RACER@25: Issue No. 108, April 2001 - Losing Dale Earnhardt

This is the 12th installment in RACER's ongoing 25th anniversary celebration during which we share the 25 most important issues from our first quarter century.

Racing's thrills come with a price – the fact that the sport we love can take our lives or those whose talents and personalities we have come to respect, cherish, even adore. Being forced to confront this fact has happily become a rarity in the modern era. But that just makes the shock more profound when it does happen.

RACER was in the closing stages of production on our 108th issue, three weeks into the magazine's new era under new majority owners Haymarket Media, when Dale Earnhardt – icon of a whole era of NASCAR stock car racing and a seemingly larger-than-life figure – was lost in a three-car crash on the final lap of the Daytona 500. As had been the case seven years earlier following the death of Ayrton Senna, the staff – now with Haymarket's editor Andy Hallbery and designer Allan Muir working alongside editor John Zimmermann – set to work to recast the issue into an appropriately informative and respectful tribute to a lost hero. The result of these efforts was a complete sellout of the issue on newsstands.

Another aspect to the tragedy was provided in our spotlight on Earnhardt's debut with Corvette Racing in the Rolex 24 at Daytona that preceded that grim Daytona 500. As we later learned, sports car endurance racing was an avenue the veteran had planned to explore further along with his son as his NASCAR career wound down. Hindsight made it a poignant tale of what might have been.

Welcome counterpoint to the grief and loss was provided by Maurice Hamilton's look at a brash new talent on everyone's lips in Formula 1. Jenson Button had made everyone take notice with his precocious rise to F1 at the age of 20 with Williams in 2000, where he put in a series of starring performances...and then surprised everyone even more by leaving the team for Benetton in 2001. Hamilton provided American audiences with insight into the mindset of the man who would grow into one of F1's most enduring and popular characters in the years ahead.

Speaking of popular, Alex Zanardi had become one of American racing's most celebrated talents through his epic performances and engaging personality while driving for Chip Ganassi Racing's CART IndyCar team in the 1990s. The Italian's fan following was all the more remarkable for the fact that he had displaced home-grown favorite Jimmy Vasser as the de facto team leader with his back-to-back CART titles. That surely was due to a significant degree to the friendly rivalry the two maintained during their stint as teammates, lasting friendship following Zanardi's subsequent move to F1 for 1999.

David Phillips explored the pair's relationship, remarkable in the modern world of pro racing, with his feature story for that issue, which came as Montoya was testing the waters for a return to CART following his frustrating season in F1. That return would ultimately have devastating consequences for Zanardi with the crash at the Lausitzring in 2001 that claimed both his legs but, unbelievably, the force of Zanardi's will to overcome and to see the positive side of whatever life throws at him, would open the door to another inspiring chapter of his life that would continue to play a recurrent role in RACER.

In addition to the farewell it provided to an American icon, issue No. 108 also was the last for the RACER format that had been maintained with minor changes for the first decade of the magazine. The May issue would bring a full relaunch under the direction of Haymarket Media in collaboration with the founding management group under Paul Pfanner, and would take RACER in a bold new direction.