He’d been as surprised as anyone, he said, at the severity of the accident. “We didn’t know it was that bad.” His team manager gave him the first heads-up. “Tony Glover told me about the time we were getting ready to leave the racetrack that it didn’t look good for Earnhardt. I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He said, ‘He’s hurt pretty bad.’
“By the time we got to the airport,” Sterling said, “they came and told us. I was in total shock. It made you just want to go throw up . . . just sick to your stomach.”
But it was, after all, an accident. “It was strictly a racing accident,” he said. “Things happened and people are going to look for somebody to blame. On a short track, you beat and knock and get by somebody, and they’re going to pop you. But with them high-speed tracks, you know you don’t touch anybody because you know it’s going to hurt when you hit. No way in this world would I do something like that, knowing the consequences.”
It was good that Sterling spoke up. But I thought it was important that the rest of us speak up too, to show that we didn’t blame any driver for Dale’s death. At that post-race press conference at Daytona on Monday, no one denied there’d been contact between Sterling’s and Dale’s cars. But a little contact is inevitable in a tight race, I said.
“Sterling didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “Sterling was simply racing. When the checkered flag’s waving, nobody is going to let off. When they rubbed, I’m sure Sterling didn’t think Dale would wreck. Otherwise he wouldn’t have rubbed him. But there was just a little bit of contact, and maybe it would have just shot Dale up the hill a little bit, Sterling probably thought, and he could make the pass.
“It’s the last lap, it’s racing. I don’t think the wreck looked to me a result of anything other than guys wanting to get to the checkered. I believe that in my heart, and I hope that people will remember Sterling during this time.”
Sterling seemed relieved at the support he received from his peers. “When your fellow drivers call,” he said later, “and NASCAR calls and all the folks at DEI and Childress call and say, ‘Man, just hold your head up. There’s nothing you could have done,’ it makes me feel a ton better.”
Meanwhile, NASCAR officials were being pressed by the media for answers. Answers about the sport’s safety record and how it was going to be improved. Wasn’t Dale the fourth NASCAR driver to be killed in a crash in less than a year? Remember Adam Petty, the little boy I used to let sit in my lap and drive? Kyle’s kid? He was making his way up the NASCAR ladder and was killed in a crash in 2000. Two other up-and-comers, Kenny Irwin Jr. and Tony Roper, were also killed that year.
We thought we were racing the safest cars in the world, but the sport was getting more dangerous. I once assumed when there was a crash, everyone would walk away. But more often now, people didn’t. Racing was getting scary.
Was this a coincidence? Or had something changed? What was different? We know now—or at least I believe—the reason had to do with some advances in race-car engineering.
During the 1990s, racing teams developed a better technical understanding of the cars than we’d ever had before. When I started racing, I never heard of an engineer working on a race car. Back at BAHARI, we hired an engineer. But he mostly was just our travel agent, planning the trips where we would go testing. We didn’t actually let him work on anything.
But in the 1990s, engineering became a routine part of how the cars were built. The teams learned and proved through testing that a more rigid car was a faster car. Not only was it faster, it was also more tunable. The stiffer the car’s frame, the more effective adjustments became.
You go barreling into a bank turn at 200 miles an hour, stuff’s gonna give. The frame is going to flex. Components that we thought were staying within .25 of an inch of tolerance were actually moving significantly more than that when the car was loading up in the banks.
The engineers’ conclusion: “Stiffen ’em up. We gotta keep these frames from flexing. We gotta keep these components from moving. We’ll get better results.”
And they were right. Chalk one up for engineering. The rigid cars were performing better. Lap times were improving. We were all going faster. But people were getting killed.
The stiffness made the cars respond differently in accidents. This is Physics 101. Irresistible force meets immovable object. All that energy has to go somewhere. Before, the energy was spread throughout the whole floppy car. Now, because of that lap time everyone wanted so badly, that wasn’t happening anymore. The stiffer car frame was giving less.
Think about that for a second. The walls are concrete. They hadn’t given in the history of time and they weren’t going to start giving now. With the car frames becoming less flexible, they weren’t giving nearly as much as they used to. So before, when you hit a concrete wall, the wall didn’t give but the car did. Now neither one of them was.
So where was all that energy going? Straight to the driver.
That’s why I think Dale’s accident was so deadly.
“There are no easy answers,” said NASCAR CEO Mike Helton. NASCAR would move, but not rush. “We will not give up on looking for that new technology,” he said on Monday in Daytona. “But in the meantime we simply are not going to react for the sake of reacting. We are not going to do something just because it’s a reaction that we can take credit for. We will do it when it’s the right thing to do.”
It was understandable to second-guess NASCAR from the outside looking in. Cars were crashing and people were getting hurt. That’s what the media and the public saw. But exhaustive research was already well under way. NASCAR’s focus was on a couple of new technologies. One of them involved retaining walls that would help soften the blow when a car hit. These are called SAFER barriers, for Steel and Foam Energy Reduction. It’s pretty simple how it works. A steel barrier is attached to a concrete wall. There’s about a one-foot gap between the concrete and the steel. Foam is slipped in there. When a car hits the steel, the foam gives and the wall flexes. Basically, it’s the same reason boxers wear gloves.
The other focus was on the HANS device. HANS stands for Head and Neck System. It was pretty simple too. A special collar was fitted to the driver. It sat over his shoulders and under his seat belts. This collar was attached to his helmet, stabilizing his head when he ran into something.
Sometimes genius is simple, isn’t it?
Helton defended the progress NASCAR had already made and vowed continued improvements. “We’ve gone from no walls at all to wooden barriers to guard rails to concrete barriers,” he said. “There very well may be a new substance out there that replaces concrete. We have not found it yet. Concrete still is the best barrier that can be incorporated in a racetrack.”
Helton noted that the racing sanctioning body wasn’t opposed to the HANS device. “NASCAR recommends drivers try it and work with the developers of it to perfect it for stock-car racing,” he said. “It’s a joint effort by every mind in the NASCAR garage to make all these elements work right.”
Dr. Steve Bohannon, who tried to save Dale’s life as he sat slumped in the wreckage, wasn’t calling for mandatory HANS devices either. “Even if he had the device on,” Bohannon said, “hitting the wall that fast may have resulted in the same injuries.”
Dr. Bohannon continued, “Even if you restrain the head and neck in this type of injury with the forces we’re talking about—hitting a concrete barricade at 150, 170 mph, whatever, there’s still one more element you have to address,” he said. “And that is the body has internal organs that are free-floating. The brain is floating in fluid, the heart, the liver are all floating inside the body. Even if you restrain the body—the head, the neck, the chest—all those organs internally still move in that kind of impact. The brain will still impact on the inside portion of the skull, and there’s considerable forces involved.”
All the drivers were certainly concerned and wanted to expand their knowledge. We all wanted to know: How could we be safer inside the car
? And why were drivers getting hurt?
In the meantime, we were learning more about internal organs and the fluid they floated in than any of us imagined we would or wanted to know.
The SAFER barrier wall technology and the HANS device were being tested and retested by NASCAR. It wasn’t long after Dale’s death that tracks all began installing the new barriers. And the HANS head-and-neck device became mandatory. The results prove we are smarter and safer than ever. In the ten years after 2001, NASCAR drivers hit the wall from every angle imaginable and at incredibly high speeds. Not a single one of them died.
Dale always had his own interpretation of the safety rules. At the time of his death, he was one of only a couple of drivers still wearing an open-face helmet. He chose not to use the HANS device. It wasn’t that he was cavalier. It’s that he wanted to make safety decisions for himself. Dale had done his own research. Based on the walls he had hit and walked away from, he was confident he was safe. That made him kind of old-school, as we all were at the time. We had grown up in an era where we were responsible for our own safety and the interior of our cars. The choices about helmets, seat belts, fireproof gloves—those decisions were the drivers’. Often, we made those decisions based on comfort first and safety second. Racing for six hundred miles, sometimes for more than four hours, on a hot summer Sunday in the South is a tough day’s work. You had to be comfortable, we told ourselves, if you were going to win. Back in the day, race-car drivers were macho gladiators. We would figure it out. That was our space. We didn’t want anybody else messing around in there.
How funny does that sound? We’re talking about 2001 as “back in the day.” I mean, we had computers then. It couldn’t have been that long ago. But with NASCAR safety, that’s how much things have changed. What we know about safety today makes ten years seem like a hundred.
Since then, NASCAR has gotten more and more involved in the details of driver safety. Today, while our input is encouraged, NASCAR makes the final decisions about keeping drivers safe. And that’s a good thing. We weren’t doing a very good job.
Dale and I had spoken about all of these safety concerns. It was his belief that a driver needed to “ride a crash down,” as he put it. He believed, if you were strapped in tightly, a sudden stop would jerk a knot in your neck. That could be dangerous.
His thinking made a lot of sense to me. It reminds you of the SAFER walls. They keep anything from suddenly happening. Dale may have been ahead of his time in how he thought. Tighter belts and stiffer seats were a contrast to his riding-a-crash-down theory.
Did that skepticism cost him his life? That would be hard to say. You couldn’t be certain. No one could be. Not only because of how he thought, but also because of the ripped seat-belt discovery. One of Dale’s belts had frayed during the crash. Could that be the reason Dale Earnhardt died? There were so many questions being asked. We were all learning about advances in safety technology. For better or worse, we all shared at least some of Dale’s attitudes about safety.
I faced the same questions every weekend. All drivers did. The HANS device was something all of us were curious about. Some drivers were already wearing it. Others had tested it and elected not to use it. There were mixed reviews. People liked the way it stabilized the head in an accident but were concerned that it was cumbersome and made it hard to get in and out of the car, which could be a problem. One thing we all liked the sound of was a softer wall. We had all hit concrete enough to know that it hurt. When you took on concrete, ten times out of ten it won. Concrete was undefeated.
I will never forget the first time I hit a SAFER barrier. It was in Miami, 2004, the final race of the NASCAR season. Buffy, Macy, Caitlin, some friends, their kids, and I were going to the Dominican Republic for a few days of fun and sun after a long season. I went down to turn one. Just as I turned into the corner, the right front tire blew out. The instant that happened, I looked up and saw a wall. It looked white and hard. Holy crap, I thought. This is bad. I won’t be going on vacation tomorrow.
For twenty-four years, from 1981 to 2004, when I blew a tire, I hit concrete. And that wall looked just like concrete to me.
I gripped my steering wheel, braced my body, gritted my teeth, and thought to myself, Aw, man. This is going to hurt.
But after I hit, it felt like I’d been in nothing more than a pillow fight. I was shocked, and I was thankful. That next day on the beach, as I sipped a fruity drink with frilly umbrellas and fruit on toothpicks, I was thankful for all the people who made that technology part of my world.
I knew I wouldn’t be on that beach if it weren’t for those people—NASCAR, the engineers who developed the technologies, but most of all my fellow drivers who had paid the ultimate price of plowing into concrete, people who were my friends, and one who was a real close friend of mine, Dale Earnhardt.
But up until the day that Dale died, we didn’t get it. Maybe the latest deaths were just a run of bad luck. After all, racing was dangerous. You didn’t have to be very bright to figure that out. All you had to do was look around. You were strapped into a steel cage with a fireproof suit on, wearing a helmet. Those should have been some pretty good clues.
We all agree now. The HANS device and the SAFER barrier save lives. But at the time Dale lost his, we were all just looking for answers.
CHAPTER 28
THE FUNERAL
It was Tuesday morning in Mooresville, North Carolina. Those of us inside Dale Earnhardt, Inc. were trying to absorb all that had occurred. We had already decided we were going racing that weekend, and that meant being in Rockingham in four days. I wasn’t sure I could do that at a time like this.
Dale Junior, Park, and I were sitting around a long conference-room table at DEI. All the chairs at the table were full—except one. Dale’s.
Ty was there. Richie and all the crew chiefs and engineers. We were discussing car setups and race strategies for Rockingham. Our teams hadn’t done this before Daytona. Everyone did their own thing going there. This meeting was an attempt to make sure we had our heads in the game and we were as ready as possible.
I sat there and tried to pay attention. But it wasn’t happening. I had made it my goal to publicly say all the right things after Sunday’s tragedy. But privately, I was all messed up. I was thinking nutty stuff. That day, as I looked around the room, out of the dozen or so people who were in that meeting, I knew most of their names but I only knew a couple of them well.
What were all those other people thinking? I wondered. Did they think Dale’s accident was my fault? Were they mad at me? I didn’t know.
Everywhere I went, I wondered that. I had been that way for two days. I couldn’t get over it. There I sat, looking around. Every now and then, I’d catch a word the engineers and crew chiefs were saying. But that’s about it. I looked down at Dale Junior, and he didn’t look like he was into the meeting either. He mostly just looked down at the table the whole time. On the other hand, Park and his team seemed focused. They looked like they were into this dumb gathering.
Just down the hall from where our group was discussing Rockingham, Teresa and the other Earnhardt family members had the somber job of figuring out the details of Dale’s funeral.
That wouldn’t be easy. So many people were flocking to the Mooresville area, there was no simple way to accommodate everyone who wanted to be part of honoring Dale. The best way to achieve that, the family decided, was to hold a small private gathering on Wednesday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Mooresville just for the Earnhardt family and a few close friends. That would be followed on Thursday by a larger, invitation-only memorial service at Charlotte’s massive Calvary Church, which seats 5,800 people on three levels.
NASCAR put out a statement outlining the plan: “Because it is impossible to accommodate the tremendous outpouring of support to all those who followed Dale, we are unable to open the service to the public. With that in mind, the family has chosen to broadcast the service live on television, enabling fans across th
e country to share in this service for Dale.”
Buffy and I and our family attended both services, showing the Earnhardt family our love.
Wednesday night was a special time for all of us in attendance. Dale’s pastor, the Reverend Johnny Cozart, spoke about the Dale that most of those closest to him knew. Not the Intimidator. Not the Man in Black. The quiet Dale. The family Dale. The Dale who had a real spiritual side.
I can tell you Dale didn’t walk around publicizing his faith. He didn’t talk to people about what was going on inside him.
“But when it came to faith, Dale knew what he believed in,” the pastor said. “He believed in the Lord. He sinned. He fell short like all of us do. But he loved Jesus Christ. He had such a positive influence on everyone.”
The minister continued. “Whenever I’d visit with him, I’d always leave with a spring in my step.”
Dale wasn’t churchy in the traditional sense, the pastor said. “He was just a guy who loved people. He was not intimidated by anybody.” I guess we all know that, right?
That had touched the minister personally. “I grew up intimidated by certain people. He taught me to be a more assertive pastor and a leader of God’s people.”
How ’bout Dale? I knew he knew how to make me a better race-car driver. But he also knew how to make the preacher be a better preacher.
Everyone who knew Dale, the minister said, had stories of small kindnesses from him. “One day after church, this lady was out in the parking lot and her car wouldn’t start. Dale went out and tried to see what was wrong with it. He raised the hood. He looked around. But he couldn’t fix it. ‘I’ll drive you home,’ he told her. ‘I’ll see that the car is fixed.’ He took the lady home and took the car and got it fixed. That’s the kind of story I don’t think too many ever heard about Dale.”
For the memorial service at Calvary Church on Thursday, people packed all the streets nearby. It looked like about forty TV satellite trucks were parked outside the church. Dale was a huge and influential figure. However, Teresa wanted the service to be relatively subdued and brief.
In the Blink of an Eye Page 17