08-04-2025
Cape Cod's Jay Blake is the only blind crew chief in the NHRA; it's all due to an app
A phone app is helping the only blind crew chief in the National Hot Rod Association get his cars on the track and hitting 300 mph.
Jay Blake is the founder of Follow A Dream, an NHRA race team that drives funny cars, dragsters with the body of a car. Soon, the team will move to the top circuit in NHRA Funny Car.
Blake has been blind since he was injured in an accident in 1997.
"That afternoon, a wheel and tire assembly off of a forklift exploded in my face, threw me 45 feet through the air," explains Blake. "Three-and-a-half weeks later, I came home with no eyes, no sight, no smell, no taste. A bad day at the office."
He was taken to Mass General Hospital, where doctors spent 11 hours reconstructing his face and placing two prosthetic eyes.
"Drag racing was my love, my dream," Blake said. After his accident, his friend took him to a race, and it inspired him to own his own team.
"I wanted to motivate kids to get an education and to believe in themselves and to follow their dream. Hence, the start of Follow a Dream," Blake said.
When he is working on the cars in his Marston Mills shop or out at the track, the area is a controlled environment that helps him to operate independently. At his Cape Cod shop, the radio is always on. The sound becomes his North Star and allows him to have a better understanding of where he is situated in the room.
Navigating on his own can become difficult when he has to read or measure something. That is when he turns to an app called Be My Eyes. The app will contact a volunteer with the company who will have access to his phone camera. The volunteer can then help to guide him through the situation.
"My eyes don't work, but I know what I am looking for, so all I need is someone else's eyes to tell me what is there," Blake said.
The app was founded by Hans Jorgen Wiberg, a blind man from Denmark. "I met a young blind guy, and he was telling me how he was using FaceTime when he needed eyes, and then he said, 'But I always have to think about who to call,'" Wiberg said.
The app now has more than 8 million volunteers who help the blind when they call. Soon, they will be partnering with Meta to expand the services to utilize special Ray-Ban sunglasses with cameras in the frames.
"Now you can say, 'Hey Meta, ' and then say 'Be my eyes,' and then we make a call directly from the glasses, and volunteers will be looking through the camera," Wiberg said.
