A dark pall hangs over Loudon

By Jim Huber, Turner Sports Interactive
July 24, 2001
9:42 AM EDT (1342 GMT)

COMMENTARY

Death casts an aura like none other. Dark and foreboding and chilly, even when the sun is fierce and the temperatures nearing one hundred. You could see it here this past weekend, smell it, almost taste its acid edge.

Jim Huber

Surely Kyle Petty rode that mountain range of emotions here as he met with the workers who tried to resuscitate his son a year ago, as he walked to Turn 3 for the first time in these last 14 months, as he fought back the tears.

Unsuccessfully.

Surely Kenny Irwin's family was watching on television and saw it. They never miss a race, even now.

An aura racing would dearly love to erase from the spectrum. But one which will always linger, as long as men race machines door to door at breakneck speeds.

No one can explain this one. They had gone a decade here at New Hampshire International Speedway without a serious incident and might go the next one, hopefully.

But within the space of 60 days, throttles stuck in two different race cars in the same corner of this track. And two racing men died.

Kyle Petty

And so the aura of death, like a giant black wreath, enveloped this place and held it this past weekend. Enormous crowds felt it. Son-less fathers and mothers felt it. As though something wicked had visited here for a couple months and left its stench behind.

One very bright and positive thing came out of it all. If there was ever a question of NASCAR fixing races, it had to have been answered unequivocally. If they fixed Daytona to make the Earnhardt family legend complete, surely they would've fixed Loudon to make the Pettys, too.

Where did Kyle finish in his late son's No. 45?

Fix the dark aura instead.