I can hardly say that I knew Kenny Irwin, other than holding a few conversations with him when he was running midgets at Phoenix s Copper Classic several years ago. I recall a pleasant, thorough-going professional, prototypical in many ways of the young men who now populate American oval track competition. They seem to possess a brand of quiet courage and relaxed intensity unique to their particular element of the sport. This is hardly to denigrate amateur sportsmen or the well-born who choose to race, but I find that men who race as a pure profession, as their sole source of income, face its challenges and hazards with a brand of stoicism not found among the others.
Winners get paid, losers go hungry.
This is the simple code by which the American professional race driver lives, at least during his formative years. Such a man was Kenny Irwin, who through his long apprenticeship in midgets, sprint cars, Silver Crown and Craftsman Trucks, understood fully the risks he was facing, even at the wheel of a Winston Cup stock car, which we accept as one of the safest racing machines on earth. Speculation centers on a stuck throttle that caused Irwin to hit Loudon s third turn wall in roughly the same spot that took poor Adam Petty s life eight weeks earlier. After all, the USAC midgets and sprint and Silver Crown cars that served as the first tools of his trade are equipped with a throttle loop that permits the driver to pull back on the pedal and free up the linkage in the event of a sticking situation. This requires considerable deftness on the part of the driver to run quickly.