"There's a great photo of that moment," Petty says. And that's the other stupid saying you'll hear. Stuff flying everywhere. Dale Earnhardt Jr. remembers back to what the day his father's fatal crash was like. It has become customary to name a new roll cage addition after the driver whose wreck warranted its invention. The chances of someone dying again behind the wheel of a NASCAR race car are almost certain. His car slid alongside Earnhardt's and they stopped nose-to-door in the infield grass. As they played out, Waltrip added: Those kind of licks are the worst kind; theyre sudden. He died of a basilar skull fracture after contact with Kerry Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt's oldest child. When we look back on Feb. 18, 2001, the day Earnhardt died at the end of that race, we find so much of both -- personal recollections about conversations that feel so foreboding now, and moments when so many racers chose to stick with the norm, even amid the constant sounds of safety experts' warnings, ambulance sirens and funeral parlor organs. THE RACE ITSELF was a good one, with 49 lead changes swapped among 14 different race leaders. ONE BY ONE, cars started leaving the hospital to return to Daytona International Speedway. Richard Childress, the owner of Earnhardt's NASCAR team, has declined to state publicly where the car is. Newman says with a proud chuckle. He wants it to be an educational tool. Bill Elliott won the pole and Michael Waltrip, in his first race in the No. One circuit later, he allowed Michael Waltrip to slide by, taking Earnhardt Jr. with him. That shift started the night Earnhardt died, when the phones started ringing at Jim Downing's shop in Atlanta with calls from previously defiant racers, asking the co-inventor of the HANS device how they could purchase one of his head and neck restraints. On February 18, 2001, Dale Earnhardt Sr. lost his life at the 43rd running of the "Great American Race" following a collision on the outside wall at Daytona International Speedway. The 2001 Daytona 500 was the first 500-mile (800 km) race run at the track with this package, which was designed to keep cars bunched up close together and to allow more frequent passing at high speed. That forced Earnhardt's car to ricochet back up into the steep 31-degree banking, cutting across the front of the pack of the cars behind him. Thing is, they already do. She had arrived with her stepson, Earnhardt Jr. Earnhardt's was the fourth fatality over a heartbreaking span of only nine months. 45 and Kyle Petty's HANS device was sitting in the cockpit waiting for him, one of only five drivers in the 43-car field to wear one that day. "Any time the driver's unconscious, we know it's going to be a difficult situation," Bohannon said in January during a visit to Daytona, his first time back to the track in years. Earnhardt, a seven-time Winston Cup champion, crashed on the final turn of the Daytona 500 on Feb. 18 and could not be revived. E60 explores the legacy of Dale Earnhardt 20 years after his death. Richard Childress, the owner of Earnhardts NASCAR team, has declined to state publicly where the car is. They talked about his advancing age and what the new r. I am not satisfied with this. After the crash, NASCAR did an internal investigation and found that there were some design flaws in the cars that pertained to safety, per the Orlando Sentinel. ", Adds Earnhardt Jr.: "You still gotta look at what you have today and go, 'I'm not OK. He was beating himself up for talking his friend out of quitting and couldn't shake that "they're going to get someone killed" comment during the red flag. The impact also broke a left side lap belt that was already frayed, but multiple doctors interviewed said that, due to the nature of a basilar skull fracture, Earnhardt's mortal wound had already been inflicted by the time the force of the crash broke the belt. 20 machine took a hard right-hand turn and drilled the concrete wall with a perfectly centered shot from the nose of his Pontiac. The 1998 Daytona 500 win was a popular one in the garage as seen by the amount of congratulations Dale Earnhardt received on pit road heading to Victory Lane. I'm thankful for our sport being safer. He doesn't remember anything about the crash, or even about that day except for having lunch with his parents before going to the track. He arrived at Earnhardt's car less than 10 minutes after the crash, after crews had already cut the roof off the car and a surgeon stationed closer to the scene had already been administering resuscitation efforts. Ryan Newman looks back at his crash at Daytona (3:33), How the Dale Earnhardt tragedy made NASCAR safer -- and saved Ryan Newman, Kurt Busch still not cleared from July concussion, Nemechek wins final NASCAR race at Fontana, Ky. 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Busch apologizes for gun violations in Mexico, NASCAR's 2023 season will be a year of change, Daly, Mayweather team up for Daytona 500 run, Truex Jr. wins in NASCAR's return to LA Coliseum, "E:60 Presents -- Intimidator: The Lasting Legacy of Dale Earnhardt. "Dr. John Melvin, the racing safety expert, or Dr. Bob Hubbard would come to talk about safety or the HANS, and we respected them but didn't understand them. I talked him into it. Since the changes, there have been no fatalities in major NASCAR races. We'll find more and more flaws with what we have today, just like we did in the past.". The sudden stop is a drivers worst nightmare.. Here's a look at exactly what happened leading up to, during . "Not just this year, not just the people that built that race car. It became OK to talk about it as a group. Six key themes to follow in the 2022 NASCAR Cup season, How NASCAR had to learn a harsh lesson ahead of Next Gen arrival, How NASCAR had to learn harsh lesson On the night of Feb. 18, 2001, phones started ringing at the homes of HANS device co-inventors Jim Downing in Atlanta and Robert Hubbard in Michigan. All she said was, "No. He believed the belt had likely broken via the force of the collision with the wall, so Earnhardt's fatal skull fracture had already happened. When everyone else in the room broke out into laughter, he never joined them. But then Schrader's car hit Earnhardt in the passenger side door, creating a sudden surge of speed and turning both cars into the wall. ", Part II on the safety culture before Earnhardt's crash, Part III on the day of the Earnhardt crash, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. I turned around and walked back out of there and sat for 30 minutes in that hospital before they told us he was gone., Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s HANS device is connected to his helmet. It often leads to major bleeding in that area. On one giant HD monitor is super-slow-motion footage of a soda can fired from a cannon to see how a laminate windshield holds up versus 190 mph projectiles. He also threw his arms around Kyle Petty, the man whom he worked so hard to avoid throughout the 2000 season after Petty's 19-year-old son, Adam, was killed in a Busch Series practice crash at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on May 12, mortally wounded with a basilar skull fracture. It's a test of skill, reflexes, and concentration, along with resource management and nerves. Before 1998, he had four runner-up . Speed was a vital part of what attracted people to watch, and watering it down could have turned people away. If you want to believe that he knows that, then that's fine. "We all knew that the biggest threat to keep one of us from winning the race was Sterling [Marlin]," Waltrip says of those frantic final 17 laps, running first with a mirror full of teammate Earnhardt Jr. and the black Chevy of Senior zigzagging back and forth to keep two different lines of cars at bay, the inside line led by Marlin and Rusty Wallace and the group in the outside lane led by Schrader. His 184-pound body was thrown far enough out into the right center of the cockpit that he suffered a blow to the back of his head. But we were all focused on getting the race restarted.". The 24-year-old thought about himself, his own racing career and his life as a fatherless son. He got so excited that he leapt out of his seat. To most, it is completely unnoticeable. The impact registered around 60 G's, so much force that it pushed the entire right front corner of the car from an aerodynamic curve into a flat surface that fit the wall as perfectly as a jigsaw puzzle piece. The engine stayed put, but everything around it moved, in some cases a full two or three feet to the right. Drivers use harnesses that prevent injuries to the sternum and also keep the head from moving forward while the body stops. I dont like that, thats the kind of crash that hurts you. I know a lot of drivers -- Ryan Newman, me -- we can thank Dale Earnhardt that we are alive here today. Photo by: F. Peirce Williams / Motorsport Images. ", With the field parked under a red flag so crews could clean up the mess, Earnhardt chatted with Childress on the radio. When NASCAR and Joe Gibbs Racing looked over the car in the garage, they discovered that the steering wheel was bent, dented from the impact of Stewart's full-face helmet. Before stepping out of the NASCAR trailer, Helton asked his colleagues, "How in the world do I say that we've lost Dale Earnhardt? Safety was always a part of the plan, but after Dale's death, the focus leaned much more into a safety mission.". Dale Earnhardt, a seven-time Winston Cup champion, was killed instantly yesterday by injuries suffered in a last-lap crash at the Daytona 500, the sport's biggest event. When Earnhardt dropped low in front of Marlin, he hadn't completely cleared the nose of the No. She didn't interrupt, she didn't, um, disrupt anything," he says. I've got it all! AFTER FIVE DECADES of slow-moving, reactionary safety efforts, NASCAR now doles out safety-based changes and mandates at a relatively superspeedway-like pace. On Lap 183, Earnhardt was in the lead. The IROC race car had an all aluminum forged internal Katech Chevy 350 small block, overbored .040 to 358 cubes producing 470 horsepower. It also included the new steel roll bars and intrusion plating (a shield to block objects from breaching the cockpit) added to the left rear side of the cage behind the driver's seat, the very area where Corey LaJoie's car smashed into Newman's Mustang on the Daytona frontstretch. In the Halifax Medical trauma room, Bohannon and his coworkers tried to inflate Earnhardt's collapsed lungs, performed a chest X-ray and continued pumping his body with blood. Earnhardt died in a crash on the final lap of the Daytona 500. It did a pirouette, landing on the hood of another car and barrel-rolling twice before landing atop teammate Bobby Labonte's car and eventually sliding to rest, destroyed, in the backstretch grass. It was a weird emotion. I knew when he got there it would be the biggest hug ever. His brother Michael Waltrip, who was unaware and celebrating in Victory Lane, went on to release a film in 2019 about that day, Blink of an Eye. But their thankfulness also comes with a warning. If close friends or family ask to see it, he'll show it to them, though he doesn't allow photos. On Feb. 17, 2020, he was high atop the speedway in Race Control. 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