Bluntness is a Rusty Wallace character trait.

So, characteristically, Wallace was straightforward Monday in explaining why he decided to make 2005 his final season as a Nextel Cup driver.

“When (Dale) Earnhardt lost his life, it kind of got to me,” Wallace said. “It made me feel nervous, and it made me think hard about it. I’ve won a lot of races, and I want to have fun in this sport, and I don’t want to get hurt.”

Earnhardt was killed in a crash in Turn 4 on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. Monday, Wallace only was a few hundred yards away from that point — at Daytona USA just outside the track’s walls — confirming that he’ll hang up his helmet after the remainder of 2004 and a 2005 campaign that will be called “Rusty’s Last Call.”

There will be die-cast cars and all sort of other merchandise for sale, of course, as he closes out a career that, if all goes as planned, would wind up with his 706th career start at Homestead-Miami Speedway Nov. 20, 2005.

Wallace hopes to add to his career total of 55 Cup victories before then, saying he wants to leave while he goes to the track each week still thinking that’s entirely possible.

“It’s important for me not to have to go through the struggles some of the guys have,” Wallace said, alluding to the slow, painful declines some other top NASCAR winners have endured at the end of their careers. “I’ve won this year, and it seems like just about every week I am running in the top five and something crazy goes wrong. I know I am on the top of my game, and I want to go out on top.”

He also wants to go out healthy.

“I want to enjoy a lot of time with my kids,” said Wallace, who has three children between ages 17 and 24. “And I don’t want to be hurt — or killed — by something that went wrong.

“It bothered me a lot when Dale got killed. … He was the guy who, every single time I went to the track, I looked at him. Even if he qualified 30th, so long as I qualified 29th that felt good. I felt like I beat the best.”

Earnhardt was one of the chief rivals in Wallace’s NASCAR career, which began when the Missouri native came to Atlanta for his first Cup race in March 1980. Driving a Chevrolet owned by Roger Penske, Wallace finished second — behind Earnhardt.

He made just nine NASCAR starts from 1980 to 1982, then won the 1983 championship in the American Speed Assn. before coming to NASCAR full-time the following year.

Wallace won the 1984 rookie of the year award driving for a team owned by Cliff Stewart out of High Point, N.C. In 1986, he moved to Blue Max Racing when Tim Richmond left that Raymond Beadle-owned team to go to Hendrick Motorsports.

Wallace won 18 races and the 1989 championship in his five seasons with Blue Max, but when that team’s run in the sport ended in 1990, Wallace went back to his first NASCAR car owner, motorsports mogul Roger Penske, and began a partnership that lasts to this day.