on the dashboard, one crushed under the van and her head in the air-conditioning unit. Her seatbelt was wrapped around her neck and she was turning blue.
Andre staggered to her side and freed her neck. When he freed her arm, she tried to take his hand.
He was still trying to get her seatbelt off when he passed out again.
Wreck puzzling
Belinda nearly lost a foot while in intensive care and spent months in recovery. Andre was with her every day – in the same Fort Worth hospital room where he would lie six years later.
When she could walk again, they bought 37 acres in Krum, built a warehouse and started wholesaling motorbikes. They called it their "ranch."
Andre stopped racing professionally and started teaching. According to one student, he could get a newbie from the back of the pack to the front in a single day.
The Subaru, meanwhile, sat in the garage, its engine hanging out from countless aborted repair jobs. From time to time, Belinda would try to give Andre a reason to fix it. They could do a race if he did. Or she got a month's vacation if he didn't.
But the old car still lay broken when Andre went to work May 15.
Nobody seems to know how Andre crashed. His friends can only assume it was a mechanical error. They can't believe the guy who knew every turn, every racing line and exactly the right gear could mess up so badly while giving a fun ride to an elderly passenger.
So while the lawyers investigate and reconstruct the crash, Belinda waits at the hospital for the racer with a scratch on his nose and a brain that won't wake up.
There is a town off the coast of Newfoundland that shuts down each September and turns into a race track. Going this year was the last incentive Belinda gave Andre to fix the Subaru. Now she knows he won't make it in time.
But she is sure he's going to wake up. He's going to race again. And one day, he'll get that Subaru to run.
Researcher Erin Amburgey-Sood contributed to this report.
