Two years after his death at age 89, NASCAR Hall of Famer Fred Lorenzen has been posthumously diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), USA Today reported on Tuesday, October 20.

Fred’s brain was donated to science, and researchers at the Boston University CTE Center discovered he had stage 3 CTE. The disease is most often linked to repeated head trauma in football, but the findings make Fred the first NASCAR driver known to have been diagnosed with it.

For his children, the news brought answers more than shock.

“There’s some relief to know this is what he had as opposed to he just declined and we can’t explain why,” his son, Chris Lorenzen, told USA Today. “You know, I’m 53 now. Just into my very early 30s, in all reality, he was gone. I was never able to share the better things that I’ve experienced in my life with him. Nor did he know of my successes and stuff like that. In reality, he sort of passed in the mid-2000s.”

His daughter, Amanda Lorenzen-Gardstrom, echoed that sentiment. “There were so many stages of grief, of loss and not understanding things,” she said. “It makes me understand why. It doesn’t make anything better at all, but it makes me able to understand why things happened the way they happened.”

Fred, a Daytona 500 winner, was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2015. According to the CTE Society, “75 percent of the Stage III individuals studied were considered cognitively impaired.”

The diagnosis comes just weeks after another Hall of Fame driver’s health struggles became public. On September 23, the family of Darrell Waltrip announced in a statement, per ESPN, that the 79-year-old was stepping away from public life after being diagnosed with frontotemporal degeneration “complicated by possible” CTE.

Chris said he wasn’t surprised by Waltrip’s news, but he hopes it serves as a wake-up call for NASCAR.

“The question is, can we somehow help these injured drivers earlier?” Chris said. “Because our dad didn’t have any help.”

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