Kolby Garrison’s ability to describe the race-day experience seems to come naturally. The feel of being at the race track is an over-sensory stimulant, and her perceptions of growling engines, the smell of heated tire rubber and the whoosh of a full field whisking by at full song all resonate.

How Garrison takes it all in might be missing one key piece, but all the other pieces fit and bring her to the same destination. The 33-year-old fan was born blind, but her understanding of NASCAR is on the lead lap with the rest of the sighted racing community. In some cases, it’s a lap ahead.

“I don’t feel like they’re heightened any more than yours would be if you were in my situation,” Garrison says of her other senses. “So I don’t think that I have any … there’s not a superpower or anything, but my senses are heightened because I use them more because that’s what I rely on.”

WATCH: Vivid: How Kolby experiences NASCAR | Watch episode 3 | Watch episode 4

All those senses were up in her most recent visit to the track. Ask Kolby which speedways are on her bucket list, and she enthusiastically says, “All of them!” So far, she’s been to Charlotte, Martinsville and as of two weeks ago, can cross Richmond Raceway off her travel guide. The distance of the sound of the engines and the other senses of speed help her to gauge the size and scope of each track.

Her trip to the Virginia capital with her fiancé, David Manuel, provided an opportunity to enrich her sensory understanding of the sport, to connect with the Motor Racing Network family of voices who serve as her access point to the action, and to feel, hear, smell and touch everything within reach.

As she met or became reunited with the crew members, drivers and broadcasters who guided her through the race weekend, word of Kolby’s presence and her passion for racing had spread. She had said she wanted to experience everything she could during her Richmond immersion, which has been documented by NASCAR Studios in a four-part video series. By the time pre-race festivities wound down, she had. Dale Earnhardt Jr. — long a sought-after subject for fans wanting an autograph, a selfie, or just a moment of his time — became his own interaction-seeker. He took a break from his on-air duties with NBC Sports, walked past the cameras on pit road and made a point to introduce himself to her.

Kolby Garrison was born three months before her due date, and her condition — retinopathy of prematurity — was at a severe stage at birth, and both retinas detached. She has been blind her entire life, but says she’s never felt compromised, especially at the track.

“It may take a few more word choices and kind of an explanation that might be different from anything that somebody might’ve ever encountered before,” Garrison said of her experiences, “but it’s no less enriched because I don’t see the world around me.”

Kolby’s introduction to NASCAR came through a familiar device — radio. The airwaves also delivered music, which she embraced early on. She connected with her fiancé through a shared love of bluegrass; David plays all stringed instruments, save for piano, and Garrison is an avid singer who is taking guitar lessons from her future husband.

But the radio also stoked a fascination with how sports commentators described the action, and racing’s fast-paced storytelling gripped her early on. When Garrison had difficulty finding a steady signal for racing broadcasts near her home in Greensboro, North Carolina, she found a dedicated home for listening through SiriusXM satellite radio.

That connection sowed deeper roots in a trip Garrison made to Martinsville in 2014. Her guide dog back then, a playful collie named Amelia, helped her locate the MRN Radio truck to hear the broadcasters’ familiar voices in person. Garrison recalled some initial nerves in making the introduction, but she wanted to offer a personal thank-you to the on-air personalities who made the sport come alive for her.

“I’m just so blessed and honored to call MRN just dear, dear friends,” Garrison said. “… That’s also a day that I will never forget. I got to talk to them and just express my appreciation for what they do, and how I rely on them and how they are my access to the sport. And I was just honored to have that opportunity, and I’m so blessed to have continued those friendships.”

The power of their initial meeting was a mutual feeling.

“Obviously, it was overwhelming, and you don’t realize how much you touch people from different walks of life,” said Alex Hayden, an anchor of MRN’s broadcast team. “And to meet her that afternoon and get to see her literally almost every single year after that, it’s just been wonderful to get to know her and to see her flourish and continue to love the sport of NASCAR racing as much as — if not more than — the overwhelming majority of people.”

MORE: Motor Racing Network home page | Radio schedule

Richmond provided another reunion, but another chance to broaden Kolby’s perspectives. Meeting her in the media center before the Saturday night race for the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, MRN’s announcers joked that roughly half of the pre-race production meeting had been spent planning the broadcast. The other half was “what are we going to do with Kolby?”

The broadcast team made sure she was involved.

Kolby appeared as an on-air guest during the early portions of the Truck Series race. Her comfort with the MRN crew was already at a high level, and her knowledge of the team’s voices and broadcasting positions was uncanny. She donned a headset, described the elation of being in the booth and wielded the push-to-talk control like a seasoned pro.

“She earned it,” Hayden said, “and it’s about time, quite frankly, as much as she knows about MRN and as much as she knows about NASCAR racing, it’s about time we got her on the air.”

The second half of that production meeting had more in store. Kolby shadowed MRN voices during various points of race-day Sunday, and Winston Kelley made sure she had a front-row perch when a cycle of pit stops drew near. Kelley — the executive director of the NASCAR Hall of Fame — retired from his long-running full-time role as MRN’s lead pit reporter after the 2020 season, but he still finds time to call the action for a handful of events in a part-time capacity. Donning his blue MRN polo at a race with Kolby in attendance was serendipity.

Kelley received permission from a NASCAR official for them to access the empty fifth pit stall, inching her closer to the over-the-wall action from Ross Chastain’s Trackhouse Racing crew in pit stall No. 6. He described the scene, with crew members at the ready and the No. 1 Chevrolet squealing to a stop. It was over in a blink, but Kolby had added more details to her at-track tapestry.

“So just painting that picture — where they are, what’s being done — she can visualize the whole four-tire stop,” Kelley says. “She said she was close enough to get smells that she had not smelled before, and then she described those — be it the fuel or the rubber — as more robust scents then she had when she been a little further back. So she actually got to have that part of the experience, which just seeing her light up every time she had an experience was special.”

Those bonds run deep whether she’s listening on the radio from home or tuning in from the track through a scanner — a race-day essential that keeps her informed. She’s remained in close touch with MRN’s tight-knit group ever since that first meeting, and Hayden confirms “she’s absolutely part of the MRN family.”

“When I get a text from her, it doesn’t matter what’s happened that day, it makes me smile,” Kelley said. “There have been times she’s texted me toward the end of the day, and rather than text her back when I get in the car, I’ll call her and just talk to her. She’s a special person, and she has touched us infinitely more than we’ll ever touch her.”

A top-ticket story line for the 2022 season has been how teams, drivers and fans have adjusted to the Next Gen car model and the new approach to pit stops this year. Kolby fits in that group as well, and her grasp of those new concepts has grown stronger through hands-on experience.

What better way to get that feel than hopping right in. In recent weeks, Kolby did that twice – once at Richard Childress Racing’s shop for pit stop practice and again alongside Jeff Burton for a Richmond ride-along as part of NBC’s pre-race activity.

Though she has never seen the choreography that goes into a big-league pit stop, Kolby says she has long appreciated the contributions of the over-the-wall crew. After her close-up experience at Richmond and a day of pit-stop drills at RCR, her understanding grew for the precision, the parts and the people involved in making four tires and fuel happen in roughly 10 seconds.

“That was something I’ve never really done,” said Paul Swan, tire carrier for RCR’s No. 3 Chevrolet. “I’ve never worked with somebody who’s blind before, especially with such a sight-driven, hands-on kind of profession that I’m in. It was really cool to see how she used touch and smell, just her sense of direction and everything. Obviously, she can’t see where she’s going, so to see how she used her other senses to move around, and to ask questions, and to really just dive into what our job is, it was so cool to see.”

The tools of the trade were at Kolby’s disposal. She sensed the weight of the fuel can, the motion of the jack, then felt the car drop from the passenger seat when it released. She felt the teeth of the single, center-locking lug nut, describing how it fit and fastened as a “puzzle piece.” The 14 spokes of the aluminum Next Gen wheel translated to ladder rungs through her touch, and she noted the transition from metal to rubber, sensing the grip of the tire’s contact patch as she ran her fingers across the surface.

Pit crews don’t typically have the luxury of free time to make note of all the textures, shapes and motions involved with their over-the-wall duties. During pit-stop practice, their guest had all the time she needed.

“I’ve always thought that pit crews were an integral part of the sport and oftentimes don’t get enough exposure,” Garrison said. “But it was incredible to have someone break it down for me and explain it in a way that I understood by just getting very detailed with what every single person is doing during a pit stop. And I knew going into it that it was kind of controlled and chaotic and there were a lot of moving parts, but having someone explain it and show me where everyone is moving as they’re doing a pit stop and then being able to be in the car as the pit stop was happening, again, made everything fall into place.”

She added more pieces in Richmond, with her 4-foot-10 frame buckled into NBC’s Next Gen car and Burton behind the wheel. The former racer turned broadcaster had already helped Kolby become better acquainted with the car’s contours in the garage, pointing out the deck lid, the abrupt angle of the rear spoiler, the back glass as it rises to meet the roof, then the grille openings, helping her conceptualize the sizes and shapes. The education continued when the car roared to life and lurched out onto pit road.

Burton spent all 30 minutes of his allotted track time helping Kolby map out the track’s layout, parking on more than one occasion to offer a better sense of the banking through the turns and the curved frontstretch. When it came to go time, Burton asked Kolby as a courtesy what speed she’d be most comfortable experiencing. She didn’t hold back.

“I don’t know that I could encapsulate the experience in one word. Unforgettable would probably be the first thing that comes to mind,” Kolby said. “There was just so much that he was explaining, and it put all of the missing pieces together for me, being in the car and feeling it as he’s saying, ‘when you hear us talk about this on TV or on the radio, you know, this is what this feels like, this is what this sounds like, this is what we’re doing.’ So there was just so much movement and understanding loose versus tight, and that when you’re tight, it has something to do with the radius of the turn you’re going through. So there were just a lot of pieces or concepts that fell into place for me.”

The impression was felt, too, by Burton, who said he began to well up as the two connected, taking alternate paths to get there. In the same way that Kolby experiences the world, all the pieces fit.

“The way she consumes things is completely different in some ways than we consume them,” Burton said. “And then but also there’s similarities, like I’m seeing something and she’s feeling it and we’re coming to the same conclusion, but we get there just a different way. That’s what struck me was the things she could feel were so much more descriptive than the way I would’ve described it, because that’s how she consumes it. And it’s a bit of awareness for me, right? The way we perceive things, we take it for granted. We perceive them differently, and she consumed them differently but we came to the same conclusion. It’s really cool.

“It was just … you know, there’s some things that you’re really lucky to do because of what I did for a living, and that was one of them. Really, honestly it was pretty damn special.”

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