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Final chapter NASCAR tries to lay Earnhardt controversy to rest
By Stephen Thomas, CNNSI.com ATLANTA -- If the last six months of Mike Helton's first year as President of NASCAR have exacted any long-lasting toll on the man, he might have been reasonably expected to view Tuesday's presentation in the Centennial Ballroom at the downtown Hyatt Regency as something of a catharsis, an opportunity to finally put to rest the Dale Earnhardt affair. But, as he has for the duration of this unfortunate mess, Helton portrayed neither significant relief nor any outward signs of contrition or repentance. As he walked toward his seat on the dais and took his seat to the left of Drs. James H. Raddin Jr. and Dean L. Sicking, independent experts hired by NASCAR to study the crash that killed Earnhardt, Helton was as impassive as ever, impossible to read. Indeed, throughout both his brief remarks and the 100-minute presentation by Raddin and Sicking that followed, Helton seemed utterly unconcerned. If Tuesday was a time to redress any missteps, real or perceived, in the manner in which NASCAR conducted its affairs in the immediate aftermath of Earnhardt's death, Helton was having none of it. In fact, he was almost defiant, pointedly refusing to accept any censure for having inferred in the days that followed that a failed seat belt was the likely cause of Earnhardts death (Raddin and Sicking concluded that it was merely one of an unfortunate confluence of events). "No, not at all," Helton said when asked if he regretted that news conference. "And I think it was necessary. Once we discovered the separated belt in Dale's car on Monday morning [Feb. 19], we began asking questions. And it was a big issue, a huge issue. We had that responsibility to the competitors because they were going back on the track and they needed to know what we found." For their part, Raddin and Sicking were nothing if not comprehensive, using more than 90 minutes (where only 60 had been allotted) to carefully explain the processes of their investigations and their findings. As a result, what had been announced as an hour-long question-and-answer period was approximately 30 minutes. Throughout their respective presentations, neither Raddin nor Sicking so much as misspoke even once and each was perfectly clear in his evaluation of the data available to them: on Feb. 18, Dale Earnhardt died because a whole host of unfortunate circumstances came together at one horrific moment and killed NASCAR's greatest driver. Perhaps had the angle of Earnhardt's impact with the wall been slightly different, perhaps had Ken Schrader's car not hit Earnhardt's car, perhaps had the seatbelt not failed (whatever the cause), Earnhardt might have survived. But, as Raddin and Sicking made abundantly clear, there is no way to determine what, if anything, could have been done differently to save Earnhardt. And while NASCAR has come under scathing attack for not responding adequately to previous driver deaths as they have Earnhardt's, senior vice president of NASCAR George Pyne retorted that not only were the seat belts not a factor in the deaths of Adam Petty or Kenny Irwin, but the organization took quick steps to address the issue of stuck throttles, the cause of those driver's accidents. "One columnist recently wrote that NASCAR isn't progressive in its philosophy regarding safety," Pyne said, "and that we would never see black boxes in the car. Well, not only are we taking steps to install data recorders, we are hiring a medical liaison to work with medical staff at tracks and undertaking a study of the restraint system. Is that progress?"
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Dale Earnhardt Jr.
