Not auto racing’s finest hour

Mike Hembree

Sunday, July 16, 2000 | 1:27 a.m.

They buried Kenny Irwin Jr. in his native Indianapolis Wednesday.

This weekend there will be no Winston Cup race. But it's purely a coincidence.

NASCAR marches on in the face of death. It slowed down only slightly after the loss of Adam Petty and again last week after Irwin's gruesome death in the same turn at New Hampshire International Speedway.

Death has become only a speed bump in a mad rush toward tomorrow.

The situation at New Hampshire last Friday cried out for someone - anyone - to step forward and give the day its proper perspective. That would have been one of mourning, of memory, of magnitude of loss.

Instead, a few minutes after the crumpled wreckage of Irwin's race car was removed from the grim site of the accident, a few minutes after Irwin's blood-soaked body was flown from the premises in a helicopter, cars returned to the track for practice. Qualifying was held as planned later in the day.

Irwin's boyish smile was missing. Heads hung low in the garage area. There was little energy.

Yet the show went on.

NASCAR has gotten so big and its list of responsibilities - to television, to sponsors, to ticket-buyers - has grown so long that it can't take time to make the proper response to the sudden death of one of its competitors. There is no substantial reason why all activities at the track Friday could not have been postponed. In fact, there is every reason that they should have been.

Qualifying could have waited until Saturday. No one was in the mood to go fast, to compete, to "win" a pole. Anything that happened Friday after Irwin's wreck held only emptiness.

Lost in a few terrible seconds was the life of a young man whose promise had not been fulfilled. What followed was not one of auto racing's finest hours.

Like pages springing from an office copier, there appeared a parade of "official statements" about Irwin's death. From sponsors, from the speedway, from the team. All sounded as if they had been created by some computer program.

This moment cried out for someone to step forward, out of the web of officialspeak, and talk about Kenny Irwin, good guy.

They could have talked about how he handled a tough situation - swimming upstream and ultimately failing in a two-year run in the highly-visible No. 28 cars owned by Robert Yates - with steadiness. An open wheel specialist, Irwin was to be the next Jeff Gordon, but it didn't work out.

He handled the pressure - and the behind-his-back talk - with quiet composure.

Periodically, Texaco, then his sponsor, invited news media members to join Irwin for lunch in the company's at-the-track mobile headquarters. Always, there were the questions about poor performance, about not meeting expectations.

Irwin, pushing food around his plate, struggled for answers but tried to respond intelligently to every inquiry. These were not the favorite times of his life.

He is gone too soon.

Next time, and odds are there will be a next time, we should stop longer to remember.