They say the worst crashes in auto racing are often those that appear the least violent.
And so it was that Dale Earnhardt’s final moments on a racetrack Sunday looked as if he had been no more than nudged from behind. No more than a mere inconvenience to an afternoon that would surely end in the joy of seeing Michael Waltrip drive one of Earnhardt’s cars to victory in the Daytona 500, and his son Dale Jr. finish second in another.
Earnhardt was administered CPR almost immediately after his car came to rest in the infield. Firefighters removed the roof of his car while paramedics and then doctors reached in and began treating him.
Less than 10 minutes passed before they cut Earnhardt from the car, maybe a minute and a half until he was transported to the ever-familiar Halifax Medical Center across the street.
At the hospital a full trauma team awaited his arrival, along with emergency-room doctors and surgeons.
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“We did everything we could for him,” said Dr. Steve Bohannon, a doctor at Halifax who also works for the track. “Nothing could be done.”
The fact is, Earnhardt would have had a better chance had his car flipped wildly, as it had at Daytona in 1997, or flown through the air, as Tony Stewart’s had earlier in the race, than by taking the sudden impact of hitting the wall at 180 m.p.h., as it did Sunday.
The human body is not built to withstand that, the human skull only so durable, and there are those who will say that nothing could have saved Dale Earnhardt.
And there are those who will say that something should have. Earnhardt would not wear the HANS (Head and Neck Support) device created 10 years ago and still being developed, saying that it affected his peripheral vision and that it was uncomfortable. So he stuck instead with his open-faced helmet.
It is a stance common among veteran drivers as safety issues in racing have come under more and more scrutiny lately. “Soft walls,” as examined in the Tribune last week, have also been discussed and dismissed by many because it has simply not been determined whether they would do more harm than good.
Though an autopsy will bring more conclusive results, Bohannon speculated that injuries to the base of Earnhardt’s skull had caused his death. And indeed, basal skull fractures, caused when the head or neck whip violently under high G-forces, are something engineers claim the HANS can prevent.
Veteran drivers, including Earnhardt, have sneered at the technology.
“It’s the drivers’ responsibility to look after himself,” Kyle Petty said last week. And coming less than a year after he lost son Adam in a crash, it is not as if Petty was speaking from ignorance or indifference.
Maybe a half-dozen drivers wore the U-shaped, toilet-seat lookalike at Daytona, including defending champion Dale Jarrett. That was considered an encouraging sign, more drivers than ever before.
Racing has taken other steps in past years, like fuel cells that have virtually eliminated the catastrophic fires that used to curse the sport, and roll cages that keep drivers in one piece when all around them the car may be gone.
The drivers’ point is that danger is omnipresent, most not wanting to blame a sport that has spent billions on making cars faster but has ultimately failed its own by not taking their safety seriously enough.
NASCAR does not require its drivers to wear the HANS, and last week NASCAR President Mike Helton was quoted as saying he was “not prepared” nor did he “desire” to discuss safety research.
To talk about death is to acknowledge it, to allow it to somehow win.
Sunday, once again, it did. But it was competing with an unfair advantage.
“We’ve lost Dale Earnhardt,” Helton said.
One of the sport’s tough guys, Earnhardt is to blame as much as the others. Less than two months short of his 50th birthday and a half-mile from the finish Sunday, he leaves a wife and four children, ages 12 to 31.
Two of his sons are drivers.
For their mother’s sake as well as their own, may they be less stubborn than their father.
And smarter than their sport.