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STATEMENT FROM TERESA EARNHARDT ABOUT PHOTO'S
The minister who prayed with Dale Earnhardt right before the Daytona 500 spoke about the driver's last words to him.
The Rev. Max Helton stood at the side of Earnhardt's car and led a prayer, as he had done on most race day Sundays for the past 13 years.
"We held hands through his window," said Helton, a Presbyterian minister and founder of Motor Racing Outreach.
"He says, 'Just pray that I'll be wise in putting the car at the right place at the right time ... and be able to drive with wisdom.' And we did pray about that. And we did pray for safety."
When Earnhardt finished, he squeezed Helton's hand, as he always did. But this time, something was different.
"I noticed it at that particular time, that he seemed to squeeze my hand a little longer than he normally does," Helton said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
After the race, Helton was in a prayer circle with the same people. Only this time it was at a hospital, and his old friend was dead.
"No one expected, I think, Dale Earnhardt to die in a race car," he said. "Maybe in a plane crash, maybe in some other way; but not in a race car. Because he was so good and he's been through so many crashes and walked away from them that seemed a lot worse than the one he was in and which took his life."
Helton, whose ministry has traveled the NASCAR circuit since 1988, said he didn't think much about Earnhardt's gesture at the time, because The Intimidator was always surprising him. He remembers one instance when he greeted Earnhardt in the victory circle.
"Man, he grabbed me by the neck and pulled my head in and said, 'Let's pray and thank God for this victory,'" Helton recalled. "He was just that way."
Helton was waiting in the victory circle Sunday and watching the race on a Jumbotron when the accident occurred. But he didn't think it looked "that horribly bad" and went to congratulate winner Michael Waltrip.
Helton was walking casually through the garage when someone told him it was serious. He was ushered into a waiting police car and rushed to nearby Halifax Medical Center.
"They were still working on him at the time, and I was there with them when the doctors told them, 'Listen, we've done everything we can do,'" Helton said. "I was right there by his side at the table in the trauma room."
Helton led Teresa Earnhardt, Dale Jr. and Richard Childress in a prayer beside the trauma table.
"We were praying that God would give sustaining grace and that God would give his strength and wisdom," he said. "We were really hurting, and we talked about in our prayer, even confessed the fact that, yes, we're really hurt and we're deeply saddened by this, and we're asking for God's saving grace through this."
Helton said some might think it odd that Earnhardt's final prayer for safety would be answered with a fatal wreck. But he doesn't see it that way.
"If you look at that, I mean, God really watched over him and cared for him, because he took him on," he said. "You know, that's the ultimate safety. He'll never hurt again."
