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Dale Earnhardt celebrates winning at Daytona. (File photo courtesy of NASCAR)

By Jonathan Ingram | Senior Writer
RacingToday.com

In a forum I checked into recently, I found this rather incredible question posted in an online Q & A with longtime TV commentator Bob Varsha. The site was SafeisFast.com and a participant asked, “What if Ayrton Senna had met Dale Earnhardt?”

As the author of “CRASH! From Senna to Earnhardt – How the HANS Helped Save Racing,” this question, perhaps inevitably, stuck with me. The only time these two titans actually met was on the opposite ends of motor racing’s safety revolution. The revolution began in F1 after Senna’s death from an errant suspension piece and culminated with Earnhardt’s death from a basal skull fracture at Daytona. Although it’s still a possibility, we no longer must regularly accept drivers dying behind the wheel in the major leagues as a result of this revolution, which came too late for Senna and Earnhardt, whose deaths, among others, marked the end of an era. 

Given the current circumstances of limited travel and no races, I’ve had more time to ponder this idea of the two drivers meeting. I also exchanged some e-mails with Varsha, a fellow Atlantan and a long-time colleague who was around Senna more often than I while covering F1. If Senna and Earnhardt epitomized motor racing and helped drive its popularity internationally and in the U.S., surely a meeting between the two would have been interesting.

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