2000 thatlook.com 300 at New Hampshire

Kenny Irwin Jr. was 30 years old and driving the No. 42 Chevrolet for Team SABCO when his throttle stuck during the opening practice session for the thatlook.com 300. The car hit the wall and Irwin died of a basilar skull fracture, an injury the Wikipedia account says likely killed him instantly. What made the crash land so hard on the garage was the echo. On May 12 of the same year, Adam Petty, 19, had died in practice for a Busch Series race at the same track, his throttle stuck wide open going into the third turn, the car striking the outside wall nearly head on. The Irwin biography on Wikipedia puts his accident at nearly the same spot. Two drivers, the same track, the same failure, eight weeks apart. Irwin's car was withdrawn from the entry list, which in the official record carries a plain footnote: withdrew due to a practice crash, killing Irwin. The race went ahead on Sunday. Criticism of NASCAR gathered around the absence of ignition kill switches, a device that lets a driver cut the engine when the throttle hangs open, and around the sport's approach to safety more broadly. That argument would run through the rest of 2000 and beyond. For a reader coming to this cold: a stuck throttle on a flat, tight oval like Loudon means the car keeps accelerating toward the corner with the brakes fighting a wide-open engine, and the driver has almost no time to do anything about it.

Rusty Wallace took the pole with a lap of 28.835 seconds, 132.089 mph around the 1.058-mile oval, ahead of John Andretti, Mark Martin, Jeff Burton and Ricky Craven. The top five qualifiers were covered by about fifteen hundredths of a second. Dave Marcis was the only driver who failed to make the field. On Sunday the race belonged to Tony Stewart in the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing car. He led 156 of the 273 laps that were run, with Ricky Craven leading 63 and Geoff Bodine 20 among the others who spent time at the front. Rain arrived before the scheduled distance and NASCAR called the race at lap 273, 27 short of the 300 advertised, which trimmed the day to 288.834 miles instead of 317.4.

Joe Nemechek brought the Andy Petree Racing car home second and Martin was third for Roush. Jerry Nadeau and Jeff Gordon gave Hendrick Motorsports fourth and fifth. Dale Earnhardt was sixth. Average speed for the shortened race was 103.145 mph, which is what a flat one-mile oval produces even on a dry day; Loudon has never been a place for big numbers. Stewart, an Indiana native like Irwin, gave the winner's trophy to Irwin's parents. TNN carried the broadcast with Eli Gold, Buddy Baker and Dick Berggren in the booth.

The trophy went to Irwin's parents. The rain took the last 27 laps.

The Racin.net page that Wikipedia still links to for this race was a speed sheet from the first practice session, the same Friday session in which Irwin crashed. A practice sheet lists drivers and their best laps; it carries no story. That is worth saying plainly, because a timing sheet from that particular morning is an unusual thing to have survived, and readers arrive here expecting more than columns of numbers. What the rebuilt page can and cannot offer:

• The old practice speeds are not reproduced. This page cites no lap time that was not taken from the Wikipedia race article.
• Wallace's 28.835-second pole and the top-five qualifying order come from the race article, not from the original sheet.
• The finishing order and laps-led figures come from the same article.
• No text from the original Racin.net was reused.

The 2000 Winston Cup season ran 34 points races. This was the 18th, eight days after the Pepsi 400 at Daytona and a stop on the summer stretch that would take the series to Watkins Glen, Michigan and Bristol in August. The sport carried the argument about what had happened in July with it for the rest of the year.

Read the finishing order with the weekend in mind. Stewart's 156 laps led say the No. 20 was the class of the field, and the names behind him, Nemechek, Martin, Nadeau, Gordon, Earnhardt, read like an ordinary July at New Hampshire. The official record does not read like an ordinary weekend, and the footnote on the entry list is the reason. If you are researching NASCAR safety, the 2000 thatlook.com 300 is a place to start, together with the May Busch Series weekend where Petty died. If you are researching Tony Stewart, note it as a win taken on a day when he handed the trophy to someone else's family. Both readings are correct, and the archive keeps the race for both.