It used to be that the four most profound words in auto racing were “Gentlemen, start your engines!”
That changed on a warm and breezy Florida afternoon 25 years ago when stock car racing legend Dale Earnhardt was killed in a last-lap crash at the Daytona 500.
“We’ve lost Dale Earnhardt,” then-NASCAR president Mike Helton said Feb. 18, 2001, in confirming the unfathomable.
To paraphrase an expression usually associated with singer-songwriter Don McLean’s elegy about the death of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Buddy Holly, that was the day the music died in NASCAR.
Wrote McLean in the opening verse of his allegorical anthem “American Pie”:
“I can’t remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride. But something touched me deep inside the day the music died.”
NASCAR fans were dealing with similar emotions when Earnhardt’s widowed bride, Teresa, made her first public comments about her husband’s demise before the Daimler-Chrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway two weeks later. NASCAR returns to the speedway this weekend.
With Earnhardt’s son, Dale Jr., sitting tight-lipped by her side in LVMS’s packed infield media center, Teresa Earnhardt made an impassioned plea amid the Orlando Sentinel’s attempt to obtain her husband’s autopsy report and death photos.
“If access is allowed, others will demand them, too,” she said. “And make no mistake, sooner or later the photos will end up unprotected and … on the internet.”
More people watched the Las Vegas 400 than saw Duke play North Carolina in basketball that day. But as The Associated Press reported, Teresa Earnhardt’s media conference was much more compelling than the game or the race.
To use a term made popular by her late husband on the racetrack, she was ultimately successful in rattling the cages of then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and other elected officials as NASCAR fans rallied behind her.
The autopsy photos were legally sealed and never published.
Lasting impact
Dale Earnhardt was two months shy of his 50th birthday when fate intervened at his sport’s biggest event. He drove three times at LVMS, finishing eighth, seventh and eighth after starting 26th, 38th and 33th.
While it was generally agreed that his best days were beginning to loom a bit larger in his rearview mirror, one also could have argued that a lot of very good ones still were in front of him.
Known as the “The Intimidator” for his take-no-prisoners driving style that resonated with NASCAR fans, Earnhardt won 74 races and seven Cup Series championships during a career that spanned 26 seasons.
Richard Petty and Jimmie Johnson are NASCAR’s only other seven-time champions and had their own legions of fans. But no one could make the needle move off the track like the irascible Man in Black with the gunslinger’s mustache, former LVMS president Chris Powell said.
“He really did have so much to do with the sport becoming so popular that it had to expand westward,” Powell said of a speedway boom during which new tracks were built in California, Las Vegas and Kansas, and NASCAR assumed control of existing ones such as Phoenix from the IndyCar series.
In 2004, LVMS honored Earnhardt and Petty (Johnson would win the first of his seven titles two years later) by naming towering new terraces bookending the main grandstand for them.
Earnhardt’s success on the track and his popularity away from it underscores his legacy. But Powell said were it not for his death and the way it happened — Earnhardt suffered a basilar skull fracture and was killed instantly when his car struck the concrete wall at an acute angle — safety measures that were mostly an afterthought might have never become the status quo.
Ironically, Earnhardt was not a big fan of the HANS (head and neck system) restraint system that along with SAFER (steel and foam energy reduction) barriers helped raise safety standards.
There hasn’t been a driver fatality in NASCAR’s top three series since Earnhardt lost his life 25 years ago.
Hitting the big time
It might have been his hard edge on the track that endeared Earnhardt to NASCAR fans with a passion that continues to this day.
But those at Las Vegas Motor Speedway who knew him best shared anecdotes that showed his softer and more complex side.
Powell recalled escorting Earnhardt around New York City when NASCAR had its awards banquet there and Powell was a marketing executive for series sponsor R.J. Reynolds.
A montage of Earnhardt’s racing highlights was shown on the Times Square display board as the Big Apple welcomed NASCAR’s best.
“He had Teresa with him, and as we turned the corner onto Broadway, he saw that jumbotron showing his highlights and he said: ‘Look at that, Teresa, isn’t that great? We’ve hit the big time.’
“There was almost a boyishness about him. He was giddy. That was the kind of thing that I was able to see that a lot of people didn’t get to see.”
Former LVMS publicity director Jeff Motley told a similar story about accompanying Earnhardt to Washington for a National Press Club appearance.
Before that trip, Motley said, it was always “Hey, you” when he was in Earnhardt’s company.
“I don’t remember him ever saying my name. But when we were meeting the heads of the National Press Club, he said, “This is my No. 1 PR guy from NASCAR, Jeff Motley.”
But another Las Vegan recalls meeting Earnhardt under slightly less cordial circumstances.
Kurt Busch, the 2004 Cup Series champion who won 34 races during his Hall of Fame career, was driving in his first Daytona 500 in 2001 and had traded paint with Earnhardt early in the race.
When Earnhardt pulled alongside Busch and extended a finger through the protective netting, it wasn’t to remind the youngster of what position he was in.
The recently retired Busch recalled that incident during the Fox Sports documentary “We’ve Lost Dale Earnhardt.”
“Kurt, you’re No. 1, and then I see his middle finger out the window, and I’m like, I just can’t do anything right around this guy,” Busch said in recalling a similar skirmish with Earnhardt at Rockingham Speedway a year earlier.
It has been 25 years since Kurt Busch became the last driver Dale Earnhardt flipped off in the heat of battle.
“And I never did get to talk to him about it,” Busch said with a quiver in his voice.
“Never did get to clear the air.”
Ron Kantowski is a retired sports writer who worked 36 years at Las Vegas newspapers, including 15 at the Review-Journal, covering motor sports.
