Since Earnhardt’s death, there hasn’t been a single fatal NASCAR Sprint Cup, Nationwide or Camping World Truck Series crash. - Tom Jensen (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Once we quit laughing, Earnhardt turned serious. “You know what I think of all these drivers who think racing is too dangerous?” he asked. “I think they ought to tie a kerosene rag around their ankles so the ants don’t crawl up their legs and chew their candy asses off.”

He then spent the better part of the next hour talking about safety. He told some horror stories of watching drivers die as a kid, trailing around with his late father Ralph across the hardscrabble NASCAR Sportsman circuit in the Deep South.

Earnhardt said he understood the risks of racing, knew he could die in a racecar and accepted that as part of the deal. And if the other drivers didn’t get that, then they shouldn’t be racing. For him, it wasn’t any more complicated than that. Black and white, which is pretty much how he saw things.

As the conversation went on, he talked about the death of his close friend Neil Bonnett at Daytona in 1994, which he blamed on Bonnett’s full-faced helmet acting as a fulcrum on his chest after the impact of his crash. Later, Dave Marcis joined us and so did Dale Earnhardt Jr.

It was fascinating to listen to Earnhardt, though in truth much of what he believed about safety simply was wrong.

And less than six months later, he was gone. The toughest, strongest guy in NASCAR turned out to be mortal after all, something none of us expected. We’d seen him flip over at Talladega and walk away from a dozen crashes that looked worse than the one that killed him.

Like Jim Pedley, I was there that day and it still seems surreal. I was standing outside the Daytona infield media center when Tony Eury Sr. walked by, crying. I knew then what NASCAR President Mike Helton would make official an hour or so later, that we lost Dale Earnhardt.

The cruel irony, of course, is that took the death of NASCAR’s most macho and toughest personality to propel safety to a whole new level, with mandated HANS devices and the car of tomorrow among the myriad changes made this decade.

Since Earnhardt’s death, there hasn’t been a single fatal NASCAR Sprint Cup, Nationwide or Camping World Truck Series crash. Nor has there been anyone who’s come even close to filling the void Earnhardt left behind.

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED, and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association. Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com! Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or Speed Channel