SAVAGE ANGEL author, Ted Woerner, was an 11-year old Swede Savage “super fan” sitting in the turn 4 grandstand at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on May 12, 1973. He watched and cheered as his hero broke the track record in time trials for the Indianapolis 500.

On race day, he was sitting in his 6th grade classroom on a Wednesday afternoon in suburban Chicago, secretly listening to the twice rain-delayed race through a wired ear plug connected to a transistor radio that he’d smuggled into school. A drawing he’d made of Swede’s bright red race car was mounted on a classroom bulletin board directly behind him, which he had decorated with an Indy 500 theme. His enthusiasm when Swede took the lead of the race turned to horror as he heard the news over the live radio broadcast that his hero had just been involved in a horrific crash only an hour into the race.

Through an improbable turn of events, Ted would finally meet Swede’s posthumous child, Angela Savage, as a grown adult over forty years after her birth. A sacred friendship was formed between them, forged in the crucible of the same fiery tragedy. Now, several years after they first began the arduous and painful task of chronicling Swede’s life story and Angela’s complex and tumultuous life that immediately followed, their book, SAVAGE ANGEL, is complete.

The book is as much of a biography of Swede Savage as there will likely ever be, but it doesn’t focus so much on the accomplishments of his career as much as it does on his life away from the track. We finally get to know the man behind the windscreen as he pursued his childhood dream to win the Indianapolis 500.

But we also learn what it was like to be in the immediate family of a man whose passion was the world’s most dangerous profession. We feel their raw emotions as his final days unfolded in an Indianapolis hospital’s intensive care unit and how they attempted to go on with their lives after suffering such an immense, unexpected loss. SAVAGE ANGEL finally exposes the elephant in the room in the racing world: what is the cost to the family left behind in the wake of such a tragedy?

Angela’s chaotic life, which began almost immediately after her father’s death, reveals the effects that this trauma had on her life, trauma that is now known through medical research to have been transmitted to her in her mother’s womb as Sheryl Savage witnessed her husband’s crash in horror. The book also explains how complex mental health issues,  addictions, alcoholism, and general instability were essentially genetically hard-wired into her as a result of a statistically nearly impossible confluence of rare disorders and life experiences rarely found in a single person.