I wish I could have flown down to North Carolina and joined The Magazine's Dave Fleming outside of Dale Earnhardt, Inc., in Mooresville last Sunday night. Maybe then I would feel like I had paid proper respect to the greatest stock car racer of our age. As it is, I'm relegated to wearing black to the office for the foreseeable future.

I agree with Fleming that it is time to slow down, but not necessarily on the track. In the wake of tragedy, folks often call for immediate action and offer easy answers. And though we can't ignore racing's safety issue, putting even further speed restrictions on stock cars will not solve NASCAR's problem.

It wasn't just the speed at which Earnhardt struck the wall in Turn 4 at Daytona. It was the angle. Earnhardt, like the late Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin, could have been going 120 mph and still not survived. All slowing the cars down will do is bunch them together even tighter and make for even riskier maneuvers.

NASCAR must do everything it can to ensure the safety of the drivers. Mandating the HANS device would probably help. So might building soft walls in the turns. But to enact any knee-jerk rule change could prove to be as dangerous as doing nothing at all.

The HANS device, originally designed for open-wheel racing, is a remarkable system that needs to first be adapted to -- and then adopted by -- NASCAR and its more confining cars. Soft wall technology will be worth every penny spent by NASCAR and its track owners, once they determine its effectiveness.

Changes have to be made -- and will be made. But they have to be the right changes for the right reasons. Softer walls and slower cars won't change racing's hard-and-fast rule: sometimes people get hurt. And sometimes they die. And every time that happens, no matter who is behind the wheel, it is a tragedy.