Nascar Dale
NASCAR Sings - Track 06: Dale Jarrett - Race Track Fever
A decade without Dale Earnhardt
Even 10 years later, signs of Dale Earnhardt are everywhere, especially for one son who would rather soak up the memories than talk about what might have been.
Ten years. A decade. Make that 3,650 days.
Can it be that long? Say it isn't so.
Say that it wasn't just yesterday when the man was rounding the turn, heading for the checkered flag, the February Florida sun gleaming off that midnight-black car as it screamed into the second to last turn at the 2001 Daytona 500.
Tell us that it can't be 10 years since the car careened into a concrete wall, ending it all.
We all recall the image of a crumpled No. 3 sliding directionless toward the green Daytona grass. A legend gone. A legacy stopped cold.
Ten years later, there is an eeriness that still permeates NASCAR.
The son that never came home one night. The father that is no longer there.
Ten years later, Dale Earnhardt is still gone. And the racing world is still trying to move on, while at least one son still tries to cope.
"After that happened I never wanted to see another race track or another race car again," Dale Earnhardt Jr. said recently about his feelings the days after his father's death.
"We went to Rockingham [the next race in North Carolina], I felt responsible to go, but I didn't want to be there. But after a week I got to thinking, 'What am I going to do? My dad gave me this opportunity."
For three decades, Dale Earnhardt - the Intimidator - was everywhere. With a twinkle in his eye and a devilish grin, he had shoved and pushed his way to the front, willing his cars to victory and driving with a disdain for safety. He wore an old-style helmet, didn't care for the HANS (Head and Shoulder Neck Restraint) device and had never been to a funeral.
"I'll be in one of them soon enough," he told a reporter years ago.
"Dale would go up in the gray areas," said "Humpy" Wheeler, former president of Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina. "Up where the angels feared to tread." For many NASCAR teams the Charlotte area is home, so Earnhardt's death - and his life - were omnipresent. Of course, it helped that Dale was born near there.
From dawn to dusk, Earnhardt was surrounded by racing. Cars lined up in the backyard waiting for his father, Ralph, to patch them together. Cars at the track where Ralph would go racing four nights a week, dragging that little boy around like he was part of the pit crew. Even the neighborhood they lived in was called Car Town. On Sedan Street, no less.
Ralph died suddenly at age 45 while changing a carburetor with his son, at the time 22, by his side.
Dale was already married, already divorced, already a father. A ninth-grade drop-out (twice) pumping gas at one of the local stations, stringing together his own one-man racing crew on Saturday night dirt tracks where the winner took 25 bucks and a ride home.
"Wild and crazy, young and dumb," Earnhardt was quoted as saying in his biography.
He was a fire-breathing offspring of the moonshiners his father made friends. A legend who would scatter piles of wreckage on a racetrack, then smirk under the mirrored glasses and mustache on the drive back to the garage.
From his start driving Hobby-class cars in his hometown of Kannapolis, N.C., Earnhardt made a name for himself by doing things on the track others thought impossible. And that led to his first full-time Winston Cup ride - the top tier of NASCAR - by age 28, late by today's standards. But by his 16th career start, he had his first win.
By the end of his first season, he had 11 top-five finishes and the rookie-of-the-year title.
A season later he was the circuit champion, the only driver ever to win the rookie crown and the series' championship in consecutive seasons. Six more titles, a total of 76 wins and more than $40 million in earnings followed. But they were all afterthoughts to the millions of fans in a following that was unequaled by any NASCAR driver.
"Sometimes a sport makes a man great," a Citgo representative said after Earnhardt's death. "Every once in a while, a man makes a sport great."
There will be a great deal of reverence regarding Dale Earnhardt in the coming weeks leading up to the Daytona 500 on Feb. 20, 2011. Earnhardt Jr. says he has no problems with that, but would prefer to stay on the sidelines.
"Everyone wants to reflect and honor my father at this time," he said. "What I enjoy is hearing other people talk about him, not me."
"I'll be happy to observe everything that goes on. If it's something big, if it's something small, whatever it is. But if you don't mind I'd just rather watch it; stand on the sidelines . . . I know how I feel in my heart and I don't feel the need to discuss it a lot."
Dale Earnhardt died at age 49, striving for an eighth title, which would have broken his career tie with Richard Petty. NASCAR chairman Bill France, never one for superlatives, said simply: "NASCAR has lost its greatest driver."
Ten years later, his impression still stands. Even in death, the racing league he helped build, then left behind, might have gained a sharper sense of reality, ironically, because of his destiny.
NASCAR, without its Black Knight, was in search of an immediate identity. It was an entity that struggled through a heavily scrutinized investigation and emerged with more questions than answers.
Has anything changed? Safety, of course. After a nearly six-month investigation of Earnhardt's crash, NASCAR required all drivers to wear the HANS device. And safety continued at full speed ahead with tracks on the circuit steadily adopting new impact-absorbing wall technology. Had the changes been in place before Feb. 18, 2001, Earnhardt might be alive today. Instead, they're part of his legacy.
For Dale Jr., life moves on because it has to.
"I don't really think about what life would be like if he was still here. I can't even begin to have the faintest idea of what it would be like if he was still here, how things would be, what the sport would be like, what our lives would be like. I think that there are a lot of things that I do, and have done in the past 10 years, that I think would have made him proud."
Photos by Getty Images and NASCAR
Dale Earnhardt had little trouble winning races at Daytona International Speedway, just the Daytona 500. The monkey was finally off his back in 1998, however it was the only race he won that year.
After scoring four victories in 1994, Earnhardt clinched his seventh Winston Cup title, which tied the record held by retired driver Richard Petty. At age 43, however, Earnhardt had plenty of racing left in him. Sadly, there were no more titles.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. was only 26 at time of his father's death and finished second in the 2001 Daytona 500. Dale Sr. was in third at the time of the fatal crash.
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