They say there are certain days, certain events that remain etched into your brain so completely that you remember every detail.
Years go by, decades pass and it could have been yesterday.
I don’t know who “they” are. But they’re right.
Twenty-five years ago, May 12 was one of those days. It was a Friday. I wasn’t at the track that day. I was at my desk in my little home on the cubicle farm — the one that everyone knew was mine because of all the tiny racecars going at it all around the top edge. It was a quiet day, so when my dad called my extension, it rang through and I picked up.
I was surprised to hear from him. Usually email sufficed for anything personal from family or friends, so when I picked up to hear Dad’s voice, I immediately thought the worst.
It wasn’t the kind of news I’d dreaded, but it was far from happy.
“Adam Petty was killed in a crash in practice.”
I hoped it was a crazy rumor. I hadn’t seen anything about it online, but I hadn’t been looking either. In the days before smartphones took over the world, information didn’t spread quite so fast as it does now. I’m not talking pony express, but you didn’t get 47 texts the moment something happened either. We weren’t banned from using our office computers to check the internet periodically, but most of us didn’t spend much time surfing, even on a slow day. Nobody wanted to be the person who did get us banned.
I did go online in search of more information, but instead of a silly rumor, it was true. The racing community was as stunned as I was.
We knew the sport was dangerous in those days. Not that fans don’t know now, but it’s in a more theoretical sense. Then, it wasn’t decades between fatalities; it was years. In the spring of 2000, it had been just over three years since the last fatality in a national series. John Nemechek died in March 1997 after suffering severe head injuries in a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. If his name sounds familiar, it’s because John’s brother, Joe, named his own son, NASCAR Cup Series regular John Hunter Nemechek, after him.
Petty’s death was another blow. At the time, just weeks after his Cup debut, he was the first fourth-generation athlete at the top level in any national sport. His father, Kyle Petty, son of Richard, son of Lee, had commented on NASCAR’s 50th anniversary in 1998 that when the sport reached 75 years, there was likely to be a Petty in every one of them.
That wasn’t to be.
Two months shy of his 20th birthday, Adam Petty was making a practice run in his family-owned NASCAR Busch Series (now the NASCAR Xfinity Series) car at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. The Busch race was a standalone event back then, and truth be told, it was more fun that way, but that’s another story. There was nothing unusual about Petty’s run or the setup in his multi-colored Sprint-sponsored Chevrolet.
Petty had struggled a bit in Xfinity Series competition in 2000, his second year of full-time racing in that series. He was making gains over his rookie year, though, and at just 19, growing pains weren’t cause for alarm.
New Hampshire isn’t really a high-speed track in the sense that the larger intermediate tracks were and are. Pole speed for the Xfinity race in 2000 was just a tick over 130 mph. But the track’s configuration is tricky. A flat one-mile oval, Loudon’s tight corners demand drivers to rate their speed sharply at the ends of the long straightaways that invite full-throttle speed.
And on that chilly May day, Petty throttled up for the backstretch only to have his throttle hang open, hurtling him into turn 3 at close to full speed. Petty’s car hit the wall entering the corner. He wasn’t wearing a head-and-neck restraint. They weren’t required at the time, and if anyone wore them, it wasn’t something they talked about.
And the turn 3 wall was concrete.
A year later, Ricky Craven made the bold prediction that someday concrete walls would only exist in drivers’ memories, and thankfully, that has proven true. But in 2000, SAFER barriers weren’t a thing. Anyone watching a car hit a SAFER barrier at high speed has seen how far the wall flexes, and in doing so, takes the energy of impact away from the driver.
Concrete doesn’t flex, and with no head-and-neck restraint, when a driver hit the wall, the car stopped instantly. The driver’s body, restrained by a five-point harness, stopped a split second later. But his head didn’t stop until it was stopped by the driver’s spine.
We didn’t know it that day in May, but “basilar skull fracture” was about to become a sadly common part of NASCAR vocabulary. When the head is topped by the spine, the base of the skull separates from the vertebrae, just below the part of the brain that controls basic bodily function, including breathing. Without more graphic detail, in several cases, death is instantaneous.
As it was with Adam Petty.
The race went on the next day. A few years away from working in the sport, I was in the stands with friends that Saturday. Even the fans were subdued, and truth be told, I doubt the drivers really wanted to be there.
As if even the very ground the track sat on grieved, a day that had been forecast to be sunny and warm for New Hampshire in May was overcast, damp and so cold that fans who didn’t bring blankets bought them.
The party atmosphere that goes along with a race was absent. Fans cheered for their drivers out of habit, out of need for some shred of normalcy, out of respect for Adam’s memory. When it was over, they trailed out, still in shock.
NASCAR fans, maybe moreso then, but ever still, are a community. They root for different drivers and manufacturers and defend their favorites passionately. But that day, and on other days afterward, they grieved together for a life cut far too short and a family without a son, a brother, a grandson.
We all felt the loss on that cold, grey May day.
Still fairly new to racing then, if those two days left me with any last bit of racing innocence, it would be dashed two months later. I was there that day, but mercifully spared because I went to get a drink at the beginning of Cup Series practice for the July race at Loudon. I heard the engines turn off and got back to my seat and my same friends who I’d sat with for the race the day after Adam’s accident just in time to see the blue tarp.
Again.
Same corner, same throttle malfunction, same result. Kenny Irwin Jr., himself an up-and-coming youngster, died of a basilar skull fracture following a practice crash.
That same weekend, a rainbow appeared out of a bright blue sky just over turn 3.
NASCAR did what it could in the moment — cars were outfitted with engine kill switches that year. Loudon’s fall Cup race was run with restrictor plates on the cars as a last-ditch precaution, born out of the need to do something, anything at all to maybe keep it from happening again.
NASCAR lost three more drivers in 2000 and 2001, Tony Roper and Dale Earnhardt, as well as Busch Series driver Blaise Alexander, who lost his life in an ARCA Menards Series race (which wasn’t part of NASCAR at the time) in late 2001.
Thankfully, because of an entire industry that hasn’t stopped trying to make sure we didn’t lose more drivers, we haven’t seen a fatality in a NASCAR national division since Earnhardt’s death 24 long years ago. Twenty-four long years that seem like both a lifetime and only yesterday.
There is a generation of fans who don’t remember “the day,” be it Adam or Kenny or Tony or Dale. But for those who do, whether drivers or crewmen or media or fans, the day we lost Adam Petty changed us all a little, stole a piece of innocence we didn’t even know we still had.
We don’t take safety in racing for granted. We remember, we know what the cost can really be, far beyond dollars.
Adam Petty would’ve turned 45 this year, an age equal to his car number, an age where he’d be contemplating retirement if he hadn’t hung up his helmet already. The years keep rolling on by. Petty leaves an enduring legacy in the camp founded in his name, Victory Junction, which hosts children with illnesses that would keep them from being able to attend a traditional camp. Every driver who has walked away from a crash after 2001 did so in part because of him and the others who left us in those two terrible seasons.
And even all these years later, May 12, 2000, is frozen in time. To his family, his competitors, to legions of fans and to me, Adam Petty will be forever 19 years old, with the sky still his only limit.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.