Earnhardt's Death a Watershed Moment

Ed Hinton reports at ESPN.com that Dale Earnhardt's death devastated NASCAR, but may also have saved it.

He resisted the very safety innovations that could have saved his life, and yet "transformed the sport and saved everybody else's life," says Dr. John Melvin, widely considered world motor racing's foremost authority on driver safety.

Research now is focused mainly on refining all the life-saving innovations introduced since Earnhardt's death: protective seats, seat placement, better belt systems, HANS Devices, energy-dissipating "soft walls," crushable materials in the cars, and evolution of the roll cages and the cars themselves …

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