How Earnhardt’s death changed NASCAR
It’s 20 years since the NASCAR legend died at the Daytona 500, but the legacy of his crash continues today
February 18, 2001. Seven-time NASCAR Cup champion Dale Earnhardt, the fearless‘intimidator’, was in his element at Daytona International Speedway. While his own DEI team’s cars ran 1-2 towards the finish line, and Daytona 500 glory, his famed #3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet was playing rear-gunner to block any late runs from the chasing pack. As the cars tore through Turns 3 and 4 on that fateful final lap, Earnhardt maintained the strongarm tactics that encapsulated his persona… but his actions in those moments proved to be his last.
As he threw his final block, Earnhardt’s left-rear corner tagged Sterling Marlin’s right-front fender, getting the RCR Chevy loose.
Earnhardt battled for control, his car clipping the apron, unsettling it yet further, and it began to spin clockwise, moving up the track and across the bows of the closely following Rusty Wallace and
Ken Schrader. His right-rear corner was struck by Schrader’s left-front, which crucially accentuated the angle of Earnhardt’s car (between 53 and 55 degrees in relation to the wall) before it nosed hard into the unprotected concrete.
Although it appeared to be a ‘regular’ NASCAR crash, the impact at this angle was devasting for the occupant: Earnhardt’s car was travelling at 157-160mph, but its total velocity change – as it pivoted to the left after the wall impact – was calculated at about
44mph. That’s equivalent to dropping the car from 61 feet into the ground. The crash-pulse duration was about 80 milliseconds, resulting in a g-force spike of somewhere between 50 and 100.
As his and Schrader’s cars spun down the track in unison, Earnhardt’s right-rear wheel parted company – an indicator of the violence that had shaken through the vehicle. Schrader, whose Pontiac hit the wall adjacent to Earnhardt at much the same speed but at a far shallower angle, was completely unhurt and hopped out to check on his rival. What Schrader saw that day “will always stay with me”. Medical crews were on the scene moments later and, despite their best efforts, there was little to be done but transfer Earnhardt to the ambulance and directly to the nearby Halifax Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 1716 local time.
Twenty years since his violent death, Earnhardt’s legacy lives on as one of NASCAR’S most famous names and fiercest competitors.
“Dale Earnhardt was, and still is, NASCAR,” says the organisation’s executive vice-president Steve O’donnell.
“He was a driver who people admired, who people wanted to be, but also a driver who could be really tough one minute and could be really charitable the next.
“When he finally won the Daytona 500 [in 1998], it produced one of the most iconic moments in our sport. I think he was everything you’d want someone to be in this sport, someone who we keep up there as someone you need to aim for to be successful in NASCAR.”
If you were in any doubt over Earnhardt’s standing at the time, President George W Bush called to offer Dale’s wife Teresa his personal condolences. While NASCAR (and the United States) grieved the loss of its greatest driver, it also sparked a safety crusade that lasts until this day.
“We were given a directive by our industry after Earnhardt’s death to work on this every day,” says NASCAR senior director of safety engineering John Patalak. “In other sports, safety engineers have a harder time, because equipment and making changes costs money. We’re not blind to that, but our industry expects safety – it demands it. From my point of view, I’m very fortunate that NASCAR, drivers, teams, manufacturers all push in the same direction. Racing is always going to be a dangerous sport, but that’s why we’re here and pushing the needle forward.
Nobody here argues against safety.”
O’donnell remembers those dark days that followed Earnhardt’s death, as the NASCAR community came to terms with the loss of its biggest star and worked out how best to react. “It was extremely tough,” he says. “He was a friend to many as well.
And, honestly, it was a point where we all thought, ‘How does this sport go on?’ You felt like he was the sport and, without him, how would we go to the next race at Rockingham?
“For all of us in the industry, we felt personal loss, even the younger employees, and then it was that question of how we continue and progress this sport in a good way. But we also knew he was someone who would have said, ‘Hey, press on and make sure you continue to deliver.’ It was a moment that gave us the ability to change the culture around safety. He helped spur that conversation.”
Earnhardt – like fellow NASCAR racers Adam Petty, Kenny
Irwin and Tony Roper before him – had died from a basilar skull fracture. Four drivers dead in an eight-month period, all killed by a similar injury.
Another major strand to the story was Earnhardt’s left-side lap belt that had separated in the impact, allowing his body to twist forward and to the right inside the car. His autopsy revealed that the underside of his chin had impacted the steering wheel – although the fatal blow was likely to the back of his head – as he rebounded from the impact back into his seat, which displayed severe scuff marks on the head-surround area. Earnhardt’s open-faced helmet (he preferred to ‘feel’ the air) had rotated forwards when he hit the wall, exposing the back of his head. He shunned any head and neck safety restraint, unlike half a dozen of the drivers that day.
NASCAR’S crash report, published in August 2001, stated:
“Dale Earnhardt’s death was most likely caused by a blow to the back of the head not from one single cause but from a combination of unusual factors. These included the uncommon severity and trajectory of the car’s impact with the wall, an immediately prior collision with [Schrader’s] car that put him out of position and a separation of the left lap belt under load that allowed greater motion within the car.”
Looking back today, O’donnell believes the post-earnhardt response was similar to that in Formula 1 following the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger (who suffered a similar skull fracture) and Ayrton Senna at Imola in 1994. Poignant too, when you consider that Earnhardt won at Talledega on the day of Senna’s death, and paid his own tribute in Victory Lane: “[Senna] was a great racer and it was a shame to see him go like he did, it’s tough.”
O’donnell explains: “The R&D Center was spawned by what happened, it was founded in 2002, and I felt like safety was something that people did talk about, but they didn’t like to talk about at the time. The drivers were going out to race, they didn’t want to talk about safety. I think Senna’s death in F1, and Earnhardt’s death, they spurred a culture where it was
OK to talk about this and make changes.
“For NASCAR, we went all-in across the industry, we knew we needed to work together to ensure it didn’t happen again, while knowing it’s an inherently dangerous sport, and knowing it could happen. So, what do we do to put ourselves in the best position? We had those conversations about safety, and if you didn’t take part in those, you were asked why not.”
The work that’s gone on at NASCAR’S R&D Center in Concord,
North Carolina has been in tandem with the adoption of head and neck restraints (such as the HANS device) and the SAFER barrier, which was developed in conjunction with Indycar and the University of Nebraska. From 2002, head and neck restraints were mandated; by 2005 the SAFER wall was installed at all NASCAR Cup ovals (full-face helmets were compulsory by then too). Seatbelt harnesses became six-point in 2007 and today are seven or nine-point, along with an ‘All Belts to
Seats’ system that was mandated in 2015.
“IT WAS A MOMENT THAT GAVE US THE ABILITY TO CHANGE THE CULTURE AROUND SAFETY”
“It’s impossible to put a number on how many lives head and neck restraints have saved,” says Patalak. “Nobody knows the outcome without them in the crashes we’ve had since – we’re just very fortunate in that we don’t have to justify it, or find that data, to answer that question.
“The SAFER barrier has also been a tremendous improvement. It reduces peak accelerations by deformation and, in combination with the driver’s restraint systems, it actually means those have to work less hard because the SAFER barrier is doing the work on the outside of the car. It reduces the input the driver has to deal with.”
Patalak has a neat way of isolating the three areas that go into safety: “I put them in three buckets: what the car hits – so that’s race track design and SAFER barrier. Another bucket is the driver’s restraint system, so after the car hits something, how the drivers interact with that – seats, seatbelts, head and neck restraints, rollbar padding, window nets, steering wheels. The third bucket is the car itself, the chassis and the rollcage – so how that performs structurally to protect the driver. All those three buckets are absolutely critical to work together.”
This was proved in last year’s Daytona 500, when Ryan Newman and Corey Lajoie survived a brutal crash in their race to the finish line. As Newman’s Ford Mustang was tossed into the air it was stuck by Lajoie’s Ford car while inverted, causing it to fly skywards again. Both vehicles were subsequently transported to the R&D Center for a full investigation.
Patalak says: “With the 6 car [Newman] and the 32 car [Lajoie] last year at Daytona, there were a handful of things in place already that benefited both drivers – people’s focus was on the 6, but we also spent a lot of time looking at the 32 car in accident reconstruction as well. We learned a lot from that.
“It was a very severe impact. The laminated windshield and improved window net mounting – we’d redone the complete hardware on that system a few years ago – and two new rollbars in the roof all played their part. Those were all proactive safety improvements, including the enhanced chassis, plating on the doorbars and increased thickness of the floors. We take this all into future car design.”
NASCAR’S latest step is its Next Gen car (aka Gen-7), which is scheduled for introduction in 2022, and O’donnell says each chassis iteration raises the bar on safety: “Each new generation of car learns something from the last, so we’ve moved the driver over 1.6 inches towards the centre, the driver doorbars have moved out a little more again, and the bumpers on the cars – our guys do a lot of beatin’ and bangin’! – so we have some extra energy absorption built in. We feel our current car is quite safe, so it’s a case of beefing that up and improving the energy absorption of what it can take.”
Twenty years on from Earnhardt’s demise, his legacy in improving NASCAR safety is clear to see. The safety systems are as tough and resilient as he was as a racer, and it’s fair to assume that he’d have really liked that.