The price, and the legacy

Safety's come a long way in this sport, but sometimes we are reminded

 that it is a very dangerous sport.

-- Jeff Gordon

 

The drivers, they always know first. They're the ones who know what looks bad from what is bad, what is merely a spectacular rending of sheet metal and what exacts the dearest of prices for whatever gets in a man's blood that makes him go hurtling along a ribbon of asphalt at cartoon speeds.

 

And so you listened to the drivers, early Monday evening, and you heard 2001 all over again.

 

You heard Jeff Gordon and Denny Hamlin and Ryan Blaney and, hell, all of them, and once more you heard Darryl Waltrip. Once more you heard DW, in the middle of celebrating his brother's Daytona 500 win 19 years ago, stop and say, "Hope Dale's OK." Because he knew Dale Earnhardt wasn't.

 

Because Gordon and Hamlin and Blaney and, hell, all of them, knew Ryan Newman wasn't, knew that this wasn't just another guys-running-into-each-other deal at the end of another Daytona 500.

 

Not when Newman slid over to block Blaney as they fled toward the finish line, and got together, and Blaney turned Newman straight into the wall at 200 mph. Not when Newman went airborne and flipped and was T-boned spang on the driver's side door by Cory Lajoie on the way down. Not when he wound up sliding to a stop upside-down in a gout of flame.

 

This was bad. This looked and sounded and felt like it was really bad, the way 2001 turned out to be really bad.

 

Tuesday morning now, and it still is bad. But not in the way 2001 was bad, because 2001 changed everything.

 

The official report is that Newman is in serious condition in the hospital this morning, but that his injuries are "non-life threatening."  This does not mean that Newman is OK, because, as with the way drivers talk about a crash, there is also a way team officials talk about a crash. It's not so much what they say as what they don't say -- and what they aren't saying here is what exactly those non-life threatening injuries are. And that can't be an accidental omission.

 

Still, he's alive. And once again Dale Earnhardt's most valuable legacy looms large.

 

Because he was not OK at the end of the Daytona 500 19 years ago, see, and because he was Dale Earnhardt, we now have mandatory head-and-neck restraints and a tighter safety cocoon surrounding NASCAR drivers than ever before. It might go against the sport's bullheaded libertarian ethos -- Aw, hell, just strap me in and let's go -- but it also keeps the stars who feed the sport alive.

 

No one has died in a Cup car since Earnhardt, and there have been plenty of occasions in the intervening 19 years when that might have happened. But it hasn't. And it didn't yesterday.

 

And however bad yesterday was, that is a legacy never more worth appreciating than now.