How Earnhardt’s death changed American motorsport

February 18, 2001. Seven-time NASCAR Cup champion Dale Earnhardt, the fearless 'Intimidator', was in his element at the Daytona International Speedway. While his own DEI team's cars ran 1-2 towards the finish line, his famed #3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet Monte Carlo 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 sadly 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 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. 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 devastating 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 doesn't sound much, but is 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 car hit the wall adjacent to Earnhardt at much the same speed but at a far shallower angle (by as much as 12 degrees), was completely unhurt and hopped out to check on his rival. What he 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 later pronounced dead at 1716hrs local time.

Twenty years since his violent death, Earnhardt's legacy still lives on as one of its most famous names and fiercest competitors.

"Dale Earnhardt was, and still is, NASCAR," Steve O'Donnell, NASCAR's executive vice president tells Autosport. "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."

"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" John Patalak

If you were in any doubt over Earnhardt's standing at the time, NASCAR's then-president Mike Helton received a phone call that evening from Daytona's night-security guard, asking if he knew the whereabouts of Earnhardt's wife Teresa. As she was with him, Helton demanded who the heck thought they were important enough to know, and got the reply "Sir, we have the President of the United States on the line" - George W Bush wished to offer Teresa his personal condolences.

While NASCAR (and America) 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's 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 passing, 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 for us 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 Jr. 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 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 skull. He shunned any head and neck safety restraint, unlike six of the drivers in the field 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 ring fracture to the skull) and Ayrton Senna at Imola in 1994. Poignant too, when you consider 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. 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.

"Nobody knows the outcome without [FHRs] 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" John Patalak

"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.

"Through the R&D Center, we hired a lot of experts and worked with outsiders too, and it really helped us to get from where we were in 2001 right through until today."

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'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 that the driver has to deal with."

Patalak has a neat way of isolating the three areas that go into safer racing: "I put them in three buckets: What the car hits - so that's racetrack 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, seat belts, 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 the race to the finish line - as Newman's Ford Mustang was tossed into the air it was stuck by LaJoie's Ford 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 - peoples' 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.

"A lot of the time we'll see things happen on the racetrack where nobody's hurt but, as safety engineers, we'll look at it and say: 'If that happened slightly differently, how would that system have handled it?' So we go and develop tests via computer modelling to understand it, to ensure that what we have in place will deal with that scenario. We're highly proactive."

Another huge step has been to log information from crashes, which provides the ability to create computer model re-enactments using data from real-world crashes.

"Incident Data Recorders are installed in all Truck, Xfinity and Cup Series cars," says Patalak. "They give us acceleration in three directions: X, Y and Z. So front-to-back, left-to-right and up-and-down. In 2018 we added a high-speed video camera pointing at the drivers, and that's connected to the IDR, so they are synchronised when they record each incident.

"We know how many Gs the driver experiences in a crash, and what direction to that input, and then the camera records the response of the driver's body. How the seat is working, the seatbelts... it gives feedback on everything we do.

"With Next Gen, we've not been constrained by an existing chassis, we could start with engineering goals - so the designers could cut loose and hit those goals" John Patalak

"We don't sled test with live people, we use dummies, so the videos we're getting help us understand the correlation between tests and real life; it's called biofidelity. It's a really good tool to understand crashes."

As well as monthly liaison with the likes of the FIA and other sanctioning bodies in America, NASCAR's safety team also holds regular meetings to review each weekend's racing.

Patalak adds: "Of course, we learn a lot from the large, severe crashes but every week we debrief - just like the teams have competition meetings among themselves - so on Tuesday morning all the safety officials from all series are on the call, with our medical liaisons and consulting physicians and we walk through everything. That's every week.

"The more... let's say, visually spectacular crashes - especially if a driver is injured - we do much more in-depth studies."

NASCAR's latest step has been 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."

Patalak adds of Next Gen: "It's always a great opportunity to have a clean-sheet design like this. As you go along and roll out changes to the existing fleet of cars, that's always a cost associated with adding those new parts. But with Next Gen, we've not been constrained by an existing chassis, we could start with engineering goals - so the designers could cut loose and hit those goals. Everything can be stronger in a lot of areas with the same amount of weight of today's cars. It's a lot more efficient."

Twenty years on from Earnhardt's tragic 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.