Kurt Is My Co-Pilot, Rolling Stone, March 2000
Dale Earnhardt, Junior, is a regular 25 year-old American kid with a pretty cool weekend job who’s pretty good at telling a story. He’s telling one right now. This story is about a kid who on Sunday afternoons drives his Chevy 170 miles an hour in front of 150,000 plus a national TV audience and how MTV changed his life.
“Up until I was 14 or 15 I was real short and I was kindof an Opy,” Junior began. “I wore Wranglers and cowboys hats and fished and raced round on boats and lissened to country music. Then one day changed it all.” He was standing behind the bar in the nightclub he’d had constructed in the basement of his Mooresville, North Carolina home. The basement-club was dimly lit with purple neon tint and had tall black stools, mirrored walls, a cooler large enough for 11 cases of Bud, and a framed poster of Kurt Cobain. “I was a junior and I went to a buddy’s house and this song came on MTV. We was gittin ready to go do some shit, and he’s like, ‘Man, dude, this song is kickass! Less jus sit here and lissen to it for we leave.’ And I sit down, and man, when it was overwith I was just fuckin blown away. It was Teen Spirit by Nirvana. It fit my emotions. I was tired of lissenin to my parents, I was tired of livin at home, I didn’t know what I was gonna do, I didn’t have any direction. The fact that he could sit there and scream into that mike like that give you a sense of relief. And the guitar riffs and the way Dave Grohl played the drums? It was awesome.” He was, that moment, pulled from the Good Ol Boy path and rebaptized by rock n’ roll.
He went out and bought Nirvana’s Nevermind. “I couldn’t really get anybody else to dig Nirvana like I dug it and I never heard nobody else lissenin to it in the high school parking lot. When I was lissenin to Nirvana, I felt like I was doin somethin wrong. But I didn’t care. I’d just sit there and turn it up.” Nirvana led to Pearl Jam led to Smashmouth, Tupac, 3rd Eye Blind, JT Money, Moby, Mystikal, Matthew Good Band, Busta Rhymes, and Primus (“That was my first moshing experience. That was awesome”).
Carlos Santana says, “Sound immediately reconfigures the molecular structure of the listener.” Junior is a prime case study. “When I was 12 or 13 Dad’s races came on the country station [Dad, by the way, is Dale Earnhardt, Sr., widely considered one of the three best race car drivers of the last century]
and I member sittin there playin with matchbox cars on the floor. I had the perfect little bedroom with the perfect toys and the perfect friend up the road that always played every day I wanted to play and played all day til I couldn’t play anymore and I thought e’rybody fished, e’rybody lissened to country, and e’rybody lived in a cool house on a lake and it was sunny all the time.
“Then I got my driver’s license and I was able to buy music and lissen to it on my own and you hear the words and you think, man I never thought about that. I never really was rebellious against my parents. I never really thought the government was fucked up. I never really paid much attention to the schools suckin. Up until I was 16 I thought every cop up and down the road was just happy and glee and now you hear these songs and you’re like, is that the case? Is that what’s goin on? You don’t learn from anywhere else.”
Junior followed Dad into big-time stock car racing and now in a sport filled with real, Suth’un Good Ol Boys, he’s known as the rock n’ roll driver. That’s him in the red #8 Budweiser Chevrolet Monte Carlo in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series facing off against heavyweights like Jeff Gordon, Dale Jarrett, Tony Stewart, and his father. After five starts Junior is ranked 21st, 2nd among rookies in NASCAR’s most competitive rookie field in years, and Junior’s first victory came after fewer starts than any other active driver. Junior is a fan favorite, one of the the circuit’s best loved drivers. People see in Junior a kid from the MTV generation invading one of America’s oldest cultures. A kid like you, who on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday does little or nothing—fix up the house, paint ball with the guys, Sega NFL2K, surf the Net, hang with best friend T-Dawg (mom still calls him Terrell), and mostly, watch videos on MTV, BET, and Much, a Canadian channel. A kid who gets to the race track and thinks, “Can’t wait to get home so I can fuck off some more.”
[Apparently, fuckin off helps him on Sundays. “The thing about drivin race cars is mental,” he said. “How long can you concentrate? How long can you focus? And if you don’t focus good and you cain’t be in deep thought for a long time then you’re not gonna be very good at it. The things I do every day prepare me for that. When you’re on the computer playin a game or on the Playstation whippin your buddy’s ass in Knockout King you gotta be on top of it.”]
When not fuckin off Junior is raisin hell, as in gettin in one of his cars and peelin the tires every gear wide-ass open [read: goin real fast]. There’s the Corvette he won that he almost never drives. The Chevy Impala with GPS, a VCR, and TV screens in the front and back. The hulking red four-door Chevy pickup truck with a monster stereo system and, if you lift up the back seats, on top of where the bass amps are hidden, there’s this skull and crossbones design that Skippy from Freeman’s Car Stereo etched in there without Junior even askin and the darn thing lights up when you push a button on the keypad, but no one knows that cuz Junior ain’t one to show off. And then there’s the breath-taker: a mint condition, midnight blue 1969 Camaro with an exposed grill on the hood and an oversized finger-thin steering wheel and a gear shift shaped like a bridge and a top of the line Alpine stereo. Junior bought this piece of art for a mere $12,000.
Junior eased into the piece of art and floated down the road to get some pizza from Pie In the Sky. “When I got it [the piece of art] I took it out and thought, this thing has no fire.” He added a new transmission, a new aluminum head Corvette motor, and a 2,500-RPM stall converter that allows you to shift and keeps the piece of art from changing gears until it reaches 2,500 RPMs. Now the thing is pretty awesome.
“It’s real stiff and hard and doesn’t have the handlin package like a new car,” Junior said, cruising at a leisurely 40 miles an hour on the thin, desolate Carolina road, “so you gotta really know what you’re doin, have your hands on the wheel at all times and stuff.” The piece of art was loud—the engine rumbled and gurgled, and practically drowned out the stereo—but the ride was cool and he turned the Chronic 2001 up way loud and it still sounded crisp. “I like Dr. Dre. He’s got a good attitude. I saw him on that VH-1 deal, that Behind the Music, and that really give you an idea of who he was. I mean, he enjoys success. I mean, that’s kinda the way I’ve tried to be. There’s a lot of money comin in and there’s a lot of talk about how good the future’s gonna be and how much is gonna happen and I’m excited about it, but I don’t wanna be molded or changed. I wanna be able to go back to $16,000 a year and be okay. I wanna be able to still realize the value of a dollar bill. And I think that’s what Dr. Dre’s done. He’s still maintained his coolness and not turned into a big jerk.”
Junior said, “Check this out,” and pulled back the shifter. The engine seemed to constrict slowly, tightening like a coil, roaring and snarling as if it were angry at us, and then, after three slow seconds of build, the engine growling louder all the time, it reached 2,500 RPMs and there was a loud POP!, like a gunshot, and the piece of art slingshotted off, leaping in a milisecond from 40 miles an hour to 80—like light speed in the Millenium Falcon or something—and suddenly we were flying down the thin, empty Carolina backstretch, zipping past cows and tractors and horses and go-carts as the malevolent funk of Dr. Dre boomed out the window—Nowadays, everybodywannatalk, liketheygot sumpintosay, but nuttincomesout whentheymovetheirlips, justabunchagibberish, andmotherfuckersack liketheyforgotaboutDre—sounds so alien in this Waltons-ish country small-town it seemed like music from another planet. And Junior was cool with both.
Vegas on Friday was a cloudless blue sky, a heavy wind, a lot of sun. Out by the Las Vegas Motor Speedway there’s nothing but low mountains and an Air Force Base. If you look over the edge of the speedway you can see for miles. On a race day, with thousands of fans and press and drivers crammed in there for a little festival of Americana, it seems like the only place in the world.
It was Qualifying Day for the CarsDirect.Com 400, when the 55 guys vying for the 43 spots in Sunday’s race go out one at a time, tearing around the track as fast as they can. Friday’s top 25 finishers are guaranteed a spot in the race, their starting positions based on their qualifying speed. The guy with the fastest time gets the pole position, or the inside spot on the front row. The guy with the second fastest time will start front row outside, the third fastest 2nd row inside, and so on. Saturday the last 18 spots will be filled, but it’s a little more complicated because of a thing called provisionals which means if a guy who’s a legend, like Dale, Sr., is slow in qualifying he’ll still get in the race, so if you’re not a legend, on Saturday you’ve gotta rip and pray.
The hours before qualifying are for practice. Teams work on their cars, send the driver out for a lap or two around the track so he can judge what adjustments are needed, and then tinker some more. Junior has spent years working on cars so he’s really good at feeling what they’re doing and communicating to his crew what will make it faster. Then the guys—Favio, B, Brendan, Keith, Jeff, and Tony Jr.—jump all over the car, sodering, clipping, pouring, cramming like the minutes before a final, wrenching, wiping, welding, tweaking the $250,000 beast, $50,000 motor, and $6,000 transmission, turning the engine into “a time-bomb,” as Crisp called it. “All loose and sloppy and about to all fall to hell.” Where Sunday is about being consistently fast over four hours, qualifying is one lap—brute strength and balls-out sheer speed—so the qualifying motor isn’t made to last. For example, to improve the aerodynamics, they put tape over the car’s every hole and crack. But this makes the engine very hot. Hence, a time bomb. Another example: just before Junior gets in the car there’ll be a little portable heater linked up to the oil tank to get the oil up around 200 degrees. “The hotter the oil the thinner it is and the faster you can go,” Crisp said. “It’s like runnin with Vaseline tween your cheeks. If you’re lubed up you can really haul ass.”
The race teams work on their cars in a garage that puts them inches away from their competitors in a giant warehouse where everyone tests and talks and works out in the open. Imagine a fleet of NBA teams having to change, stretch, and strategize in a big open dressing room, bumping biceps with opponents, reporters, photographers, and a select handful of unescorted fans mulling through the chaos, the smell of smoking hot engines and sizzling tire rubber hanging in the air. In the middle of the din, Junior, like all drivers, stands by, grim-faced, maybe scarfing fried chicken, watching the guys work on his car for five or ten minutes, then jumping back into the beast for another test lap. His weekend alternated between driving as fast as he wished without fear of police reprisal [aka heaven] and sitting at the mechanic’s [hell]. Junior can and occasionally does get involved with race-day mechanics, but drivers are like quarterbacks: rugged to you and me, pampered within their world. [Really, there’s little to hide from other crews because there are no secrets between crews: racing isn’t about technical superiority, it’s about a driver’s relationship with his crew and their ability to work together to get the car as fast as possible as quickly as possible.]
Things went well that morning. Laptop computers in the garage report the times of each driver in practice. At 11am, after four practice laps Junior was 8th fastest. At a quarter past noon, after 15 laps, he’d fallen to 16th, but he wasn’t worried. The tires hadn’t been changed all morning and at high speeds tires wear out very fast, making them crown, which means your contact patch with the ground lessens and you can’t grab the track—try to turn at 140 miles an hour on crowned tires and you’ll think you’re driving on ice. At one o’clock they finally threw on stickers [new tires] and Junior beat around the big oval like there was a killer on his tail, finishing practice with the day’s fastest lap, faster than the next guy by more than three-tenths of a second, a monster lead in this business.
When it was time for the qualifying lap, Favio and the guys wheeled the Chevy out to the track. After a moment, Junior joined them. As he walked down pit road the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider” was booming on the track’s loudspeaker, and 20,000 were in the stands cheering for him, and Junior, with his impeccable military school posture, the red and black race suit snug on his long, slender body, the blazing sun gleaming off the silver in his racing shoes, the black wraparound shades and the stubble and the chiseled chin and the movie-star cheekbones, shit, Junior looked like gotdamn Steve McQueen.
He slid into the doorless beast, strapped on his crimson skull-n-crossbones helmet, pulled on his black gloves and goggles, then screwed on the steering wheel which sat about a foot and a half from his face, so close that he can’t slide in or out of the beast without taking it off, that close so that he can drive with his forearm muscles instead of his back and shoulder muscles. There was only one seat—rollbars where the passenger seat should be—and that seat was form-fitted to Junior’s body like shrink-to-fit jeans. There were gauges for water, oil, and fuel, and a tachometer to register RPMs, but no spedometer because it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going, just that you’re going faster than everyone else. There was a thin rearview mirror about two feet wide and a clear tube Junior could suck on and get water, and on Sunday there would also be a black tube stuck down his chest to blow cool air on him because over a few hours the car gets up around 100 degrees and sometimes, during the summer, 130. One more thing: all the teams paste headlight and stoplight and decals onto their cars to heighten the illusion that they’re driving the same sort of car that Bob has out in the driveway. Stock car racing is the most popular sort of racing in America because it seems the most pedestrian. In the 60s guys bought regular Chevelles or Dodge Chargers, yanked out the passenger seat, threw in some rollbars, and went racing. Nowadays the cars are constructed by the race teams themselves—I actually saw someone at the Garage Mahal bending and molding a big piece of sheet metal into a door—and they’re nothing like any car you can buy from Chevy. But Junior’s “Chevy” shows up on TV, shaped like the car Bob owns with headlights and stoplights [which don’t even make sense—why would a race car need headlights? They drive during the day!] and then Bob thinks, Hey, that car’s like mine, or even better, Hey, that’s like the Chevy down at the dealership. Think I’ll go get me one. You think Bob doesn’t think that? One of the oldest sayings in racing is Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday.
Early this morning all the drivers pulled numbers to determine the order of qualifying. Junior drew a number two. When his turn came he flicked the lever to start the engine and the beast cackled loudly, then began to ripple and roar as if it were a lion growling through clenched teeth, or a gigantic, demented bowl of Rice Krispies snap-crackle-popping in a fury. A NASCAR official dropped his arm and Junior stepped on the gas and flew off like a low-slung comet, sounding like the humming of a six-foot hornet an inch from your ear, and when the lap was over over and the speed was flashed on the board—172.216 miles an hour, a new track record—the crowd thundered. He’d bested the old record, correction, demolished it, by more than two miles an hour.
He parked and his team ran over to celebrate. “When ya drove into the corner,” said a breathless Favio, “ya went all the way wide open! We didn’t think you was gonna lift! The whole pit road just sit and looked at ya, amazed!” [Translation: “It seemed as though you took that first corner without braking (which we both know is impossible without wings)! We thought you weren’t ever going to get off the gas! You The Man, baby!”]
Junior jumped out of the car, ecstatic. “It doesn’t matter if we git the pole,” he said, his face beaming like a kid getting good presents at Christmas. “That was awesome!”
But when ESPN and local TV rushed over to get a comment, he muted his excitement. “The car handled real good… I don’t know if it’ll stand up as far as the pole goes, but it’ll up there somewhere toward the front…. My expectations at the first of the week were to come in here and make the top 25 and that hasn’t changed.”
It was incredible to watch a 25 year-old athlete do something so spectacular and then be so humble. “There’s 40 cars to go, man,” Junior said after the cameras disappeared. “I don’t wanna sit here and go whoo-hoo!! and then get beat and everyone go, What an asshole.”
And sure enough, his track record lasted about six minutes. Ricky Rudd topped him by three-tenths of a second. He looked down the track and saw his father walking onto pit road for his qualifying run. “There’s Dad,” he said. “Less go talk to him. $100 my Daddy give me shit for gittin beat. He don’t say nice goin. He’ll say why’d you get beat?”
He jogged down the track and caught the old man. Before Junior could say a word Dad leapt into him with barbed but loving ribbing. “What happened? Why ain’t ya first? What’d ya do wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Junior said with a laugh. Photographers snapped wildly behind them.
“What should I do?” Dad said as another car flew by. “What were ya doin?”
Junior said, “Run deep, brake hard, turn left.” It was just about the most smart-ass thing he could possibly say without being rude.
“Run deep, brake hard?” Dad laughed. Terry Labonte, another top driver was walking by. Dad grabbed Terry’s arm and said, “Listen at him,” then turned back to Junior. “How ya get round there now?”
“Run deep, brake hard, turn left.”
The veterans laughed. “He don’t even know how he did it!” Dad said. There was a brief pause. Then Dad patted Junior on the shoulder, giving him a break from the teasing, silently saying good job.
A little later Junior was back in his trailer, watching other cars qualify on ESPN2. He was parked on the infield just feet from turn number one so you saw the car on live TV zipping into that turn, and then, with a timing that seemed a bit incongruous, heard the six foot-hornet-humming sound the car made when it actually reached the corner. It was a wrinkle in time sortof moment. “C’mon! Beat us!” Junior said. He was sincerely rooting for other drivers, any drivers, to best him so that he would fall out of the top three and not have to walk all the way across the park to the press conference mandatory for top three finishers. “C’mon!” he yelled at the TV. No one beat Ricky Rudd and only one other driver, Scott Pruett, beat Junior. After the final qualifier failed to beat him, he took a second to bemoan walking, then, ever the trooper, threw on a jacket and bounced out the door.
At the press conference one of journalists asked about Junior’s relationship with his legendary father. “Well,” Junior said, “durin practice and qualifyin it was [Dad] car owner.” Junior races for Dale Earnhardt, Incorporated, in a car owned by Dad, though Dad does not own his own car because he’s still loyal to Richard Childress, the man who put him in a race car long before he could buy one himself. “He’s all, ‘How’s it goin? We need to get faster. We need to do this, we need to do that.’ Then when the race starts it’s diff’rent. [Last week at Rockingham, North Carolina] we were goin into turn three. I was on the inside of Jeff Gordon and got loose [lost control] goin into the corner and I slammed into him. About a straightaway and a half later Dad went by shakin his finger out the window at me. I guess that was where the father was goin, ‘You’d better watch it. You’d better straighten up.’ ”
After the press conference Junior was asked, if you were leading on the last lap and Dad was right behind you would Dad use one of his legendary tricks to spin you out and take the checkered flag for himself? Junior didn’t pause to think. “He would do what it took to win.”
In the 1940s, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia, there were some Good Ol Boys fresh from the war with a little money, a little training on how to service military planes and jeeps, and a talent for brewing moonshine. They made their outlaw liquor in hidden stills in the woods and got it to the dancehalls, speakeasys, and bootleggers in cars big enough to carry 100 gallons of moonshine, maybe 700 pounds, and still fast enough to outrun the cops: big Ford or Pontiac sedans with killer motors and real, stiff suspensions—liquor cars. Racing’s first superstar, Junior Johnson, was a moonshiner. He always said he was never caught with moonshine in his car. He could always outrun the boys, always until they got the in-car radio.
Sometimes some Good Ol Boys would get together and brag about who had the fastest liquor car and if the braggin got too loud, they’d pick a Sunday, head out to some deserted field, plow out an oval and race. Thus was born American stock racing, now the country’s biggest spectator sport with 150,000 watching 35 weekends a year. “In the south,” said Steve Crisp, Junior’s manager, and a natural comedian, “ya see stock cars e’rywhere. From the time you’re a little kid to the time you’re put in the grave you’re gonna be around a stock car track. Hell, ya can’t sling a dead cat thout hittin a shop.” By the end of the 40s the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) was founded.
It was a sport where the track and the stands and everything in between was filled with Good Ol Boys. “He hunts, his Dad taught him to hunt, and his Dad taught him to hunt,” Crisp said. ”He drinks Jack Daniels and Maker’s Mark. He listens to Hank Williams. He loves his huntin dog and his pickup truck and he married his high school sweetheart and he lives in the town he grew up in or a stone’s throw away. He puts God first and then his family, then his truck.”
Junior has a pickup truck, loves dogs, and maintains a certain downhome-ness about him, but young Junior ain’t no Good Ol Boy. For example, he hates to hunt. He’s got a story about that, too. “My Dad’s always been a deer hunter. He loves that shit. He took me a coupla times. I went out there and sat in a tree stand all freakin day. And it’s great to sit there and think about shit and reflect back on what’s been happenin with ya, but really, it’s just a waste of a day. Just pissin it away.
“After a while [a deer] walked out there and I shot the hell out of it. You shoot him right in the chest and it’s sposed to go right into his heart. When I saw it I thought, Dad’s gonna like this. And then I‘m like, man, I don’t like it. The only excitement I got out of it was seein him bein excited, but I didn’t enjoy sittin there all day and I didn’t enjoy havin to drag it over to the truck and pickin it up and throwin it in there and then sit there watchin him skin it and gut it and that pissed away all night so there went a day and a night! So the next time I went in a deer stand I’m like I ain’t shootin shit cuz I got shit to do tonight. So then I’m like what am I doin up here? I got down and never went back.”
Stock car racing is still dominated by Good Ol Boys, though Junior is part of a class of new blood, guys who aren’t from the south—Matt Kenseth from Wisconsin, Tony Stewart from Indiana—and southerners who aren’t Good Ol Boys, a titanic shift in the cultural direction of NASCAR. Imagine the NBA beginning to be dominated by white guys. “There’s a lot of drivers within this age group that are diff’rent,” Junior said. “It’s just the way things are goin and NASCAR’s not immune to it. Even the image is something more modern. Just look at the TV coverage. Ten years ago when they’d go to break it’d be some fiddle, banjo-pickin music. And now it’s this jammin rock music. Somebody somewhere said, hey let’s change it.”
But things change slowly. So while NASCAR moves slowly away from Good Ol Boyness, so does Junior. It’s not easy to refuse all of the cultural stimuli around you in favor of another drummer’s beat. Sure, Junior hates to hunt, but there, mounted on the wall of his living room, is the head and neck of a deer.
On Friday night the Motor Speedway was quiet and empty and around ten Junior headed out for a walk around the track and another story. “I’d just started drivin my late model car,” he said. The late model series is the lowest-rung of organized stock car racing. “We had this shitbox of a car and we was racin at this track with all the big dawgs.” The Speedway’s rock concert bright lights were on. The only sound, besides our feet on the concrete, was the muffled snarls of dirt-track racing a half-mile away.
“My crew chief was an old-timer e’ryone knew named Gary Hargett and he ordered a brand new car from Rick Townsend, the most popular car builder. And we were so excited. So we git to the track and Gary’s like, Man we ordered that car, when you think you’re gonna git on it? Rick’s like, Well, we’re behind. It’s gonna be a couple months for we ever start on it. You guys should get it midway through the season. And Rick’s like, By the way man, where’s your driver at? And I was standing a little ways away and Gary’s like, he’s down there. And Rick says, Boy don’t look like much. Looks like he barely know how to get out of the rain.
“So we started the race bout midpack and beat our way up through there and two laps to go I came up on Rick’s house car runnin second. And I drilled him straight in the ass, man! Right in the fuckin ass and turned him sideways and went past him and finished second in the race. They don’t do that here [in Winston Cup], but that’s how they do back home. After the race Rick come up to Gary and said, That was pretty awesome. We’ll start on your shit Mondee. And Rick’s been a good friend ever since. But I always remembered what Rick said and e’rywhere I go, when I walk into a room with people I don’t know, I assume they look at me and say, He don’t look like much. That’s kept me real humble and small-time.”
Junior was born in Concord, a stone’s throw from Mooresville. His parents separated when he was two or three and he and his older sister Kelly were raised by his mother in a small mill house until Junior, then six, awoke to a fire in the kitchen. Everyone ran out, the house burned down, and nothing was ever the same. Mom handed over custody of her kids to Dale, Sr., and moved away to Norfolk, Virginia. “She didn’t have the means to git us another house or take care of us,” Junior said, “so she said, man, your dad’s doin good, and he can put ya in school so this is the best thing for ya. I was just like, Are my toys here?” She still lives in Norfolk and works as a loader for UPS. Junior has seen her once or twice a year since he was six, but she calls often. “She puts forth a lot of effort in our relationship,” he said and talked happily of her plan to retire and move back to the Charlotte area within the next year. “She’s awesome.”
When Junior arrived at his Dad’s, racing was a very small sport. “The tracks they raced at were shitholes,” Junior said. “If you got 50,000 fans there you were lucky.” Dad was away a lot of the time, so Junior was raised by his stepmom Teresa. “When he and Kelly were growin up,” Dale Sr. said, “I was workin and racin and goin all the time. That was a lot because of his education and school—I wanted him to have a solid home life. I didn’t want him to worry about if home was gonna be there tomorrow.”
But Dad, it seems, was a distant provider. “We’d go upstairs and sit down on the couch,” Junior said, “and he’d be sittin there watchin TV in the recliner and you ask him a question and he wouldn’t hear you. You rarely even get a response sometimes. He was so in his racin thing you could hardly sometimes have a conversation with him cuz his mind was on what he was thinkin about.” It’s been suggested that Junior became a driver to get his father’s attention. Both deny it. But there seems a kernal of truth to it.
Dad was thinking about building an empire. He grew up at the track, watching his father Ralph, a champion stock car driver in the 50s. Then he drove his black #3 Chevy to a record seven Winston Cup Season Championships. Called The Man In Black and The Intimidator, he’s the consummate winner with a questionable reputation, like the Bill Laimbeer Detroit “Bad Boy” Pistons or the Lyle Alzado Oakland Raiders. But winning wins company, so he’s also one of the best-loved drivers in the history of the sport.
Dad took his winnings and built a giant palace in Mooresville, perhaps the greatest ever constructed by NASCAR money, lovingly called the Garage Mahal. There’s security guards in cowboy boots and red button down shirts that say Dale Earnhardt Inc., corporate offices for DEI’s 160 employees, all of Dad’s trophies, old winning cars preserved for public view and big glass display cases for the tuxedoes he wore to the Winston Cup banquet during his championship seasons and the gowns worn by his wife and the cute pink polka-dotted toddler’s dress sported by their daughter Taylor and pictures of Ralph Earnhardt and a garage where they build cars and engines and a helioport and a TV screen where they show all the commercials Dad and Junior have made and a gift shop with all sorts of souvenirs dedicated to Dad. There’s spoons, bears, pins, watches, shirts, robes, beer steins, shot glasses, tiny model cars (they earned Junior around $2 million last year), and, this just in, a Dale Earnhardt Monopoly set. The pieces include a car, a checkered flag, and a helmet. Earnhardt’s face is on the money. He’s the first individual to have a monopoly set made around him. The shop’s best-selling item, the clerks say, is a decal you can buy and affix to your car to make it appear as though you bought it at the old man’s dealership.
As all this was being built Junior was at Mitchell Community College in Statesville, North Carolina, getting a degree in automotives, and then at his father’s dealership working as a greasemonkey, his word, for $180 a week. “I got to where I could do an oil change in eight minutes. I was really proud of that. People were comin in there like, man, I want this dude to change my oil. And I’m thinkin, man, I could live like this. I could work at a dealership and it would be fine. I’m okay that my father was a big superstar and I’m a mechanic. That’s okay.”
On Saturday night in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, he raced his late-model car. “It was $1,000 to win and 100 to 150 fans, but it didn’t matter. It was kickass, man! It was like buildin a freakin remote control car and goin to where e’rybody else went to play with it. I learned e’rything—how to save your tires, pace yourself, not wreck your car, communicate with your team, motivate em to work—you got volunteer guys and you gotta be able to get em to work or they’re gonna go to the track and drink up the sodas. And that’s just people skills. You do things on and off the track to entice crowd reaction. Even though it’s only two hundred people, signin autographs. Havin relationships with other drivers to where they were comfortable racin with ya. You didn’t go there and just turn your shoulder every time a driver walked up like you hated his guts. You talked to him about racin and cars and you became like family with everybody and shit.”
In time he moved up to the Busch Series, which is like the supercharged minors to the Winston Cup’s majors, was season champ in ’98 and ’99 and graduated to the Winston Cup. “I’ve been in a position to watch racing over the past 15 years without participating and I’ve watched it change and grow and be more entertaining and attract sponsors and attract crowds. A lot of guys [asked why do you drive?] say, I love to drive. But growin up as a kid I didn’t try to drive race cars, I didn’t try to get into every damn seat I could get into, so I know inside that it’s not a live or die thing. I’m a little more three-dimensional than, Oh drivin’s kickass. There’s a hell of a lot more to it than just bein involved in the race. There’s a feelin you get from bein an asset. Look at them stands and know that people are gonna fill them seats to come watch a race and they’re innerested in what’s gonna happen here Sundee. To be a part of the actual program they’re watchin, the actual part of the race, is kinda intriguing. It makes me feel like hey, I’m an asset to somethin.”
He stopped. “Drivin is fun but that’s not the ultimate high. Right now I’d rather be home. I’d much more enjoy kickin it on my couch.”
At 10 o’clock Sunday morning Junior was in his trailer with Crisp and his trailer driver Shane, eating Corn Pops, listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, arguing about racing movies. The race was just over an hour away and there was about as much tension in the air as there is in your house before you drive to the corner store for some milk.
“Last American Hero is real redneckie,” Crisp said of the film many consider the best ever made on racing.
“But it’s the only racin movie that’s about racin,” Junior said. “I didn’t like Le Mans,” he said of the Steve McQueen classic. “They were just raisin hell and racin cars. There’s no dialogue. It’s just racin and sittin. It didn’t have a plot.”
“Heart Like A Wheel is uncool,” Shane said of the Beau Bridges piece, “cuz they had it like she’s gittin her ass beat by her boyfriend.”
“What about Days of Thunder?” someone asked about the Tom Cruise lemon.
All at once everyone said, “Sucked!”
“Grand Prix kicks ass,” Crisp said.
“Here’s Le Mans,” Junior said. “A bunch of people sittin aroun for five minutes. Then all of a sudden, snap, they’re racin, then, snap, they’re all sittin aroun. No dialogue whatsoever. It’s like someone actually followed the guy aroun, filmin him.”
“Yeah,” Shane said. “It was realistic.”
“Yeah it was real,” Junior said, “but it didn’t have a plot and shit like Grand Prix. Who was the guy in Gand Prix?”
“James Garner,” everyone said.
“I like that guy,” Junior said.
“The girl liked him in Grand Prix,” Shane said. “Member? And her husband got in a wreck and…”
“She turned out to be a beeatch!” Crisp said as though he were Snoop Dog. The room crumbled in hysterics. “She was a big beeeeatch! A biznitch!”
There was no pre-race ritual, no discussion of strategy, no prayer, no psyching. It seemed strange. Junior was moments away from the event that defined his week, and more, about to spend four hours risking his life, and he seemed largely unconcerned.
You don’t do anything special before you go out to race?
Junior looked puzzled, as if the idea of doing something special had never occurred to him.
“I think ya do a lot of soul-searching,” Shane said, “I don’t think you notice it, but you usually walk around in a daze.”
“One thing I do,” Junior said, “is when I walk out the [trailer] door I don’t wait up for people.”
“His mind is already there,” Shane said.
“I go at my pace. Real fast.”
“I think he puts the suit on and gets really focused and movin faster. Almost to the point where if ya didn’t know him you’d think he was rude.”
“It would wear me out to psych myself up all mornin,” Junior said. “I pray to God before the race. I don’t pray to win. I say, When it’s over can I go the next five days til the next race with a content, satisfied attitude so I can live comfortably and not be all down on myself on a bad finish all week? Cuz if I finish bad I’m depressed as hell for the next week.”
That’s it? C’mon! You could die today!
With childlike innocence Junior said “Ya think?”
Everyone laughed. Were they saying, That’s obvious, or That’s ridiculous, or That’s a taboo thing to say and we’re just gonna laugh at it so it doesn’t take root?
“Nah man. It’s safe as hell in there. All that paddin in there, how I’m buckled in there, all the bars and things? Dude, man, that car is bulletproof….”
But no one’s shooting at you. Seriously man, this is worse than boxing. You must know that.
“Yeah, sometimes guys get cocked just right. That’s the way it is. There’s things in there your head can hit and if it hits it just right you could be permanently injured.” He said this casually. “But guys normally walk away. There’s rarely fatalities.” He turned to Crisp. “You know what I wanna do? When they do driver introductions? I wanna say somethin into the mike like, I gotta say hi to my friend Chester McGroovy. Get well soon!”
He seemed blissfully unaware of the impending danger. It wasn’t clear if he was being honest about the lack of risk or if he were in the complete denial. Maybe the answer is embedded in the language of racing. Instead of “crashing at 150 miles an hour” they call it “touching each other,” or “trading paint.”
But then Junior down-shifted, and it seemed that his biggest worries were not on the track at all. “Last week we were drivin up to the race track and there were all these people campin outside, thousands of people, and I’m like, that’s what the fuck I’d like to be doin. That’s fun! Just raisin hell at the race track with your buddies, drinkin beer, campin out, watchin the race. No pressure, man. I mean, you don’t get no money, but shit, you’re havin a good time. It’d be fun. And I’ll never get to do that.”
He paused. “When I turn 70 that’s what I’m gonna do. Go campin and park outside the track and sit there and drink beer and just raise hell and aggravate all the fuckin rednecks with all this rock n’ roll music.”