Like a lost kite, the body flew through the air, helpless in its flight as if it were a 200-pound rag doll some giant child had flung in a tantrum. But this was a real person, 18 years old, being killed.
When the body hit the pit road it tumbled over and over down the pavement until it came to a complete stop.
Within seconds the paramedics surrounded the young man, working with a terrible urgency, but you knew there was no chance.
His name was Dennis Wade. He was a pit crewman, hit by his own driver, Dave Watson, who never raced in NASCAR again. I saw it happen at Atlanta in 1979.
I remember writing to the readers, “God willing, you will never have to see such a thing.”
Now somebody needs to see it — Kurt Busch.
If video of that terrible scene still exists, deep in NASCAR’s archives, it should be — no, must be — brought out and shown to Kurt Busch before he is allowed to climb into a Nextel Cup car again.
During last Monday’s race at Dover, Del., Busch, in an in-car tantrum — by far the gravest incident on his long rap sheet of temper — drove into the pits and intentionally scraped the parked car of Tony Stewart.
Crewman Jason Lee, Stewart’s jack man, was experienced enough, alert enough and athletic enough to leap onto the hood of Stewart’s car at the fateful split-second before he could have been seriously injured or killed.
In my mind’s own video file, another scene is indelible, another must-see for Busch before he races again.
Same track, Atlanta Motor Speedway, 1990.
Mike Rich was changing the right-rear tire on Bill Elliott’s car. Rich was totally vulnerable, scrunched down in the wheel well.
As Ricky Rudd came down the pit road his brakes locked and his car spun 180 degrees. Suddenly Rich and the whole right side of Elliott’s car disappeared as Rudd’s car slammed in, broadside to broadside.
Rich, 32, was caught and crushed in that wheel well.
That was the tragedy that brought speed limits to the pit roads of NASCAR.
After watching that second video, Busch needs to sit down for an hour each with two people. Rudd, of course, carries that awful burden to this day. But Rudd’s incident was an accident, and so not even he could tell Kurt Busch how it would have felt to go through life having hit a crewman because of a tantrum.
Jerry Punch, the trauma doctor turned TV reporter, was the first medical person to get to Rich and worked on him until the track people could get there. Punch then had to stand up and do a live report for ESPN, struggling to find something to say.
He knew Rich was dying, but he also knew Rich’s family was watching television in north Georgia.
NASCAR hasn’t announced the severity of Busch’s penalty, but the buzz is that he will be suspended for just Sunday’s race at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway.
That would be less than a wrist slap, considering the gravity of the incident.
More Top Picks Cargo Boxe
There is little doubt in my mind how Bill France Jr., the longtime czar of NASCAR who witnessed the Wade and Rich tragedies like I did, would have dealt with Busch. I think France would have parked him for the rest of this season.
But they buried France on Thursday, and his iron-fisted justice with him.
And he had deferred for years to lighter-handed executives who worry too much about what sponsors and the public might think.
It’s one thing to taunt tough old Jimmy Spencer until he punches you in the face, as Busch did at Michigan in 2003 (and it was Spencer who got the one-race suspension.) … or to get into such a confrontation with police that you’re handcuffed and hauled away, as Busch did at Phoenix in 2005.
But it’s something else entirely when he comes tearing into the pits bent on jamming and scraping alongside Stewart’s parked car, and displays the split-second judgment that any crewmen who happen to be standing in the way of grinding confrontation between two 3,400-pound cars can just fend for themselves.
Because of the deaths of Dennis Wade and Mike Rich, and myriad maiming of crewmen down through the decades, NASCAR was forced in 1990 to take an enormous amount of drama out of pit stops, for safety’s sake, with speed limits. Crewmen now wear helmets and firesuits, though they are not much defense against cars.
And now, to have come so close to further tragedy after those changes … and far worse, to come so close in a situation that was not accidental.
I don’t know how long a suspension or how much anger management therapy would be enough in this case.
This calls for punishment, not just penalty. And it would be punishing indeed, for a long time to come, for Kurt Busch to have to sit down and watch the tragedies Bill France Jr. and I saw live, and then be asked how he might feel right now if there were a new, third video.
———-