Driver’s Death Is No Small Loss

The latest NASCAR driver to die of a basilar skull fracture was eulogized Friday with about 60 people present.

He was no Dale Earnhardt. Just an obscure rookie driver who died the same way as the NASCAR legend.

Michael Roberts was a 50-year-old single parent who left behind a heartbroken daughter, Taylor--two years younger than Earnhardt’s 12-year-old daughter, Taylor.

Roberts died March 24 at I-44 Speedway near Lebanon, Mo. He was driving 80 mph on the short track--100 mph slower than Earnhardt was when he hit a concrete wall on the last lap of the Daytona 500 on Feb. 18.

Roberts was the fifth NASCAR driver in 11 months to die of injuries caused by violent head movement and the fourth to die of basilar skull fracture. But he was different. He was one of the little guys, the weekend racers on America’s grass-roots tracks. Thousands of them, like Roberts, hold NASCAR-issued licenses and drive at NASCAR-member tracks.

His death is the latest to trigger questions about the safety of cars built to NASCAR specifications. NASCAR officials did not return repeated phone calls last week about Roberts’ death and the construction of NASCAR cars.

Another Crash

Upon arriving at Roberts’ crash scene, “My first thought was, ‘These goddamned NASCAR cars,’ ” said Michael Loescher, a nationally renowned driving instructor who was coaching Roberts that day and was among the first to get to the wreck. “They’re too rigid, and they don’t have enough crush zone in them.”

Drivers Loescher coached early in their careers include Jeff Gordon, now the biggest living NASCAR star, and Adam Petty--the first in the current string of basilar skull fracture fatalities. Petty died last May 12.

Loescher, 54, has been a driver and car builder since he was 16, and he was a dominant driver in NASCAR’s modified-car series in the northeastern United States during an outbreak of fatalities on that circuit in the mid-1980s. NASCAR rectified that situation with less-rigid front portions of the chassis.

Loescher has seen it all in racing, and what he saw when he rushed up to Roberts’ car on March 24 was “the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, sobbing.

The symptoms were classic for basilar skull fracture. “Blood pouring out of his nose, his mouth, his ears,” Loescher said. “Not just running out, pouring out--just like you were pouring it out of a five-gallon pail. . . .

“I can’t sleep,” Loescher continued. “I go home, I go to bed, I close my eyes, that’s all I see.” And he broke down again.

“Now I know,” he said, “what Kenny Schrader saw.”

Loescher referred to Earnhardt’s close friend and fellow Winston Cup driver who rushed up to Earnhardt’s black No. 3 Chevrolet moments after the Feb. 18 crash, looked inside, waved frantically for emergency workers, and minutes later was visibly overcome during a live television interview. Others who viewed Earnhardt’s body after the wreck described similar evidence of rapid, massive blood loss.

“If people--all those fans--saw what I saw,” said Loescher, “they would be on NASCAR, so hard, to change things.

“It doesn’t make any difference whether you’re Dale Earnhardt or Michael Roberts--they were both killed for the same reason,” Loescher continued. “And if they don’t change things, this isn’t going to stop.”

Possible Problem With Chassis

Roberts died in a car built to NASCAR technical specifications for the Re/Max Touring Series, NASCAR’s Midwestern name for a category of cars that run as the All-Pro Series in the Southeast and the Southwest Tour in California, Arizona and Nevada.

Such cars occasionally compete on major NASCAR tracks, such as Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and so are designed for speeds of more than 150 mph.

Roberts’ car was built with the best available parts and no expense spared, say three experts who were present when he died--Loescher, crew chief Ed Holmes and engineer Eldon Zacek Jr. of St. Louis, who is also a part-time race driver.

Rigidity of NASCAR-mandated chassis and roll cages, plus insufficient crushable materials in the front ends, have been cited by builders, engineers and owners--from top Winston Cup team owner Robert Yates, down through the short-track ranks--as possible factors in the recent spate of deaths.

John Melvin, a Detroit biomechanical engineer and an expert on how auto racing injuries occur, believes NASCAR should conduct additional crash-testing.

Though he has seen lots of data from crashes in other forms of racing, such as CART and Formula One, where cars routinely carry crash-recorder devices, NASCAR cars carry no such on-board computers.

And NASCAR has never shown Melvin one of its wrecked cars “other than in pictures,” he said.

Most of the recent fatal crashes “don’t look very severe,” Melvin said.

But stiff chassis could make a lesser crash more severe, he said. That is, if parts of the car don’t crush adequately to dissipate crash energy, then more of the energy is likely to reach the driver’s body. When the cars stop suddenly, the drivers’ bodies are restrained by safety harnesses. But their heads, when inadequately restrained, violently pitch forward and/or laterally.

Melvin’s research shows that the horrific G-force G-loading on the head and neck can cause basilar skull fracture, even if the head doesn’t hit anything. When the fracture occurs, nearby arteries in the back of the head are often cut. There is also trauma to the spinal cord and the area of the brain stem that controls breathing and heart rate.

Dr. Louis Bealer, coroner of Laclede County, Mo., ruled that Roberts died of basilar skull fracture. The Volusia County medical examiner’s office determined that Earnhardt died of the same injury. And New Hampshire state medical examiner Thomas Andrew also made the same ruling in the deaths of Petty last May, and another NASCAR driver, Kenny Irwin, last July 7 at New Hampshire International Speedway.

No autopsy was performed on Tony Roper, who suffered what doctors loosely termed a neck injury at Texas Motor Speedway near Fort Worth last Oct. 14, and died the next day.

Barry Myers, a medical doctor with a doctorate in biomedical engineering at Duke University, is preparing a report on Earnhardt’s injuries. Myers was appointed independent expert in a legal settlement between the Orlando Sentinel and Earnhardt’s widow, Teresa. The Sentinel, and other newspapers including The Times, had sought court permission to have an outside expert view Earnhardt’s autopsy photos to try to determine precisely how the driver’s basilar skull fracture occurred.

Dr. Steve Bohannon, Daytona International Speedway’s director of emergency medical services, had speculated that Earnhardt suffered a basilar skull fracture because his chin struck the steering wheel with great force. NASCAR later blamed Earnhardt’s death on a severed seat belt.

Roberts, like the other recent NASCAR crash victims, was not wearing a head-and-neck support system when he died. Roberts had been completing paperwork to order this device, known as a HANS.

However, crew chief Holmes said Roberts was wearing “the latest, best, full-face helmet” and other state-of-the-art clothing and equipment. Earnhardt was wearing an open-face helmet.

Roberts’ car was built to NASCAR’s specifications using the basic rolling chassis from Port City race car construction company in Michigan, Holmes said.

“It was a $60,000-plus race car,” Zacek said. “Michael had invested between $80,000 and $100,000 all told.”

Still a Rookie

Even at 50, Roberts was a rookie racer.

“He was a successful businessman,” Holmes said. “He’d had a desire to race for quite a while. He’d gotten successful enough that he could afford to do it himself. No expense was spared.”

“I think this was a typical case of, ‘I’ve worked my butt off for the past 20 years and now it’s time to enjoy it,’ ” said Zacek, who manufactures data acquisition systems for race cars, has degrees in both electrical and computer engineering and a background in mechanical engineering.

Roberts would have driven his first race, in NASCAR’s Re/Max Touring Series, today at Rockford Speedway in Illinois.

To prepare Roberts for the race, Holmes and Zacek accompanied him to I-44 Speedway in southern Missouri, where the weather promised to be better, for a day of test driving.

They also suggested he receive the best instruction available, and Roberts agreed to fly in Loescher from Daytona Beach, Fla., for one-on-one instruction.

“I was talking to him on the radio,” Loescher said. “We had made a couple of [practice] runs, and he was going faster and faster.

“I’m looking right at him, talking to him, saying, ‘Look way ahead, get your line.’ . . . And all of a sudden I see smoke pouring from the tires. At first I think he’s blown an engine.”

Instead, Roberts had apparently locked up his brakes. No one knows why. He was being taught “left-foot braking” and had to make sure his right foot was off the accelerator pedal during sudden stopping. This is an oval-racing technique and calls for a radical change in the reflexes of a middle-aged adult used to braking with the right foot in passenger cars.

Careful examination of the car by Zacek and Holmes indicated the throttle did not stick. They and Loescher have not been able to come up with a likely scenario--they simply don’t know what happened.

“Even if he made a rookie mistake, it wasn’t one he deserved to die for,” Zacek said. “Certainly not at 80 miles an hour. Going racing at these small tracks, drivers--including myself--figure, yes, we can get laid up in the hospital with broken bones and stuff like that. But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to at least live.”

Loescher, reliving the moment, described how Roberts’ car started to slide, then slammed into a concrete wall. The car hit, three witnesses said, on its right front, at almost precisely the same angle at which Earnhardt’s car hit the wall at Daytona.

“I see the car hit, and I’m on the radio to him,” Loescher said. “A split-second before, I was telling him what to do, and now I’m yelling on the radio, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’

“Silence. We’re there at the car in maybe 20 or 25 seconds--it’s 400 feet at most from where we were standing to where the car hit.

“We [Loescher and crewmen] ran up to the car and dropped the window net, and we were yelling for the ambulance to come, and I looked down into the car and it was . . .

“It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, there was blood pouring out . . . not running out . . . pouring.”

Doctors later said that Roberts bled to death in less than 10 seconds from a basilar skull fracture.

Earnhardt also died instantly.

Death by basilar skull fracture “does not differentiate,” Loescher said, “whether you’re a seven-time Winston Cup champion or you’re a short-track guy just starting out.”

Among the four children Earnhardt left was his youngest, Taylor.

On Friday, in a church in Fort Atkinson, Wis., Taylor Roberts sat silently as her father was remembered. She will now be cared for by her mother and her paternal grandmother.

A Lutheran minister, the Rev. Bryan Engfer, read a letter Taylor had written to her departed father:

“You are the best daddy in the world. . . . No one could ever replace you.”