Bill Simpson probably won’t get an apology from NASCAR. But he has something much more important: Public confirmation that his company isn’t responsible for Dale Earnhardt’s death.

And the cruel insinuations the Mooresville businessman has suffered since Feb. 18 should stop.

Simpson’s company made the safety harness that Dale Earnhardt snugged around his torso after crawling into his black Chevrolet for his last fateful race. Five days after Earnhardt slammed into the wall at Daytona, NASCAR President Mike Helton announced that an inspection of the mangled racecar had revealed a broken safety belt. The Daytona track’s emergency physician said the belt appeared to be a factor in the famed driver’s death.

That’s when Simpson’s nightmare began. And if NASCAR had been able to control subsequent events, that nightmare wouldn’t be over. Simpson’s company is exonerated now only because a Florida newspaper fought for access to the autopsy photos that NASCAR and Earnhardt’s widow sought to permanently seal. That would have meant sealing away the truth. An independent medical expert — not a doctor on NASCAR’s payroll — has provided the only independently verifiable information about the accident to date, almost two months after it occurred. Dr. Barry Myers of Duke University deduced that “restraint failure does not appear to have played a role in Mr. Earnhardt’s fatal injury.”

That doesn’t entirely rule out safety belt failure, although Simpson is confident engineering tests will do so. But it does clear his company of any direct culpability for the death, which Myers attributed to the violent forward motion of Earnhardt’s unrestrained head.

To his credit, the racetrack physician, Dr. Steve Bohannon, acknowledged his initial speculation was wrong. Helton wasn’t as forthright. Instead, he dodged and ducked and said that he never directly connected the belt to Earnhardt’s death.

He didn’t need to. All he had to do was mention the possibility of belt failure at a news conference, and the connection was as vivid as a lightning bolt. It immediately deflected attention from NASCAR safety procedures and three other similar deaths at its tracks to a small businessman bewildered to find himself at the center of a maelstrom involving the death of a racing legend.

Simpson lost business. He lost sleep. He almost lost his reputation — and all the while, NASCAR officials waited behind their kingdom’s walls, saying they would have nothing else to say until their own safety review was completed, maybe in a few months.

The irony, of course, is that the Florida legislature has passed a law — borne out of the Earnhardt case — that will make it much more difficult for news organizations to perform the sort of expeditious autopsy review that exonerated Simpson’s company. North Carolina’s legislators jumped on the bandwagon to propose a similar law here.

Lawmakers say they simply want to spare grieving relatives the nightmare of having a loved one’s autopsy photographs published on the Internet or in seedy tabloids. That’s a noble sentiment, but don’t think this action will come without a cost.

These records are public for a reason. When the truth is obscured or meted out only through the discretion of a few powerful individuals or entities, it is inevitably the innocent and less powerful who suffer.

But don’t take our word for it. Ask Bill Simpson.