Most NASCAR drivers of today have never met Ed Hinton and probably have never even heard of him.
But they should know who he is.
They really should.
You see, Hinton was a legendary auto racing writer who is one of the main reasons that not a single NASCAR driver has died behind the wheel of a race car in nearly a quarter-century.
It seems only fitting that Eddie, at 76, died just a few days ago on the week before the Daytona 500.
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A generation ago, on another week leading up to the Daytona 500, it was Eddie who shined a bright light on NASCAR’s dark history of safety conditions for its drivers.
His many glowing obituaries talked about what a phenomenal writer, amazing storyteller and accomplished author he was — and he was, in fact, all of those things. But most of the obituaries never mentioned what I believe to be Eddie’s most lasting legacy: His dogged pursuit of the truth and how it kept NASCAR from continuing to put driver safety on a collision course with death and disaster.
If you ask me, there are two major reasons why today’s NASCAR is as safe as any sport can be when you have drivers strapped into rocket ships disguised as stock cars and pushing the limits of speed and sanity while traveling at 200 mph.
The No. 1 reason is Ed Hinton’s journalism.
The No. 2 reason is Dale Earnhardt’s death.
And the two are sadly, fatefully and inexorably tied together like the gasp before impact and the silence that follows.
Let me explain.
Eddie was our Orlando Sentinel colleague in 2001 and passionately believed NASCAR had turned a blind eye to driver safety, shirking its most fundamental responsibility. I have never been more proud of a newspaper I worked for than when The Sentinel, with Hinton leading the way, conducted a six-month investigation into NASCAR and how it had been lapped by other racing organizations such as Formula 1 and CART in preventing driver deaths.
Hinton didn’t just report on racing — he held its most powerful figures accountable while exposing NASCAR’s alarming indifference to driver safety. In the week leading up to the 2001 Daytona 500, the Sentinel published the culmination of that six-month investigation into NASCAR’s glaring safety failures. The series — “NASCAR Idles While Drivers Die” — exposed how the sport’s reluctance to evolve had cost lives.
The headlines on Hinton’s series of stories were hauntingly telling:
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“Unsafe At Great Speed: Safety Experts Claim NASCAR Deaths Were Avoidable”
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“Safety Slow to Arrive Despite Race Carnage; NASCAR Trails Pack in Taking Action”
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“Hard Facts Fail to Get Soft Walls Installed”
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“Violent Head Motions Often Kill In Crashes; But Basal Skull Fractures and Whiplash Injuries to Race Drivers Remain Widely Misunderstood”
Hinton graphically detailed Adam Petty’s death in one of the articles:
“When Adam Petty’s race car slammed at 150 mph into a concrete wall last May, his body was tightly secured by a safety harness and seatbelt. What instantaneously doomed the 19-year-old grandson of Richard Petty was that his head was inadequately restrained.
“As the car came to its horrifically sudden stop, laws of physics kept Adam’s head hurtling toward impact. The only tethers holding his head to his body were his neck muscles and spinal column, which came under enormous stress. His head hyperextended so violently that he suffered what trauma specialists call a basal skull fracture. That is actually a set of injuries in which the fragile bottom of the rear of the skull cracks from stress, often cutting arteries and causing rapid blood loss, and destroying nerve cells that control life functions such as breathing and heart rate.”
NASCAR officials pushed back hard, dismissing Hinton’s investigative work. But the facts were irrefutable. The reporting laid bare how the deaths of three NASCAR drivers — Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and Tony Roper — within nine months could have been prevented. The culprit? Basal skull fractures, caused by the violent whiplash of high-speed crashes. The solution? Softer walls at race tracks and a simple head-and-neck restraint, the HANS Device, developed two decades earlier but never mandated by NASCAR.
Hinton’s reporting revealed that NASCAR wouldn’t divulge information about how much money it spent on safety research. NASCAR wouldn’t release results of its investigations — if, in fact, there were any — into why its drivers died on the track. While other racing leagues such as Formula One, CART and IRL analyzed each of their serious crashes with scientific data gathered from crash recorders mounted on all their cars, NASCAR recorded no crash data and did no computer modeling.
In the week leading up to the 2001 Daytona 500, Hinton was portrayed as a rabble-rouser and a muckraker by NASCAR and its fans.
Until the unthinkable happened.
Until Dale Earnhardt died on Turn 4 of the final lap of the Great American Race when his car hit the concrete wall head-on and then slid down the track. While it initially didn’t look like a violent crash compared to others in NASCAR, Eddie knew something was wrong.
He simply shook his head and kept muttering in his distinctive Mississippi drawl: “This ain’t good. … This ain’t good. … This ain’t good.”
It would be a couple of hours before NASCAR made the official announcement that the legendary Earnhardt had died, but Hinton already knew because he had spent decades writing about racing — and death
He knew when he saw NASCAR track officials immediately working to obscure the view of Earnhardt’s wrecked car by draping a tarp over it.
He knew when he saw the ashen look on fellow racer Kenny Schrader’s face. Schrader also was involved in that final-lap crash and his car came to rest on the infield grass next to Earnhardt’s. Schrader got out of his car to go commiserate with Earnhardt and expected to see “The Intimidator” fuming mad. Instead, he looked in the window and saw a dead man covered in blood slumped over the steering wheel. He gestured frantically for the safety crews.
Initially, NASCAR announced it had found a frayed seat belt in Earnhardt’s wrecked car, perpetuating the myth that the seat belt was the cause of Earnhardt’s death. But Hinton and fellow Sentinel reporters Jim Leusner and Henry Pierson Curtis continued to dig.
A judge sealed photos of Earnhardt’s autopsy at the request of his widow, Teresa. The Sentinel went to court to obtain the photos, arguing that they were public records under Florida law. Former Sentinel editor Tim Franklin now says half-jokingly that he still gets journalistic “PTSD” from all the death threats he received at the time from NASCAR fans who actually believed the narrative that the greedy media intended to publish the graphic autopsy photos for profit.
Of course, that was never the intention. The Sentinel never intended to publish the pictures but wanted an independent medical expert to review them. A Duke University doctor eventually reviewed the photos after the Sentinel reached a settlement with Teresa Earnhardt. He found that Dale Earnhardt died from the same injury that had recently killed the three other NASCAR drivers in a nine-month period: basilar skull fracture resulting from the violent “whip” motion of a driver’s unrestrained head.
NASCAR could no longer ignore the truth and dismiss Hinton as a troublemaker. Not when the sport’s most iconic driver had just died of the very injury Hinton had been warning about.
The spate of NASCAR deaths before Earnhardt’s fatal crash — and the fact that NASCAR had shown no interest in adopting safety equipment that could have prevented them — had been the focus of Hinton’s investigative series of stories.
The Sentinel’s reporting ultimately led to NASCAR ordering its drivers to wear head-and-neck restraints, installing crash-data recorders on cars and committing itself to research on other ways to protect drivers. The Sentinel’s investigation was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and I believe would have won it if 9/11 hadn’t happened later that year and rightfully reshaped the Pulitzer selection process.
“Nobody could have written that series of investigative stories with the texture and expertise of Ed Hinton,” says Franklin, now the senior associate dean of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. “He was a singular talent and a great writer who had a vast institutional knowledge of the sport. And Ed was fearless. He never relented. Despite all the flak he took, and it was considerable, Ed knew he had to get to the truth.
“And that is the core mission of journalism — to get to the truth and report the facts and provide a public service that improves government and other institutions like NASCAR. I believe Ed Hinton is largely responsible for how much safer NASCAR is today.”
Even today, I can still hear Eddie, after Earnhardt crashed, shaking his head and saying, “This ain’t good. … This ain’t good.”
Thanks to you, Eddie, something good actually came out of something very tragic.
A NASCAR driver has not died since the day Earnhardt perished 24 years ago.
In the aftermath of the checkered flag waving on Ed Hinton’s life the other day, let us remember that his pen was as powerful as any engine and his reporting as unrelenting as NASCAR’s refusal to change — until he forced it to.
Because of Eddie, the sport he loved no longer buries its heroes.
NASCAR ignored him.
Earnhardt’s death confirmed him.
And every living driver who crosses the finish line at Sunday’s Daytona 500 is proof of Eddie’s truth.
Ed Hinton is gone, but his words will forever race on.
Email me at [email protected]. Hit me up on X (formerly Twitter) @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen
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