The 2001 Daytona 500 crash is still regarded as one of the darkest days in the history of NASCAR, as it marked the fall of probably the brightest star that the sport has ever seen. Barely a half-mile run was left in the 500-mile race, but alas, the legendary Dale Earnhardt breathed his last before he was able to see his longtime friend Michael Waltrip win for the first time in the number 15 car for Dale Earnhardt Inc.
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That day is enough to send chills down the spines of every NASCAR enthusiast to this day. But for Tony Stewart, the horror was tenfold. And why wouldn’t it be? Owing to his injuries from another crash in the same race, Stewart was also brought into the Halifax Medical Center, and that too, in the same room as the intimidator. Hence, he was one of the few who had witnessed a battered Earnhardt battling it out with death.
With pure terror on his face, Smoke recalled, “I had already been there. They had done all the scans on me… they went on, put me back in a room and they had already put Dale in the same room. I was only there a second but I knew when I saw Dale, it wasn’t good. I thought I had a bad day. I realized my bad day wasn’t a bad day at all.”
Looks can be deceiving: a major takeaway for the fans
Just half an hour earlier, Stewart had also crashed, and that crash looked way more horrible than Earnhardt’s. With 25 laps to go, the SHR owner’s #20 orange Pontiac got rammed into the wall and was tossed to the air due to a ripple effect caused by surrounding cars nudging each other.
Although Stewart still doesn’t remember who exactly had started the chain reaction, he said, “We were three-wide coming off turn 2. I was the car on the very bottom, I think Robbie Gordon was next to me and Ward Burton was outside of him or vice versa but whoever the outside guy was hit the wall. They came off, hit the guy next to him, that guy hit me and turned me to the right and the wall.”
“Bobby Labonte is staring at me through the window going, are you alright? I’m like, yeah, I’m fine. He goes, if we gotta cut the top off, we can cut the top off and I’m like, I don’t wanna do that, I don’t wanna hurt the car. He goes, I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Stewart added.
Stewart was running third, and Labonte was running 23rd. One could only imagine how hard Stewart had crashed for his car to go airborne and land on Labonte’s machine. However, despite not being even half as dramatic as Stewart’s, the result of the mishap revolving around Earnhardt was far more brutal.
