Pg. 2 And he walked away!!!

If Michael Waltrip had nine lives, he surely used a number of them at Bristol in the Budweiser 250 in April. Traveling at an estimated 112 MPH, his Busch Grand National car collided head-on into the end of the concrete retaining wall that was exposed when the backstretch gate deflected under the weight of his sliding car. The impact was so severt that the right side reinforcing bars of the rollcage embedded themselces into the concrete, the right front tire and wheel wee catapulted through the driver's compartment, followed closely by the engine, and the car disintegrated. As the smoke cleared, all that remained of the car were the driver's side door beem and the aluminim driver's seat welded to them, with a dazed Waltrip still strapped inside. NASCAR officials impounded the car from car owner Ronnie Sliver for more than two hours after the crash, annalying it from top to bottom. The officials declared the car to have been built completely according to the rules and remarked that it had done the job it was intended to do. Had anything changed as little as an inch, Waltrip may not have walked away unscathed from NASCAR's most severe crash in recent history.