>>>Maybe a fluke wasn't the right word... an oddity maybe?
>>
>>
>>I'm sure Dale Earnhardt found it mighty odd. One moment you're driving around the track and alive and then the next, whoops, you're not. At least death was instantaneous rather than painful.
>
>The oddity was that he wasn't going that fast when he hit the wall, and there wasn't much damage to the car. Didn't look like anything really happened. But he was dead.


NASCAR cars are built to withstand significant impacts, for obvious reasons, but the fact is he hit that wall at 180 mph. The type of injury I would be most concerned about in a head-on impact at that speed is exactly the one he sustained, whiplash.