What happened on Feb. 18, 2001 when Dale Earnhardt crashed on the last lap of the Daytona 500?

I wrote the book about F1’s safety revolution. In the aftermath of Romain Grosjean’s ability, thankfully, to get out of a car torn in half and engulfed by flames in Bahrain, here are ten additional insights from the long view of history.

Some ten years ago, on a Sunday prior to the start of the Daytona 500, I sat in the eating area of the Daytona track’s media center, ho-humming. Free food is always a major calling card and the place was jammed. Quite unexpectantly, I heard Junior Johnson’s booming voice over my shoulder. “Ah’m sitting he-ah!” he declared, grabbing a chair from another table and pulling it up next to me at a blank spot left open at the table where I was sitting.

Why would a guy write an entire book on a single safety device? At first blush, that sounds like a rather narrow, technical subject.

Offered in good faith, I’ve had friends and publishers tell me this on more than one occasion. I often wonder about such observations.

BRASELTON, Ga.—Here’s an SCCA racing quiz for you. When did Formula Ford, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, reach its peak in America?

One could argue that 2019 has been the best year ever for the category that launched a thousand professional careers for drivers, car designers/constructors and engine builders. There’s been celebrations around the country, notably at Road America and Lime Rock Park, plus the Formula Ford Festival in England. This past weekend, I went to one such celebration, which was part of the American Road Race of Champions (ARRC) at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta.

We may have seen the last of Jimmie Johnson in Victory Lane for at least the remainder of the 2019 season.

Currently riding an 87-race losing streak, Johnson and his Hendrick Motorsports team face an uphill battle to beat the teams vying for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup title. Although Johnson has often been successful at upcoming tracks like Dover and Martinsville, and showed well on the new roval in Charlotte, I don’t expect him to beat the playoff teams.

Johnson and two different crew chiefs spent the season trying to win a race to get into the playoffs, which the California driver, who turned 44 last week, failed to make for the first time in his career. It’s likely the same challenges with Chevy’s Camaro faced all season long have yet to be overcome. Playoff teams, meanwhile, have momentum and cars they’ve been working on ever since they were confirmed for the postseason.

TALLADEGA, Ala. – Maybe this NASCAR thing is going to work out OK after all. A victory by Chase Elliott at the Talladega Superspeedway in front of a big crowd capped a race under new rules that produced bellowing engines, more horsepower, greater speed and closing rates, not to mention more passing. The Geico 500 was, using some old-fashioned terminology, an excellent motor race, even if a last-lap caution meant Elliott didn’t race to the finish.

On the 50th anniversary year of Talladega’s opening, there couldn’t have been a better result than a nearby Georgia native and the son of “Awesome Bill of Dawsonville” getting his first win at the track where his father earned his nickname and set the all-time NASCAR qualifying record at 212.809 mph. This time, the cynics couldn’t crank the crank by suggesting Chase had received a special restrictor plate, because tapered spacers now rule.

The safety revolution that motor racing has experienced in the last two decades would not have been possible without Bob Hubbard, who died Tuesday at age 75.

The inventor of the HANS Device, motor racing’s first head restraint, Hubbard created what became the needed linchpin. For want of a head restraint, the revolution might have otherwise been lost.

Fortunately for fans and all who make a living in auto racing, the sport has been bolstered, if not saved, by improvements to cars, cockpits, and the arrival of improved containment systems such as the SAFER barrier. Starting with Ayrton Senna’s death in 1994, the push for safety at the major league level began with the FIA, continued in CART and then arrived in NASCAR, which built its one-of-a-kind safety research center as a result of Dale Earnhardt’s death from a basal skull fracture in the 2001 Daytona 500.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Here we go again.

Hope springs eternal in the paddock at Daytona as the start of the Rolex 24 approaches and everybody thus far remains a winner until the green drops Saturday afternoon.

On Thursday, lightning bolts and thunder came through in the morning, a hyper-breeze assaulted the afternoon before the evening brought a high ceiling of pearly, pale blue and undulating flags. The kinder, gentler Florida weather graced the post-qualifying hubba-hubba of activity in the paddock in preparation for night practice. Meanwhile, Mazda Team Joest celebrated a record pole time thanks to Oliver Jarvis, the RT24-P prototype, and Michelin, which celebrated its new status as the tire supplier to the entire Rolex field.

Few racing car drivers arrive with as much star talent as John Paul Jr. and none from his own era met such a star-crossed career. It’s fitting that a novelist, Sylvia Wilkinson, has composed his biography.

Titled 50/50 – Race Car Driver John Paul Jr. and His Battle with Huntington’s Disease, the book comprises several genres at once. It’s a memoir in the sense that Paul Jr. provides his own perspective on his racing and family life through conversation with the author and in the context of his ongoing battle with his debilitating disease. Given the breadth of ground covered, it’s like an autobiography, except that the book also contains selected comments from many who crossed paths with Paul Jr., including team owners, drivers, crewmen, sponsors and journalists.

Longtime radio announcer Barney Hall gave David Pearson his “Silver Fox” nickname, which fit extraordinarily well beyond the graying hair that emerged during his salad days of the 1970s. Pearson was elusive as in hard to catch. He was wily as in difficult to pin down. And, he was fast as evidenced by his 18.3 winning percentage – 105 victories in 574 starts.

There are many who believe Pearson, who died at age 83 this week, was NASCAR’s best driver, which draws no argument here. His winning percentage, after all, is incredible for a driver who competed during the first two dangerous decades of superspeedway racing.

Everybody’s choosing sides after Martinsville.

I’m choosing Dale Earnhardt Sr. His name came up often enough after the last-lap imbroglio between Joey Logano and Martin Truex Jr. that it seemed like Earnhardt, too, was out there racing.

He often took the credit, or blame, in social media for Logano’s bump-and-run. “Earnhardt did it all the time,” went these comments, “and he was a big hero.”

It’s as if NASCAR finally realized it needed more of Earnhardt’s appeal and decided to create the current playoff format: win and advance. With a trip to Homestead’s finale in the balance, Logano chose the win-at-all-cost option of moving his opponent out of the way in Turn 3, then body-slamming him at the exit of Turn 4.

Oct. 1, 2016. FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. – The 2016 Petit Le Mans was the end of an era for the Daytona Prototypes, concluding a 14-year run as the lead pony in what is now called the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Next year, the new generation of DPi cars will feature 2017-spec LMP2 chassis, manufacturer-oriented bodywork and factory-backed engines.

By definition, any sports prototype class that runs for 14 years is a success. In this case, starting with the first Fabcar designed by Dave Klym, soon followed by cars from Multimatic and Crawford, among others, the Daytona Prototypes sustained the Grand-Am Series long enough to set the stage for unification with the American Le Mans Series and a new generation of IMSA. The DP category sustained not only a series and participants, but also car builders like Riley Technologies, Pratt & Miller and Dallara.

INDIANAPOLIS, May 29, 2016 – The 100th running of the Indy 500 lived up to pre-race expectations. Usually this cynical journalist would refer to hype when writing about the build-up to a big race. But how can you overstate a long-running family feud finally ending in such joyous circumstances?

Under powder blue skies and a wash of shadow-trimmed clouds that made the horizon look like an endless vista, the twenty-year hiatus of capacity crowds at Indy came to an end. Sure, there are plenty of hatchets lying around and the stewing resentment generated by the CART versus IRL wars may last some until the end of their days. But on this day people came to see a great motor race. The damn (pun intended) finally broke.

It takes some looking to find the statue of Dale Earnhardt at the Daytona International Speedway. Standing in front of the old administrative buildings, it’s well off the main pathways to the massive array of grandstands.

For a man who made his mark in the thundering cauldron of stock car racing, the memorial is deceptively quiet. The Earnhardt in bronze holds the massive Harley Earl trophy with one arm and the other has a fist raised high in the air, celebrating after a long-sought win in the Daytona 500 in 1998. The eyes smiling slyly above a wide grin and bristly mustache aren’t directed toward the sky or the horizon in a typical winner’s pose. An all-seeing gaze looks to where his fans would be, taking them in as much as they might be looking up at him, all reveling in the moment of triumph.