Death spurred safety changes

Five years ago safety experts weren't popular with NASCAR.
By ED HINTON
THE ORLANDO SENTINEL
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Five years ago Saturday, then-NASCAR czar Bill France Jr. issued a statement that thundered in its simple enormity: "NASCAR has lost its greatest driver ever."
Dale Earnhardt had been killed in the last turn of the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. Suddenly NASCAR was, with blackest irony, the No. 1 story in American sports.
NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw likened the sudden passing of the folk icon to those of Elvis Presley and Princess Diana. The planned covers of national news magazines were scrapped and replaced with portrait photos of Earnhardt. And he finally made the cover of Sports Illustrated, a publication that, in life, he'd felt had slighted him for years.
The aftershocks -- mainly controversy over NASCAR's safety standards -- wouldn't subside for months, and then only after a larger, graver event that year: Sept. 11.
Even then the tremors continued, and they do to this day. NASCAR's earth won't stop shaking until 2009, when its "Car of Tomorrow" -- hailed by experts as the safest stock-car racing design ever -- goes into full use on the Nextel Cup tour.
The spiritual loss may never heal. Jeff Gordon inherited status as NASCAR's senior-statesman driver, but as for replacing Earnhardt's persona and sheer presence in the garage area, "I don't know if anybody ever will," Gordon says.
But in these five years NASCAR has traveled in safety technology, "the change is dramatic," says Dr. Barry Myers, a professor of surgery and biomechanical engineering at Duke.
Progress has been made
In 2001, Myers was the court-appointed expert who studied the causes of Earnhardt's fatal injury, basal skull fracture.
"If we could go back five years," Myers says, "and ask the question, 'Where would we want this organization to be with regard to safety in five years?' ... I think this is where you'd want them to be."
Sunday, when Dale Earnhardt Jr. drives in the 48th Daytona 500, "there's almost no chance he could be killed in the same way his father was, given the equipment in the cars now," says Dr. John Melvin, a Detroit-based biomechanical engineer who is considered the world's leading comprehensive authority on auto-racing safety.
Five years ago, Myers and Melvin were viewed warily inside NASCAR. They were outsiders, scientists delving into a supposedly homespun form of racing where seat-of-the-pants technology was revered. That both are now paid consultants to NASCAR, as are other top safety scientists, is monumental in itself.
Melvin says conditions are the safest ever for Speedweeks.
"That's not to say that something very unexpected couldn't happen," Melvin says. But "they've got systems in place that are very protective."
There's still one potentially fatal type of crash, when one car hits another broadside, directly on the driver's door panel -- long called a "T-bone" in racers' black-humored jargon.
"We still worry about the 'T-bone' crash," Melvin says. "But I think the 'Car of Tomorrow' [it will be phased in beginning in 2007] has addressed that nicely."
Several implementations
Five years ago, at the beginning of Speedweeks, racing-oriented engineers and physicians quietly worried about NASCAR. Many considered it behind other forms of racing, especially Formula One and Indy cars, in safety technology.
And the danger in NASCAR somehow seemed to be intensifying. In 2000, basal skull fracture had killed three young NASCAR drivers: Kenny Irwin Jr., Tony Roper and Adam Petty, the fourth-generation of a NASCAR dynasty.
Medically, what was happening was the breaking of a small bone, called the foramen magnum, at the base of the skull. This breaking, in turn, cut the interior carotid arteries and devastated the part of the brainstem that controls breathing and heartbeat.
Since the day of Earnhardt's death, several safety devices have been implemented -- the head-and-neck restraints, particularly the HANS device, for all drivers; installation of energy-absorbing "soft walls"; development of cocoon-like seats in the cars that function as survival cells, and "black boxes," or crash-data recorders.
Another development, extra energy-absorbing materials in the cars, is in the Car of Tomorrow.
On the day of Earnhardt's death, only seven of 43 drivers started the Daytona 500 wearing head-restraint devices. Earnhardt was not one of them. His car slammed into bare concrete. His seat and safety-belt harness were rigged according to his own design.
The spot where he hit the wall in Turn 4 is now padded with a scientifically developed soft wall, called the SAFER barrier. Throughout Speedweeks, his son and all other drivers will be wearing, by mandate, the latest refined version of Hubbard's HANS head-and-neck restraint.