Zero.

That’s the number of fatal accidents that have occurred on NASCAR tracks in the last 10 years. That clean slate is impressive especially given the tumultuous way the auto racing industry began the last decade. A 15-month period spanning 2000-01 marked the second time in NASCAR history that the sport was clouded by an epidemic of on-track deaths.

The first, says longtime race promoter Humpy Wheeler, occurred in the late sixties, and was highlighted by the fatal accidents of Joe Weatherly and Glen “Fireball” Roberts.

But the second saw the loss of five lives, and hit the racing world even harder because it included the loss of the legendary Dale Earnhardt, whose crash at Daytona International Speedway on Feb. 18, 2001, has come to be remembered as one of the most significant moments in NASCAR history.

“He transcended the sport,” says Buz McKim, historian of the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C. “When he made the cover of Time magazine after his death, that was pretty huge. People outside the sport knew who he was. He was the ultimate American success story who started from nothing.”

An autopsy determined that Earnhardt died of a basilar skull fracture, sustained after the front of his car hit the retaining wall at a critical angle at high speed.

He was the fourth driver in less than a year to die in a crash of that nature, and studies showed that the injuries that killed Earnhardt and the others before him – Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and Tony Roper – could have been prevented with the use of a head-and-neck restraint.

In the years that followed, NASCAR adopted rules that mandated drivers’ use of head and neck safety restraints to prevent basilar skull fractures like the one that ultimately killed Earnhardt, and implemented the use of Steel and Foam Energy Reducing (a.k.a SAFER) barriers at all its tracks. These new sidewalls are made of materials that absorb energy during a crash, thereby reducing the force absorbed by a driver’s body.

Earnhardt has since down in urban lore as the man whose death spurred a revolution in NASCAR’s safety rules.

“According to NASCAR, safety has always been a priority for them, but I think there has been more emphasis on research and development after [Earnhardt’s death],” said John Miller, an assistant professor of English and cultural studies specialist at Longwood University who has studied the culture of NASCAR. “Every time there’s been an accident, NASCAR has scrutinized its practices. But I think the stature of Dale Earnhardt made them want to do more than due diligence.

“It brought a much brighter spotlight than it would have had it been somebody else.”

Still, buried in the wave to memorialize Earnhardt’s legacy and acknowledge the impact his death had on NASCAR safety, lies a little-known fact: The Intimidator’s demise got the wheels of NASCAR’s brains churning, but one more driver ultimately had to give his life before the governing body of U.S. stock car racing finally enacted the kind of legislation that ended the series of tragic deaths

* * * * *

When Blaise Joseph Alexander thinks of his son, Blaise Robert, the elder Alexander remembers a cheerful boy with a winning smile and a robust personality.

“He had the greatest smile. He was the happiest person. The kid had people laughing all the time, and he never told a great joke,” Alexander says. “He just lit up the room.”

Blaise Robert had the Irish looks and dark, curly hair of his mother, Anne, but was given his father’s first name.

He wasn’t Blaise Jr., though.

“Me and my wife actually discussed that,” Alexander said. “When you give a kid the father’s name and make him the junior, he just ends up being called junior. I liked the idea of him having an identity. So he was ‘Little B’ and I was ‘Big B’”

Growing up in Montoursville, friends also called Little B “B.R.”, and by age 12, B.R. had so much energy that his father asked a buddy who owned a go-kart track to keep his son occupied by letting B.R. ride around on weekend nights.

“Next thing I know, I hardly ever saw my son again. He just raced and raced,” said Alexander, president and CEO of Blaise Alexander Family Dealerships.

Before long, B.R. had graduated from go-karts and micro sprint cars to stock cars. His stock rose too, and by 2000, he was competing for Felix Sabates’ Team SABCO in NASCAR’s Busch Series.

“He was going to be something special,” recalls McKim, the NASCAR Hall of Fame historian.

To Alexander, his son was a fierce competitor.

“A lot of guys are drivers. Blaise was a pure racer,” Alexander said. “In my mind, racers are all out to win the race. He reminded me a lot of Todd Bodine. Tony Stewart is also a racer.”

Then came the race that B.R. never got to finish.

On Oct. 4, 2001, with four laps remaining in the EasyCare 100 ARCA race at Lowes Motor Speedway, B.R. was running neck-to-neck with Kerry Earnhardt, son of the departed Dale Earnhardt.

The cars made contact.

Earnhardt’s car flipped and burst into flames, but he escaped uninjured.

B.R’s car hit the outside wall head-on in a manner eerily similar to the crash that killed Dale Earnhardt eight months earlier, and later that night, the 25-year-old was pronounced dead./p

The cause of death?

A basilar skull fracture.

CHASING CHANGE



Death always hits hard, especially within the close-knit racing community.

B.R. wasn’t the first driver to die in an accident at Lowes Motor Speedway, but like all the others Wheeler had experienced through a lifetime in the racing industry, it left an indelible impact.

“You don’t ever get immune to anything like that,” said Wheeler, who was president of the track at the time. “If you’re a track promoter with any moral conscience at all, when anyone is killed at your track, it’s a horrific thing.

“So when [B.R.] got killed in exactly the same kind of wreck Dale had, it blew me apart.”

Particularly because Wheeler had already identified the need for change earlier that year.

“The front end of the cars had gotten too stiff and wouldn’t yield,” Wheeler explained. “The result was that when you hit the wall, the force of the impact against the wall was about 80Gs, and you need to disperse about 40Gs of that impact before it gets to the cockpit or the driver is probably going to have a basilar skull fracture.”

A basilar skull fracture is a crack in the base of the skull that often results from a driver’s head whipping forward upon sudden impact. Head-and-neck restraints such as Jim Downing’s Head-and-Neck-Support device, or, HANs, keep a driver’s head in place during a crash.

In the wake of Earnhardt’s death, NASCAR encouraged the use of head and neck restraints, but did not make such devices mandatory.

Meanwhile, Wheeler had tried to come up with another way to solve the problem. He and a friend had devised the Humpy Bumper, an energy-absorbing bumper made of carbon fiber, that would help lessen the force that got to the driver. But he had little success convincing NASCAR to adopt the bumper.

Still, the rejection of the Humpy Bumper didn’t irk Wheeler as much as what he perceived as a lack of policy change.

“I just wanted the guys to be safe. We just could not continue to have race drivers killed,” Wheeler said.

So right after B.R.’s accident, Wheeler called a press conference. He told everyone that NASCAR should mandate the use of head-and-neck safety devices. He also went right up to NASCAR President Mike Helton and told him the same thing.

To their credit, NASCAR reacted.

And on Oct. 17, 2001, the use of head-and-neck restraints became compulsory.

“Blaise’s death was a horrible thing for the Alexander family, and for us that ran the track,” Wheeler said. “It was the major catalyst to get the HANS device onto the drivers. And anything that’s done at NASCAR’s highest level has a great echoing effect across the board with other sanctioning bodies. So all of a sudden, people all over the country were mandating HANS devices.”

QUIET LEGACY



But the time of B.R.’s funeral at Our Lady of Lords Catholic Church back in the Alexanders’ hometown of Montoursville on Oct. 8, no new safety rules had been announced by NASCAR.

As Alexander stood by receiving well-wishers, a father-son racing team came up to him to express their condolences.

“I was looking at them thinking, ‘Isn’t it great that this man still has his son? I’d hate to see this man go through what I’m going through,’” Alexander said. “They were racers. Just like us. And I thought, ‘I don’t want this kid to die the way my kid did.’

“I wanted to see something done to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

The tipping point, however, came later, after NASCAR had put out the mandate on head and neck restraints, and the press began lauding the change as the legacy of Dale Earnhardt’s death.

In his grieving state, Alexander took offense to that, and expressed his feelings during a phone call with Wheeler.

“He may have called me to express condolences, and I said, ‘Humpy, they didn’t make head restraints mandatory when Dale died, had they done that, Blaise might still be alive,’” Alexander said.

Alexander remembers Wheeler asking if he was going to take legal action. He told the track owner that wasn’t his concern.

“I said, ‘I’m here to worry about the next kid that’s going to die because NASCAR isn’t doing the right things,” Alexander said.

He made Wheeler a deal – if the track president could ensure that SAFER barriers were adopted at all NASCAR tracks over the next two years, he would let the matter rest.

“I told him I’d do everything in my power to see that [an accident of similar nature] didn’t happen again,” Wheeler said.

In 2002, SAFER barriers were introduced for the first time at the Indianapolis 500, and were phased in every track on the NASCAR schedule over the next four years.

“I thank Mr. Alexander for pushing that at the time,” Wheeler said this week, over the phone from his home outside Charlotte. “Because I thought to myself, ‘How could somebody who just lost a son have been thinking of that, of the safety of others?

“But I know how committed he was to racing. And I totally understand why he said what he did. I’m certainly glad he did. He helped change the face of racing.”

Over time, the gravitas of Earnhardt’s death and the eventual change in NASCAR’s safety policies have continued to overshadow the legacy of the young racer known as Little B.

But those who know remember.

B.R. “gave his life, and the act of how he gave his life and how he did it revolutionized racing as a result,” Wheeler said. “But the press didn’t know that. They didn’t know the whole story, and I certainly didn’t go around tattling the fact that I’d had a hard conversation with NASCAR demanding they do something.”

Still, B.R.’s accident was “the final chop that knocked the tree down.”

So while Dale Earnhardt’s larger-than-life persona and storied career will eventually obscure the fact that he died on the track, Blaise Robert Alexander’s legacy was made in his death.

“Blaise will be remembered by his death because he was a very promising young driver on the way up,” Wheeler said. “I know one thing I’ll remember about him – his death caused major changes in racing.”