After two hours of this, we were right back where we were six months ago.

The driver of the No. 3 car is still dead. NASCAR still blames a broken seat belt.

The ''Official Accident Report: No. 3 car'' was offered with such clinical precision Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. This wasn't closure, it was a closing argument.

The defense rests, your honor - now would you please tell all these nosy reporters that packed this ballroom to give it a rest as well.

NASCAR presented its case as if it were a matter of law - even citing Isaac Newton's First Law of Physics that states an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted on by force.

In front of hundreds of media representatives and 28 television cameras, NASCAR made public what vice president of communications Jim Hunter called ''the culmination of the most thorough, most intensive and certainly the most anticipated investigation in the 53-year history of NASCAR.''

When the two-hour summation ended, they handed out 300-page, two-volume reports that are thicker than the Augusta phone book. They even typed up clinical statements of approval from the owner of the No. 3 car and the wife of the driver of the No. 3 car.

Most of the time they didn't use names, as if saying ''Dale Earnhardt'' too much might be too personal. They mostly stuck to the preferred NASCAR parlance of assigning numbers as reference - as in the No. 40 car bumped the No. 3 car before it was hit by the No. 36 car, sending both the 3 and 36 into the wall at a critical trajectory angle and a frighteningly high velocity vector.

In case anyone didn't understand, they explained it in the glossary along with definitions for terms such as basilar, occipital, telemetry, Delta V, photogrammetric analysis, crash pulse and the all important belt dumping.

Suffice to say that the folks who follow motorsports for a living were a might bit confused but altogether impressed with the substantial volume of big words and complicated data that doctors James Raddin and Dean Sicking provided.

And while the experts hired by NASCAR concluded that no singular factor can be isolated as the cause of death, the seat belt was the preferred villain. They firmly concluded that the left hip restraint separated in a process known as dumping when the No. 3 car hit the wall.

It all happened in a matter of about 800 milliseconds, so the precise moment when the restraint broke is uncertain. They do know the No. 3 car was traveling in the neighborhood of 157-160 mph with a trajectory angle of between 13-14 degrees and a heading angle from 55-59 degrees. The Delta V, or velocity change, at impact with the wall was from 42-44 mph, or roughly as intense as a vehicle barreling into the front of your parked car at 75 to 80 mph.

It all sounded very impressive and very conclusive. But what is NASCAR doing with all of this data? Will they be mandating the use of head-and-neck restraints for the few who haven't converted? Will they introduce better belt restraints, impact-absorbing walls or tougher roll cages?

The short answer is, no. The only new feature installed in cars will be a ''black box'' crash recorder to generate more data.

''There is not a quick fix,'' NASCAR president Mike Helton said. ''We are not going to react for the sake of reacting.''

Let's hope all this data yields something more tangible - sooner rather than later. Otherwise, NASCAR is no further along than it was when the driver of the No. 3 car - Dale - was still No. 1 on the track.

Reach Scott Michaux at (706) 823-3219.