Cheryl Malone struggles to maneuver her silver late-model Volvo around a another car parked in the narrow driveway of her westside Bend home.

Slipping past the other car is no easy move without driving over a part of the manicured lawn, but it appears possible for a driver not quite as cautious as Malone.

As if by instinct, Michael Chandler, who stands watching nearby, supplants his fiancee in the driver’s seat and effortlessly squeezes the Volvo past the obstacle and into the garage.

Chandler taking charge behind the wheel is no surprise. After all, he achieved a good measure of success driving — and at much greater speeds.

You see, Chandler raced cars professionally for five years and has performed three times on one of auto racing’s biggest stages: the Indianapolis 500. In 1984, a horrific practice-session crash at Indy just before what would have been his fourth run in the 500 left him in a coma and effectively ended his racing career.

But this week Chandler, who has lived in Central Oregon since 1996, is back at Indianapolis Motor Speedway as one of more than 250 past and current Indy drivers invited to the legendary Brickyard to celebrate Sunday’s 100th anniversary of the Indianapolis 500.

“I haven’t raced for so long, I don’t think it will be THAT emotional,” Chandler, now 53, says of his first trip to Indy since 1985. “Well, until they say ‘Gentlemen, start your engines.’ Obviously I’ll be a little emotional.”

The crash

Compared with just about any other driver attending, the trip to Indianapolis will be a different experience for Chandler, a Southern California native and father of five grown children.

During a practice session at Indy a day before qualifying laps for the 1984 race, Chandler entered turn three at about 200 miles per hour when, as he tells it, he lost control after the right-front suspension of his car collapsed.

According to a 1986 Los Angeles Times story recounting the accident: “When the car slammed into the cement barrier at a slight angle, after skidding 340 feet, the impact broke off the right front tire and wheel and all of its suspension system. Chandler might have escaped with little more than bruises, but the wheel assembly rebounded into his face, driving his helmet into his forehead.”

Chandler suffered a severe brain bruise, a broken nose and other injuries that left him in a coma at an Indianapolis hospital for 12 days.

“I was fine, except for I took a nap for 12 days,” Chandler jokes. “Or I would have been fine if the darn tire and wheel hadn’t hit me in the head.

“I am very fortunate and lucky (to be alive).”

That’s how Chandler tells it. But he does not actually remember the incident. The scars on his forehead, remnants of reconstructive surgery, are perhaps his most telling reminder of that day.

Because of the accident, he remembers almost nothing of his racing career.

Chandler’s injuries were so severe that, in addition to more than a year of rehabilitation during which he had to relearn basic skills such as tying his shoes, he suffered amnesia.

He has little recollection any of his visits to Indianapolis, including his first start there in 1981, when as a rookie he finished the Indy 500 in a respectable 12th place out of 33 starting cars. His only remaining memory of Indy, he says, is “slow and foggy.”

Chandler has not traveled to the Brickyard since 1985, a year after suffering his crash. But even that trip, made to try to reconnect with racing, barely registers with him now.

“I have a very vague memory of anything for approximately two to three years before the accident and for a year after the accident,” Chandler says. “I’ve lost that whole period of my life.”

But he is hoping that meeting with his former racing colleagues this weekend will jog his memory.

“That’s why I am ecstatic to go back to see a lot of old friends and old crew chiefs and talk about it,” he says.

“I lost the memory, but when I see fellow drivers or I see my lifetime mentors when I was 20 years old,” he says of the time when he raced against greats such as Mario Andretti and A.J. Foyt, “all those memories start coming back.

“My memory is not 100 percent lost.”

Roots

Chandler is a member of the prominent Southern California family that for more than 100 years owned the Los Angeles Times, and he is the son of longtime Times publisher Otis Chandler.

Otis Chandler, who lived part time in Central Oregon before his death in 2006, owned an extensive collection of classic cars and motorcycles.

“My father had a large impact on my love for cars,” Michael Chandler says.

And speed has long been an important part of life for Chandler. He started alpine ski racing at age 11, and as a teenager he took up racing on a dirt bike in motocross events.

At 18, Chandler sold his run-of-the-mill passenger car and, with some help from his dad, bought a kit formula racing car, beginning his professional racing career.

He spent several years racing in the minor leagues of open-wheel racing and was named rookie of the year on the mini-Indy circuit in 1979.

At a mini-Indy race that year, Foyt, then at the height of his legendary racing career, watched Chandler set a course record at Texas World Speedway, a superspeedway in College Station.

Foyt was impressed.

“I don’t believe that young man is driving his first race on a track like this,” Foyt told the L.A. Times that day. “He’s really a natural. He acts like he’s done it for years. That boy’s going to go a long way if he keeps driving the way he did today.”

Foyt was right.

In 1980, Chandler raced his first Indy car at the California 500 at Ontario Motor Raceway.

His career began to blossom in the early 1980s. He first qualified for Indy in 1981. And in 1982 he finished fourth at a race in Riverside, Calif., his best finish ever in an IndyCar race.

Chandler again qualified for Indy in 1982 and 1983, but gearbox troubles kept him from finishing the race in both years.

Life without racing

After the accident, Chandler battled depression. He tried to make a comeback in 1988 in a minor race in Phoenix, but he was tangled in a four-car crash involving Jeff Andretti, son of famed driver Mario Andretti.

That comeback attempt was short-lived.

“Nobody would recommend me,” he says. “I was damaged goods, and nobody wanted to put me in their $200,000 car.”

After the wreck Chandler began working in the Times’ Orange County production plant as a mechanical fix-it man.

He took a buyout offer from the newspaper in 1996 and semiretired to Central Oregon, where his father owned a ranch north of Bend, with his now ex-wife (Chandler has been married three times), two sons and a stepson.

He’s worked little — once managing his father’s ranch, once as a car salesman, and “messing around with my (stock) portfolio,” Chandler says.

He is about to be married in June to Malone, whom Chandler met in Santa Barbara, Calif., where two of Chandler’s children live.

Malone has recently moved to Bend to live with Chandler.

And coincidentally, Malone has been a regular visitor to Central Oregon for two decades, she says.

“I always said to my girlfriends, ‘I’m not going meet the guy I want to meet, because they have to know Southern California and love that and love the water,’” she says, “and they have to love Bend, because that is where I am going to retire.’

“It’s pretty amazing that we met.”

Chandler still has a fondness for going fast, though these days more commonly on the hills of Mount Bachelor or on a Central Oregon mountain bike trail rather than a 2.5-mile oval.

“It’s just speed,” he says of his hobbies.

And he does have one more dream.

“I’d still like to compete in one more Indy 500,” he says. To which his fiancee shakes her head, and gives a look as if to say, “No chance.”

For now, it appears Chandler’s first trip to Indianapolis in a quarter of a century will have to do.

Chandler at Indy

Bend’s Michael Chandler raced in the Indy 500 three times:

Year Finish

1981 12th

1982 Did not finish, mechanical

1983 Did not finish, mechanical