The Memories of Friends Stay with Us Forever.(Column)(death of Tony Renna)(Column)

Byline: Dutch Mandel

I'll say it: The other day I wept. The news about Tony Renna was an emotional gut punch, and no matter how many miles I put on my life's odometer, this doesn't get any easier to take. When a friend is killed, time slows, and you repeat in your head and in your heart that it couldn't have happened.

But it did and it does. And thankfully, as a result of advanced energy-dispersal technology, state-of-the-art protection and car design, and because of increasing emphasis on on-site trauma care, race drivers die less often in work-related accidents today than they did a decade or two ago.

That is little consolation to Tony's family or to his fiancee.

As car enthusiasts, do we accept the inherent dangers of racing more readily as a part of our lives? Unlike the unwashed masses, we do not cheer when a car goes into the wall-in fact we do the opposite: We hold our collective breath and pray. If accidents aren't "part of the charm'' to the general public, why do prime-time television networks care less about racing as a sport, but then lead sports segments with news of a pile of grinding metal sliding down a backstraight?

Not that we fail to put to steely memory where we were for these sad events. On my sixth birthday Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald died at the Indianapolis 500 before my eyes on an oversized closed-circuit television screen at San Francisco's Cow Palace. Later, my own family sat preparing a summer dinner-cheeseburgers, chips and lemonade-watching the Toronto CART race when Jeff Krosnoff was gone in an instant. More recently, Chris Theodore, Ford's product engineering wizard, sat across from me on Daytona's runway when news came that Dale's seem- ingly ...