The Last Lap

I’m sitting here at work, waiting for
Sunday  when the racing season will start, and the Daytona 500 is run.
There’s a lot of anticipation as usual, with the excitement of the 125’s and the
Shootout just giving us a taste of what to expect. It should be a good year for
racing, and the 500 should be exciting with all the rules changes NASCAR has
made to the aero package to try to slow the cars down.

I had a nightmare last night. I dreamed
that at the end of the Daytona 500 Dale Earnhardt was
killed. 

But then I realized that the Daytona 500
was yesterday, and that I wasn’t having a nightmare; Dale Earnhardt is indeed gone.

I started watching Winston Cup
racing around the time Darrell Waltrip won the Daytona 500. I remember seeing the 500 a few times before then, but since I didn’t have cable, I never was
exposed to many other races. But as I got more and more into it, like many
others, I decided that I didn’t really like Earnhardt. I didn’t hate him, I just
didn’t like him.

But then as the years went by, and I
started going to local races here in Nashville, I grew up. Watching those guys
every Saturday night helped me to gain an appreciation of just what it takes to
get in one of those cars and go as fast as you can. So while I still didn’t
really root for Earnhardt to win, I started to enjoy watching him do things in a
car that no one else could do. 

I was lucky enough to get to go to several
races at Talladega, including the last one he ever won. The only time I ever
spoke to him was right before a drivers’ meeting in 1996. He was sitting on the
front row (as always) waiting for the meeting to start. I’d been watching Dale
Jr. run some Late Model races at Nashville and just wanted to tell him about
that. At first he thought I was just a fan and reached for my reporter’s
notebook to sign it. But NASCAR frowns on reporters getting autographs, so I
quickly told him I’d been watching his son, and he wanted to know if I knew how
he ran the previous night. Unfortunately, I didn’t, and about that time they
called the meeting to order.

Later that day, he would be involved on
one of the most horrific wrecks I’ve ever seen. But he walked away with
assistance, and went on next week to start the Brickyard 400. 

Speaking of Dale Jr. running at
Nashville… You’d think that the son of a seven time Winston Cup champion would
roll in to a late model race with 20 people on his crew, a big hauler, and a
couple of cars. Nope. He wanted his son to learn about racing the way he did.
Junior didn’t have top notch equipment, he had maybe two or three other guys
with him, and he worked on the cars himself.  I remember Larry Woody
telling me one time that he was really impressed with Junior after he’d asked to
speak with him and Junior had to tell Woody that he couldn’t talk right then
because he was trying to get the car ready to qualify. He was very apologetic
when he did finally talk to Woody.

Junior ran several races at Nashville in
1996. But his most memorable race there was at the end of the season. During
practice, he was involved in a crash with another car, and both cars were
destroyed by fire. "Little Earnhardt" only had the one car, and was
packing up to go home when Bobby Hamilton came to the rescue. Hamilton, who
earlier that year had been denied a win by a tap from the senior Earnhardt,
stepped up to the plate and offered to let Junior run one of Casey Atwood’s
backup cars. The catch? The backup car was a Ford. A quick call to North
Carolina to get dad’s approval, and Junior was back in the race. Everyone had a
good laugh at that; an Earnhardt in a Ford.

Sadly, people are going to use Earnhardt’s
death to further their own agenda. Whether it be to play to the ignorant and try
to get racing banned, or the "do anything even if it’s wrong"
mentality that some people have about racing safety.  People are calling
for soft walls, to make the HANS device mandatory, to do this or that. As I said
after Adam Petty’s death, and after Kenny Irwin’s death, doing the wrong thing
quickly could be worse than doing nothing at all. The medical experts say that
the HANS device probably wouldn’t have saved Earnhardt. Soft walls might have
knocked a few G’s off the impact force, but it’s doubtful that you could get a
wall soft enough to have stopped a car going at 190mph slow enough to prevent
injury.

Racing is an inherently dangerous sport.
The drivers know that going into it. But it’s a risk they’re willing to accept.
I guess it’s natural for people to want to place blame somewhere when something
like this happens. But as Michael Waltrip said today, it was just a racing
incident; everyone was going for the checkered flag and doing what they were
supposed to do.

There’s really nothing anyone can say that
will make this situation any easier. All we can do is continue with our lives.
They’ll be racing at Rockingham next week, and Dale, Kenny, Adam, Neil, JD,
Rodney, Davey, Alan, John, and Tony will all have the best seats in the House.