Nascar

04.13.02
Day Seven
Extreme Risks

Many racecars had been repainted in red, white, and blue when they arrived in Delaware for the first Winston Cup competition after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Others carried messages for the victims of the attacks and the rescue workers who were digging through rubble.

It was the weekend of Sept. 23, and on that Sunday, the largest crowd of any kind in America since the attacks was expected to attend the race.

"United we stand," was the slogan on Jeff Burton's car.

"God bless America," read the decal on Matt Kenseth's.

In interviews and press releases, several racers wanted their fans to know that terrorism was not about to cow them. "I sure don't feel like crawling in a hole and hiding," Tony Stewart said.

But privately, many at Dover Downs International Speedway were anxious -- if not outright scared. So much had changed.

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS of Sept. 11 stirred up the fighting spirit in many of NASCAR's drivers and fans, including these at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. View today's slideshow View today's gallery: Car 99 Under the hood

Nearby Dover Air Force Base, where teams ordinarily parked their planes, was closed to civilian traffic. A mortuary on the base, it had been widely reported, was processing remains unearthed from the Pentagon rubble. Everyone entering Dover Downs was subject to search; coolers and backpacks were banned; and more police officers were on patrol. Speedway officials declined to disclose specifics of their security plan, except to note that it had been developed in consultation with the FBI, and that the focus was less on foiling one man with a gun than on preventing "one guy blowing up one hundred," in the words of the speedway president.

Heightened security notwithstanding, it was easy to imagine that Sunday's expected crowd of almost 150,000 -- what would be the largest gathering of the weekend in the land -- would be a tempting target for terrorists. The facts that the race would be broadcast live on national TV and that federal authorities had issued a terrorist alert for the weekend only raised apprehensions further. In many haulers, TVs ordinarily tuned to ESPN were kept on CNN.

"I do not feel safe," Mark Martin said. "That's just not how I want to go."

Asked if he worried, Burton said: "You'd be crazy not to."

It was the Saturday before the race, and Burton was sitting in his hauler with his wife, Kim. Like Jeff, Kim was anxious about being at Dover, and she remained concerned for their 5-year-old daughter, Kimberle Paige, who had been experiencing nightmares. The Burtons had tried to explain the attacks in terms she would understand: that very bad people had "wrecked" airplanes into big buildings and many had died. And they tried to shield Paige from TV. But during that time, images of death were inescapable.

The conversation turned to Islamic fundamentalism, and how militants within that religion teach their children to hate Americans, in part, Kim maintained, because of American wealth and the rights that American women enjoy. Burton, who regularly joked about how he cooked more often -- and much better -- than his wife, could not resist a jab.

"And you're teaching Paige to hate cooking like your mom did to you," he said.

Kim did not skip a beat. "Honey, that's what they make takeout for," she said.

"You're gonna be screwed when we get on the C-rations," Burton said.

The events of Sept. 11 may have darkened it, but Burton had not lost his humor.

NUMEROUS SEATS would be empty when baseball and other major-league sports resumed their schedules in the days ahead, but the MBNA Cal Ripken Jr. 400, which honored the Baltimore Orioles future Hall of Famer, was a sellout. Nearly 150,000 spectators awaited the start of the race by chanting "USA! USA! USA!" and waving nearly 150,000 American flags that the speedway's owners had distributed for free. Ripken spoke, country-and-western star Tanya Tucker sang "The Star-Spangled Banner," and one red dove, one blue dove, and 48 white doves were released into the air as a symbol of farewell to the victims of Sept. 11. The drivers started their engines and set off on their warm-up laps around the mile-long concrete oval.

"The pace car is rolling," Burton's spotter radioed. "God bless America."

It was 1 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 23.

Burton was starting 22nd, better than his Roush teammates, who had all been slow in Friday's qualifying competition. Kurt Busch had been so maddened with his poor qualifying laps that he had stormed off, exclaiming: "I quit. Tell Jack to get another driver."

But Busch was fast in the subsequent practices, and he wasted little time in moving from the end of the field to the middle. After only 27 of the race's 400 laps, Busch was running in 20th. Mark Martin and Matt Kenseth also quickly moved to the middle, and Burton held his own. But none of the drivers was satisfied with the handling of his car, and all hoped to improve their performances during pit-stop adjustments.

Busch never got much of a chance. On lap 96, his engine began running roughly, and 20 laps later, it died altogether. A dozen more laps in, Martin, who had advanced to 19th place, was hit when he braked to avoid a wreck; forced behind the wall for repairs, he was almost 100 laps down when he finally returned to the race. Kenseth didn't escape bad luck, either. Just past the halfway point, his engine began to overheat, and he lost 10 laps while his crew fixed the problem. Kenseth would finish the race in 29th, Martin 32nd, and Busch 41st. That marked the third time in the last five races that Busch had placed 39th or worse, a trend that was rapidly depleting his reserve of provisionals, the points-based system by which a good racer who has a bad day in qualifying can still make the race.

From his seat on top of Martin's pit cart, Jack Roush watched another disappointing day unfold, and another engine fail, at a point in the season when he thought Roush Racing had left its motor troubles in the past. But Roush still had one strong horse in the race. By the time the next caution flag flew, on lap 227, Burton had moved up to 11th. Burton came in for fresh tires, and was in 13th place when he returned.

"One hundred-fifty to go, man! Rock 'n' roll!" crew chief Frank Stoddard said. "We've got the fastest car on the track! Let's go get 'em!"

A few laps later, the handling on Burton's car began to deteriorate.

Stoddard hoped the situation would stabilize on its own, as sometimes happened. "You're doin' fine, baby," he said. "Just keep maintaining with me. Your lap times are still the same as the third-, fourth-place cars."

Burton's crew made adjustments during a pit stop, but then, as the race neared its end, an engine valve spring broke.

"What the hell is going on?" Stoddard said.

"It's blowing up," Burton said.

"What do you want to do?"

"You've got to realize when you're whipped."

"Then let's just take our whipping like a man."

Burton crossed the finish line in 21st place, well behind winner Dale Earnhardt Jr., who drove his victory lap holding an American flag.

"This is a really tough break, guys," Burton said over his radio.

But despite his troubles, Burton managed to advance 30 points closer to the top 10. Johnny Benson, who held 10th in the point standings, had finished 31st after an accident near the end of the race.

Inspired by Muhammad Ali, who had toured ground zero, Burton traveled to New York City a few days after Dover to visit with grieving firefighters and police officers. Bobby Labonte and Labonte's crew chief, Jimmy Makar, joined him. The 2000 Winston Cup champion, Labonte had been afforded the royal treatment the previous December in Times Square and at The Waldorf-Astoria, but no publicity attended his visit to Manhattan this time. He and Burton had refused to allow media coverage or advance publicity.

They had come to lift spirits, not pose for pictures.

Station by station, the racers went, meeting with men and women who had answered the call of duty on Tuesday, Sept. 11, and who had lost friends and fellow workers in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Some recognized the racers and some did not, but all seemed to appreciate their out-of-town guests.

Burton grew unsettled as they approached the rubble of the World Trade Center. They weren't going to walk the outer perimeter, but directly onto ground zero itself. The racers walked past National Guardsmen onto the debris, where smoke swirled and the air smelled charred. Burton was stunned by the destruction, which no camera had fully captured. Even the small details horrified him: the wheel to an office chair he spied in the wreckage, the doughnuts still in their case in a nearby coffee shop where the windows had been blown out.

"You start realizing that these people were just doing their deal," Burton said. "They didn't assault anyone; they didn't flip off anyone; all they did was get up in the morning and go to work. I'm standing there with Bobby Labonte, Jimmy Makar -- you know, tough guys -- and there was a point where I had to not cry. I said: `I can't do that. I'm not going to let anybody see me do that.' "

Since the attacks, Burton had endeavored to put Sept. 11 in a larger context. He could never forget how the 2001 Winston Cup season began, with the death of Dale Earnhardt, closely following the deaths of three other drivers in 2000. Taken together, those deaths and now the deaths of thousands had given him fresh appreciation for his blessings and put dreams of buying yachts in perspective.

"I think I understand more so -- not just from [that] Tuesday, but from before then -- what's important in life," Burton said.

NOT LONG AFTER returning from New York, death brushed by Burton once more.

It was Thursday, Oct. 4, and Cup drivers had completed their qualifying laps for the following Sunday's race at Lowe's Motor Speedway, the UAW-GM Quality 500. Drivers for the Automobile Racing Club of America had taken to the speedway near Charlotte for a race, and Dale Earnhardt's older son, Kerry, was battling Blaise Alexander Jr. for the lead when their vehicles collided. Earnhardt's car flipped and burst into flames, and Alexander's hit the wall.

Alexander died instantly of head trauma.

A well-liked man of 25, Alexander had wanted to be a racer since he was a little boy in Montoursville, Pa., the town that was home to 16 high school students and 5 chaperones who died in the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. Alexander drove for owner Felix Sabates, for whom the late Kenny Irwin Jr. had also raced, and this latest death prompted the owner to express a fatalistic belief that pervaded racing. "When these guys strap themselves in a car, they know their lives can be over in a few seconds," Sabates told a reporter. "Look at the guys in the World Trade Center. They didn't expect to die. When the good Lord decides that's what he wants for you, there's nothing you can do about it."

Although he owned a head-restraint device, Alexander, who had also raced in NASCAR, was not wearing it when he died. He was not unusual in this regard. Resistance to the devices continued even after Dale Earnhardt's death.

The reasons were varied.

JEFF BURTON was one of the first to wear a head-restraint device, left on the dashboard of his No. 99 CITGO car. By October, all but one regular Winston Cup driver was wearing such a device. View today's slideshow View today's gallery: Car 99 Under the hood

Spencer and Junior eventually relented, and by October, the only regular Cup driver still holding out was Stewart. Still, several other Cup drivers wore head restraints only during races, and then only at certain tracks. Some drivers at other levels of NASCAR and in other leagues never wore them at all. Alexander's death brought renewed calls for NASCAR and other sanctioning bodies to mandate restraints. But fearing legal liability if the devices failed, critics claimed, NASCAR had stubbornly resisted.

THE DRIVERS were already strapped into their cars for the start of the UAW-GM Quality 500 when the big video screens at Lowe's Motor Speedway abruptly switched from a live feed of the pre-race ceremonies to NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw. It was Sunday, Oct. 7, almost one month since the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, and Brokaw brought the news that U.S. forces were sending bombs and cruise missiles into Afghanistan.

The crowd of 130,000 erupted. Fans waved American flags and repeated the chant heard at Dover, "USA! USA! USA!"

They roared their approval when singer Lee Greenwood reached the line in "The Star-Spangled Banner" about bombs bursting in air, and they roared again when Air Force jets screamed by on their customary flyover. They stood to cheer when New York City firefighters, part of a contingent of some 5,000 firefighters from around the country invited by NASCAR to attend the race, gave the command to start engines.

Kurt Busch finished the UAW-GM Quality 500 in 22nd place, no small achievement considering that he had started 43rd, dead last. But of the Roush racers, it was Burton who made the biggest news. With his fifth-place finish, he had displaced Johnny Benson. He now was in 10th place, a member of Winston Cup's privileged echelon for the first time since last year -- an extraordinary accomplishment, given how his season had started.

Burton credited dogged effort, not some miraculous discovery, for his brightening prospects; he had not visited a sports psychologist as he endeavored to reconnect to his machine, only adhered to the time-honored ethic of try, and try again. "We'll probably look back on this two years from now and not really understand what we were doing wrong," Burton said.

But violence far from Charlotte overshadowed this latest chapter in Burton's resurrection, and war fever surfaced in all of the drivers' post-race interviews with the press corps. Tony Stewart could have been a member of the U.S. special forces when he shared his opinion of Osama bin Laden.

"It's time to finish this guy off, as far as I'm concerned," Stewart said. "Bring his head back on a stick."

Even before the ill-fated 2001 Daytona 500, NASCAR had been criticized for failing to take stronger steps to protect drivers. Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin had died of virtually identical skull fractures, but the sanctioning body had declined to mandate head restraints, or take other safety measures that some critics wanted.

The death of NASCAR's icon raised the level of criticism to a withering barrage. But for months after the Feb. 18 accident, NASCAR publicly revealed no details of the investigation it had launched, and it gave little indication that it would endorse change. The controversy continued into the summer.

Behind the scenes, much was actually being accomplished, but NASCAR was being deliberately silent. After so many critical stories, chairman Bill France Jr. was wary of the press. "I thought some of the articles were unfair; they weren't correct; they were taken out of context," France would later remark. "I've learned this: the bigger you get, the more the media comes after you and tries to second-guess and micromanage everything that happens. Not just in motorsports, but all over."

The investigators that NASCAR hired finished their work and announced their results in an Aug. 21 news conference. After spending more than a million dollars analyzing Earnhardt's car, reviewing videotapes, crashing a Winston Cup car, and simulating the Feb. 18 crash on a computer, the experts reached four major conclusions.

First, they said that Earnhardt "most likely" died of a blow to the back of the head, which fractured The Intimidator's skull; second, that violent contact with his steering wheel (or another part of his car) caused the fracture; third, that Earnhardt's safety belt broke during the crash; and fourth, that no single factor was responsible for killing the driver, but rather, it was a chain of interrelated actions and reactions in those few seconds when he lost control.

Many of the critics had thought that NASCAR would mandate head restraints once the Earnhardt investigation was concluded, but it did not.

But NASCAR would soon mandate other safety measures. By the 2002 season, NASCAR would hire a full-time medical director to help local doctors improve emergency response at the tracks, and so-called black boxes to record crash data would be installed in every Cup car. Other possibly promising advances, such as soft-wall technology and energy-absorbing bumpers, would be analyzed by NASCAR at a research center it had opened.

Many racers praised the Earnhardt report and NASCAR's response, if only for the fact that NASCAR had demonstrated in an unprecedented public fashion its willingness to address driver safety, albeit on its own terms and at its own pace.

"All in all, I thought it was very well done and very thorough," said Jeff Burton, leading safety advocate of NASCAR's drivers. "They have over the last -- really I want to say 12 months -- but especially the last 5 months, bit by bit, given us information and made themselves available so that we can make our cars better."

But the critics only found fresh reason to fault NASCAR. They wanted immediate action, especially on the matter of head restraints.

"Tuesday's two-hour news conference should be the last we hear of why Dale Earnhardt's life was lost," wrote the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Gil LeBreton. "What about the safety of the ones who are still driving?"

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS at its headquarters in Daytona Beach, NASCAR was still moving on the issue.

On Wednesday, Oct. 17 -- fewer than two weeks after the death of Blaise Alexander -- NASCAR mandated head restraints for all drivers in its top three series. The edict was effective immediately, and it applied to all races, qualifying laps, practices, and testing sessions -- in other words, anytime a driver was on the track. The devices would also be required on NASCAR's lesser circuits beginning with the 2002 season.

In announcing the decision, NASCAR did not mention legal liability, or Alexander and the many other drivers who might still be alive had they been wearing a HANS or similar device. But even NASCAR's harshest critics found reason to praise the mandate, and they found more reason just a few days later, when racers returned to Talladega, in Alabama, for the EA Sports 500, the fall race at the lightning-fast speedway.

The spring race at Talladega had gone off without the big wreck that drivers had dreaded. And the EA Sports 500 seemed destined to be similarly favored when, on the last lap, as several drivers were battling Junior for the win, Bobby Hamilton bumped Bobby Labonte.

Labonte's car flipped, touching off a maelstrom that mangled almost 20 cars. No one was badly hurt, but the drivers lived through a moment of terror. Stewart, who raced with Labonte for owner Joe Gibbs, told reporters: "When you come off of Turn Two after the checkered flag waves and you see your teammate's car upside down, it scares you to death. I'm just glad to be alive."

Some drivers credited their HANS devices with saving them from serious injury or death.

Jeff Burton won his second race of the 2001 season, the Checker Auto Parts 500, on Sunday, Oct. 28, in Phoenix. He was now all but assured of ending the season in the top 10 -- for the fifth year in a row. A top-10 finish would guarantee him a coveted speaking role at the annual Winston Cup banquet, held at New York's elegant The Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

But Kurt Busch placed 22nd in Phoenix. With just four races left, his chief rival, Kevin Harvick, was now assured of being named Rookie of the Year.

Busch began the season dreaming of winning the title, but he had let go of that dream earlier in the fall, during a spell of disappointment. His engine failed at Dover; on Oct. 15 in Martinsville, Va., veteran Ricky Rudd bumped him out of contention; and at Talladega, Harvick's brakes locked partway into a pit stop, momentarily blocking Busch, who had the adjoining stall, and costing him a chance at a good finish.

Phoenix only brought more heartache.

Forced to use the last of his provisionals to make the Checker Auto Parts 500, Busch had progressed from 41st place to almost 10th when, fewer than 60 laps from the finish, Jimmy Spencer spun him out. Busch was livid, but Roush, an older and more seasoned man, was sanguine. "It's a price that old dogs exact on young dogs every place on earth, a price paid for the rite of passage into adulthood. And the more exuberant, the more talented, and the more successful the young person is, the more likely he is to meet with the contempt and the disdain of the older people."

Hoping that superstition might bring results where minds and machines had come up short, Busch had placed a box of Lucky Charms cereal on his pit cart at Phoenix, but after Spencer spun him out, the cereal went back to his motor coach, where his girlfriend later ate it.

Roush at February's Daytona 500 had higher expectations for Busch than the 25th place he now held in the standings, but he wasn't about to give up on the young driver now. The results may not have been uncontested proof, but Busch's talent and ability to learn, Roush believed, were beyond dispute.

"We've had some missteps in his judgments on the racetrack," Roush said, "and we've had some missteps within the team, which is a rookie team supporting a rookie driver. We've failed to capitalize a couple of times, and we've not adapted as well as we might have some other times. Considering his age and his potential, we're on track. I'd just hoped it would be easier."

Many of Busch's lessons in 2001 were drawn from mistakes that Roush believed he would not repeat in 2002. Other lessons concerned racing's dark side, but they, too, would serve the young driver well in the future. Busch's career may have read like a fairy tale until 2001, but sooner or later, Roush knew, Busch had to learn that speed was a harsh master. Better it be sooner.

Said Roush: "That will be the profound lesson for this year: how extraordinarily difficult this business is. It will make him appreciate when things go problem-free. He will enjoy his success, and hopefully deal with it better through this humbling experience."