Motorsport · 2001 · Daytona Beach, USA
The Day NASCAR Lost 'The Intimidator'
Running third and blocking for his own drivers on the final lap of the Daytona 500, seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt is killed in a crash that changes NASCAR safety forever.
Final lap (200)
Lap of crash
7 (career)
Cup Series championships
HANS device, Car of Tomorrow
NASCAR safety reforms that followed
Dale Earnhardt, a seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion nicknamed 'The Intimidator', was running third on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, shielding a path for his own team's cars, driven by Michael Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt Jr., who were running first and second. Earnhardt's black No. 3 Chevrolet made contact with another car, was clipped again, and hit the outside wall almost head-on.
The crash did not, by the standards of NASCAR wrecks, look especially severe on television, and it took time for the scale of what had happened to become clear. Earnhardt was pronounced dead from a basilar skull fracture, the same type of injury that had killed several other drivers across motorsport in preceding years.
His death, on the sport's biggest stage and in front of a huge television audience, forced sweeping safety changes across NASCAR: mandatory head-and-neck restraint devices, redesigned 'Car of Tomorrow' safety structures, and a wholesale rethinking of barrier technology at ovals across the country. Earnhardt remains one of the most significant and mourned figures in American motorsport history.
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