PefCrash : Russell Philips Fatal Crash - 1995 Charlotte Motor Speedway

said I got clipped. I don't know if the 57 (the car driven by Phillips) didn't let off or what.

``I remember getting hit and I turned up on my left side and I fell back down. He must have hit me from the rear.''

Howard went into the wall with Phillips' car to the right of his and slightly behind him. As they reached the wall, Phillips' car got onto its right side and the top of the car came in contact with the retaining fence and the poles that secure it.

The roof and the roll bars were sheared off the car, and when it came back down onto the track on its wheels, there was a gaping hole where the top of the car was supposed to be.

The cars slid to a stop next to each other in the tri-oval grass near the head of pit road. A third car, driven by Louis Littlepage, then slammed into the stopped cars. But the damage already had been done.

``It looked like someone had taken a can opener to the roof,'' free-lance photographer Tom Whitmore of Chesapeake, who was shooting from inside the fourth turn, said of Phillips' car. ``It was like there was a cave where the roof was supposed to be, like someone had scooped it out. That's as gruesome a wreck as I can ever recall.''

The track was littered with a tremendous amount of debris. The driver's helmet was found at the entrance of pit road.

As rescue workers covered Phillips's body with a sheet and held up a huge yellow tarp to keep the scene out of view of the crowd, workers wearing surgical gloves began placing numerous white linen sheets at spots along the track and in front of the fourth-turn grandstand where human remains had been located. The grandstand was closed at the time of the crash.

More than a dozen NASCAR officials, including Winston Cup director Gary Nelson and vice president of competition Mike Helton, inspected the crash site. They were joined by track president H.A. ``Humpy'' Wheeler. NASCAR also allowed a single photographer into the area to take photographs for their investigation.

``We investigate every accident individually,'' NASCAR spokesman Kevin Triplett said. ``We take pictures of all incidents we look into. That's part of our investigative process. We're going to look into it just like we would anything else.''

Phillips had recorded one top-10 finish in his Sportsman races at Charlotte. As a race-car fabricator, he was part of the local racing community and had worked at the FastTrack driving school at the speedway.