Earnhardt's bond with fans will never be duplicated.(stock car race driver Dale Earnhardt)

There will never be another Dale Earnhardt. Ask the drivers. Ask the marketers. Ask the promoters. The answer is the same. There was only one Dale Earnhardt, and no one can replace him.

There are many reasons, but two stand out above all others. Earnhardt absolutely got more out of a race car than any other driver who has competed in

the sport. And never again will there be such a connection between a driver and fans in any form of racing.

Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, two of today's biggest stars, have many fans, but the bond isn't the same. Gordon is from California and Stewart from Indiana. They cut their teeth in open-wheel cars. They aren't embraced by the masses.

Humpy Wheeler, president of Lowe's Motor Speedway, equates Earnhardt's death with Michael Jordan's retirement. When a sport loses someone of that stature, it naturally will suffer in some way.

"What do you do now?" Wheeler says. "You have to keep going--that's what you do--but at the same time, it has put a real black hole in this business."

How do you measure someone's star power? By the volume of T-shirts he sells, the number of sponsors he attracts or the multitudes of fans he puts in the stands? In Earnhardt's case, there was a quality to the star that had nothing to do with the bottom line. He embodied the human side of stardom.