L.A. Times Archives. NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt died 20 years ago, in a last-lap crash at the 2001 Daytona 500. But some of it is not so long ago, as in one year ago on Feb. 17. THE 2001 DAYTONA 500 was without question the most hyped and anticipated event in NASCAR's then-53-year history. That's what happened to racer Michael Waltrip at the 2001 Daytona 500. It became OK to talk about it as a group. Dale Earnhardt's tragic death after a crash at the end of the 2001 Daytona 500 fueled many changes and prompted a variety of celebrations of his life. "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. 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. How NASCAR had to learn a harsh lesson ahead of Next Gen arrival, How Larson took the long way round to NASCAR Cup glory, Larson's long way round to Cup glory People stopped reacting and got proactive.". Melvin worked with Nelson and Peterson to get the NASCAR R&D Center on line by the end of 2001, initially working out of an old race shop. If close friends or family ask to see it, he'll show it to them, though he doesn't allow photos. "We've made more progress in 18 or 19 years than they made in the first 50 years of the sport, so you have to be proud of that, but at the same time I was fascinated by the reaction to Ryan's accident," Petty says. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. He was 49 years old. Behind Helton sat NASCAR chairman Bill France Jr. in the "crow's nest." Over the next few weeks, while Newman recovered from a brain bruise and miraculously little else, the car was in Concord, North Carolina, at NASCAR's Research and Development (R&D) Center, where every piece of every wrecked NASCAR stock car is examined, photographed and scanned into a computer alongside data downloaded from a "blue box" incident data recorder (IDR) and video from the high-speed camera mounted on the roll bar, pointed directly at the driver to detect every movement of every fiber of their safety systems and, most importantly, their heads and necks. Dcouvrez les informations pratiques sur la gare Roubaix : accs, services, arrives et dparts en temps rel. March 15, 2001 12 AM PT. The NASCAR chairman asked him the same question about whether the HANS device would have saved Earnhardt. But this time he stopped to shake hands, laugh it up and hug it out. Newman says with a proud chuckle. Atop that roster of safety saviors is Dale Earnhardt. His steering wheel had likely saved his life. With the next superspeedway race scheduled for Talladega Speedway in less than two months, the R&D team looked for any quick-fix issues that might have needed to be installed by race teams as they were building their cars for Daytona's sister racetrack. Instead, they said, 'OK, so where do we go from here?' According to Legacy, his fellow racers dubbed him "The Intimidator." On Lap 183, Earnhardt was in the lead. But the last hundred years of building race cars and technology. Propst, a certified EMT and firefighter for 24 years at the . The Intimidator's safety legacy has arguably had a larger impact on the sport than even his racing rsum. As soon as Earnhardt Jr. saw Schrader's eyes, he knew he would need to go offsite to Halifax Medical to see his father. I was more excited about that hug than the trophy or the money. He died after crashing during the final lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001. No, she said -- something was telling her that one was the right one. "So, now, here we all were, balancing grief, the loss of our friend. Safety was a tough conversation, and it became something that you almost didn't want to talk about it. Sometimes he even goes full Robert Duvall in "Days of Thunder." Although it appeared to be a regular NASCAR crash at the time, the impact at this angle was devastating for the occupant. It was worldwide. As his and Schraders cars spun down the track in unison, Earnhardts right-rear wheel parted company an indicator of the violence that had shaken through the vehicle. We got better seat belts, rubber fuel cells and window nets.". He won 76 NASCAR Cup races and earned over $42 million in winnings, per Racing Reference. Richard Childress, the owner of Earnhardts NASCAR team, has declined to state publicly where the car is. In 2000, he was hired by the racetrack as its chief emergency doctor. safety improvements in the sport over the past 20 years, which saved Ryan Newman in a scary crash at the 2020 Daytona 500. As the years have gone by, that seat belt controversy has faded in the wake of the real issue, the possible preventability of Earnhardt's death. "I walked out after that. As that scramble rolled through the final two turns of the event, Waltrip and Earnhardt Jr. were breaking away, hammering off Turn 4 toward the checkered flag. And if he'd had that crash today, but in Earnhardt's car hitting Daytona's wall of Feb. 18, 2001? In it, he recalled: I couldnt wait for Dale to get to Victory Lane. Kyle is the grandson of Lee Petty, winner of the inaugural Daytona 500 in 1959, and son of Richard, NASCAR's biggest pre-Dale Earnhardt superstar. Advertisement The words from then "NASCAR" president Mike Helton are as sad today as they were nearly two decades ago when the legendary driver was declared dead at Halifax Medical Center, Florida. But their thankfulness also comes with a warning. Following a huge outpouring of grief from his legion of fans, the NASCAR industry made driver safety its number one priority. Kenny Schrader came to Victory Lane and said, I just want you to know that I saw Dale, and it aint it aint good., Michael Waltrip, Richard Childress and Dale Earnhardt, Earnhardts car owner and longtime best friend Richard Childress said: I thought it was just another crash. While race teams pressed on through grief, the sanctioning body trudged through a PR quagmire, even as post-Earnhardt television ratings rose. He was racing at Daytona International Speedway and was on the last lap. We'll chew on that for a long while and then go into NASCAR. That research became the foundation upon which today's more detailed crash studies by NASCAR's R&D Center are conducted. Earnhardt was familiar with the racetrack in Florida, winning the Daytona 500 series in 1998. But Stewart climbed out of what was left of his car, shaken but OK. is ainsley earhardt related to dale earnhardt. I never saw him. 8 cars, DEI, championships," he says. Earnhardt died of a basilar skull ring fracture, the same injury that had killed three other NASCAR drivers - Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and Tony Roper - over the previous eight months. "This goes back to how Dale Sr.'s death impacted the industry, an ongoing effort that never stops, hoping to know what we don't know as soon as possible," Patalak says with his hand resting on a chunk of black foam, just one block in a lineup waiting to endure hydraulic press torture. In the garage, just a few paces from where Helton was speaking, Earnhardt Jr. had returned to the garage to see his team. One circuit later, he allowed Michael Waltrip to slide by, taking Earnhardt Jr. with him. Darrell Waltrip was there too, with a growing number of NASCAR officials. Dale Earnhardt remains one of the most popular names in NASCAR history. He got fixed up and our cars got fixed up and in 2000 we almost won the championship.". To the 17 million people watching at home, the crash looked like nothing, especially compared to Stewart's spectacular accident a half-hour earlier. From Associated Press. He said as much 10 years ago in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel. You got the sense that something wasn't right.". 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. The seven-time NASCAR Cup champion, known as the fearless Intimidator, died at the age of 49 after his famed #3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet Monte Carlo crashed at Turn 4 on the last lap of the Daytona 500. The drivers of these cars have to have unshakable confidence in themselves. "He was relieved when we told him that Tony was OK," Childress recalls. 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 "Post-Dale Earnhardt's passing, that conversation shifted. Photo by: F. Peirce Williams / Motorsport Images. 20 machine took a hard right-hand turn and drilled the concrete wall with a perfectly centered shot from the nose of his Pontiac. More often, the signs are much smaller, much more personal. Racing and winning, Budweiser and No. February 18, 2001 is NASCAR's darkest day. I've got it all! During driver introductions for the 2001 Daytona 500, Dale Earnhardt spoke with Winston Kelley of MRN. When he looks at that car, that mind is in overdrive, constantly trying to CSI what happened, how everything around him, all of that metal, rubber and foam, moved and bent and crushed in just the right way to keep him alive. The trauma room was just inside the door. In the beginning, it had more of a competition-based mission, and that's still a huge part of what is done here. Normally, his march to his waiting ride was a gotta-get-there mission. He made contact with another car and both vehicles hit the concrete wall. In 1970, my dad got flung out the window at Darlington and should have died. "Reactive is, 'OK, now I've seen something new that I didn't know before, and let's put that in a hopper and see if there's something we can do with that new piece of information. The restart came on Lap 180, with 20 to go. She didn't interrupt, she didn't, um, disrupt anything," he says. THOSE WHO WORKED in the sport before the 2001 Daytona 500 and still work in the garage today frequently find themselves wrestling with the before and after of NASCAR's mentality toward safety. "And now I'm thinking, 'I wonder what's gonna happen with all this stuff?' 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. "So, there's a stupid saying that you'll hear around the sport. "To this day, I don't know why I went to the hospital," Waltrip says. In the 20 years since Earnhardt's death, that number is zero. "We were already ramping up safety efforts from different things; you could look back at the history of roof flaps [added to cars in 1994 to keep them from going airborne at speedways] and different things that we reacted to in the past," Helton says. She had arrived with her stepson, Earnhardt Jr. Unconscious, unresponsive, not trying to breathe. There was some initial confusion about what had happened with the crash. "I was within a few feet of Earnhardt and he just didn't want to hear about the HANS," Hubbard recalled in his book "Crash! When he limped around to talk to his friend, he instead dropped the window net to an unimaginable scene. It included the addition of a check valve to the oil reservoir tank, which was the source of the fire that was spreading in Newman's car as he and it hung upside down. 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. His own teams cars, driven by good friend Michael Waltrip and his son Dale Earnhardt Jr, finished 1-2 on a day that should have been filled with great joy. A note, a comment, a last conversation with a lost loved one that wasn't really an indicator of cosmic tumblers about to fall into place, but man, in retrospect, they sure feel like it. The car was black and featured the number 3. There's nothing Ken Schrader can do to erase the image he has of seeing Dale Earnhardt dead in his car. His death forced a garage full of people who have always prided themselves on their bravery to grapple with a sensation that is especially foreign among race car drivers. To most, it is completely unnoticeable. He doesn't want it to become a tourist attraction. Earnhardt battled for control, his car clipping the apron, unsettling it still further, and so it began to spin clockwise, moving up the track and across the bows of the closely-following Rusty Wallace and Ken Schrader. However, in an interview 10 years after the crash, he did reveal: I saw a friend in trouble. Newman said yes. "In the beginning you didn't have to wear helmets, and then some guy got killed in 1951 and the next week guys were wearing helmets," Petty says. As they signed what was sure to be a lucrative souvenir contract, Earnhardt suddenly said, "That's if I make it that far." How NASCAR is gearing up for its "biggest change" in 2022, Why Bubba Wallaces Talladega win is such a big moment for NASCAR, Why Wallaces win is huge for NASCAR Earnhardts son, Dale Jr, went on to become NASCARs biggest and most popular star. We're going to look at this one day and go, 'Dang, can you believe they drove those cars? Earnhardt died of a basilar skull ring fracture, the same injury that had killed three other NASCAR drivers Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and Tony Roper over the previous eight months. 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. Back then, The Observer had two beat writers who covered NASCAR - the late David Poole and myself. Alexander was the last driver to die in a major stock car event. It looked as though his save from Friday's IROC race might happen again. He also was known as "The Man in Black." What should we focus on to try and improve these things we've got going on?' When we look back on tragic days in our lives, we always find what feel like missed signs of what was to come. It used GPS tracing, computer simulations, real-life crash tests, photographs and countless other data points to dissect the fatal accident. Ironically, Earnhardt was racing against his 22-year-old son, Dale Jr., when he died. Those are the questions that I ask at 3 o'clock in the morning when I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking about Adam and thinking about Dale. He was so adamant in his distaste of the carbon fiber brace that when General Motors, Ford and NASCAR brought esteemed automotive safety expert Dr. John Melvin to a January 2001 Daytona 500 test session to make a presentation to drivers on its benefits, Earnhardt was the only no-show. The first Newman Bar was added in 2013, along the roofline, after an airborne Carl Edwards landed on Newman's roof in 2009 and later that same season Newman got airborne himself and landed on Kevin Harvick's roof and then airborne Kurt Busch landed on top of him in 2013, all at Talladega. At the start of the 2001 All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway in May, Jeff Gordon hit the Turn 1 wall at the dreaded 1 o'clock angle but walked away. From the time they went on sale in 1991 through Earnhardt's death a decade later, Downing and brother-in-law Robert Hubbard sold fewer than 300 of their HANS devices, specifically designed to prevent a basilar skull fracture, the injury that killed Earnhardt. All she said was, "No. I had a guy, an engineer, Steve Peterson, and I'd tell him to go handle them. In order to keep delivering our expert journalism, our website uses advertising. Instead, summer 2001 was NASCAR's most miserable period. Since Earnhardts death, and its subsequent safety drive, NASCAR has not suffered a fatality in its major leagues. "I think there has always been a misunderstanding about R&D, that it was invented because of Dale's death," O'Donnell explains. His sudden frantic waving to the arriving trucks of the Daytona International Speedway safety crew was the first real indication to the world that something was indeed very wrong. But the people who lived that day in the arena with the man in his final hours still find themselves wrestling with the reality that Dale Earnhardt is gone. Propst, to this day, remembers the seat belt as being intact. 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