LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — A 20-year-old Kentucky race car driver with a dangerous heart condition is working toward the path to NASCAR.

At just 17 years old, Bryce Applegate started having heart issues.

"I was just outside playing basketball with my brother and all of a sudden my heart went into a weird rhythm," Applegate said. "I was probably maybe 90 beats a minute and then it all jumped up to 300 beats a minute all at one second."

It was a concerning realization for anyone, but especially a race car driver.

Applegate has been racing since he was 7 years old. He started out in go-karts and now races full-sized stock cars in ARCA, the development league for NASCAR. Getting there wasn't easy though.

"Usually, we would have 125 lap races, and I would be really really good for 100 laps but then once you hit 100 in the last 25 I would kind of start tapering off. We didn't know what was happening," said Applegate.

Between that and the abnormal heartbeat, Applegate went to the Norton Heart & Vascular Institute, where doctors found out he had an undiagnosed cardiac arrhythmia.

"He has a short circuit in the electrical system in the upper chamber of his heart that causes the bottom chamber to beat really fast," said Norton cardiac electrophysiologist Dr. Kevin Thomas.

In August, Applegate went into surgery. Doctors found out where the short circuit is coming from and were able to zap it away, returning his heart to normal. That same month, he crossed the finish line first in a race.

"I didn't tell any of my race team until we got into victory lane and I said, 'not bad for a guy that had heart surgery,'" said Applegate.

After that, he did five races and never finished out of the top five.

"Now I can do whatever I want to do, and I don't have to worry about 'am I going to go to 300 beats per minute and possibly pass out or something worse,'" said Applegate.

Now, he's on track to get a degree in motorsports engineering and accomplish his dream of racing in NASCAR.

"If you feel something wrong, say something to somebody because you don't really know if it's normal for everybody else," he said.

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