Kurt is My Co-Pilot

The Rise of Dale Earnhardt Jr., The Rock & Roll Nascar Whiz Kid

 

By Toure

 

May 11, 2000 - Rolling Stone

 

 

 

 

          Dale Earnhardt Jr. is pretty good at telling a story. He’s telling one now about the thing that changed his life.

          “Up until I was fourteen or fifteen, I was real short, and I was kind of an Opie,” Junior begins. He’s twenty-five now. “I wore Wranglers and cowboy hats and fished and raced around on boats and listened to country music. Then one day changed it all.” He’s telling this while standing behind the bar in the nightclub he built in the basement of his Mooresville, North Carolina, home. The basement club is dimly lit with purple neon and has tall black stools, mirrored walls, a cooler large enough for eleven chases of Bud and a framed poster of Kurt Cobain.

          “I was a junior in high school, and I went to a buddy’s house, and this song came on MTV,” he says. “We was gittin’ ready to go do some shit, and he’s like, ‘Man, dude, this song is kickass! Let’s just sit here and listen to it ‘fore we leave.” And I sit down, and, man, when it was over with I was just fuckin’ blown away. It was ‘Teen Spirit,” by Nirvana. It fit my emotions. 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 Kurt Cobain could sit there and scream into that mike like that gave you a sense of relief. And the guitar riffs, and the way Dave Grohl played the drums? It was awesome.” Dale was, that moment, pulled from the good-ol’-boy path and re-baptized by rock & roll.

          He went out and bought Nirvana’s Nevermind. “I couldn’t really get anybody else to dig Nirvana like I dug it,” he remembers, “and I never heard nobody else listenin’ to it in the high school parking lot. When I was listenin’ 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, which led to Smash Mouth, Tupac, Third Eye Blind, JT Money, Moby, Mystikal, Matthew Good Band, Busta Rhymes and Primus. (“That was my first moshing experience. That was awesome.”) According to Carlos Santana, “Sound immediately rearranges the molecular structure of the listener.” Junior is a prime case study.

          “When I was twelve or thirteen, Dad’s races came on the country station,” Junior says. Dad is Dale Earnhardt Sr., widely considered to be one of the three best drivers in the history of stock-car racing. “And I ‘member sittin’ there playin’ Matchbox cars on the floor. I had the perfect little bedroom with the perfect toys and the perfect friend up the road who always played every day I wanted to play and played all day till I couldn’t play anymore, and I thought everybody fished, everybody listened to country, and everybody lived in a cool house on a lake, and it was sunny all the time.

 

 VROOM at the top: Dale Jr. in a 'legends' car (top) powered by a motorcycle engine, on a dirt track, 1993; in a late-model racer (middle) on which he did all the mechanical work (and which he also drove to and from the track), 1994; in the big leagues in March.

 

 

          “Then I got my driver’s license and I was able to buy music and listen 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 paid much attention to the schools suckin’. Up until I was sixteen, 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 good ol’ boys, he’s known as the rock & roll driver. That’s him in the red number 8 Budweiser Chevrolet Monte Carlo in the NASCAR Winston Cup series, facing off against heavy weights like Jeff Gordon, Dale Jarrett, Tony Stewart and Dale Sr. In seven starts since February, Junior is first among rookies and eighteenth overall. On April 2nd, he won his first big race, the DirecTV 500. He has now won more than $600,000 this season, but the numbers don’t show that Junior is also a fan favorite. People see in him a kid from the MTV generation invading one of America’s most stubborn subcultures. A kid like you, maybe, who on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday does little or nothing - fixes up the house, playing paintball and Sega NFL2K with the guys, surfs the Net, hangs with best friend T-Dawg (his mom still calls him Terrell), and watches videos on MTV, BET and MuchMusic, a Canadian channel. A kid who gets to the racetrack and thinks, “Can’t wait to get home so I can fuck off some more.”

          (Apparently, fuckin’ off actually helps him on race days. “The thing about drivin’ race cars is mental,” he says. “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 Kings, 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). He’s got a Corvette he won that he almost never drives. He’s got a Chevy Impala with a global-positioning system, a VCR and TV screens in the front and back. He’s got a hulking red four-door Chevy pickup truck with a monster stereo system, and, if you life the back seats, on top where the bass amps are hidden, there is this skull-and-crossbones design that Skipp 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, ‘cause Junior ain’t one to show off. And then there’s the breath-taker: a mint-condition midnight-blue 1969 Camaro with an exposed grille on the hood and an oversize finger-thin steering wheel and a gearshift shaped like a bridge and a top-of-the-line Alpine stereo. Junior bought this piece of art for a mere $12,000.

 

 

Baby driver (age 4): The 3rd generation of a racing dyansty.

 

 

          Junior eases into the piece of art and floats down the road to get some pizza from Pie in the Sky. “When I got this,” he says, “I took it out and thought, ‘This thing has no fire.’” He added a new transmission, a new aluminum-head Corvette engine 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-rpm. Now the thing runs pretty awesome.

          “It’s real stiff and hard and doesn’t have the handlin’ package like a new car,” Junior says, cruising at a leisurely forty mile 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 is loud, the engine rumbles and gurgles and practically drowns out the stereo, but the ride is cool, and he turns Dr. Dre 2001 up way loud and it still sounds crisp. “I like Dr. Dre,” Junior says. “He’s got a good attitude. I saw him on that VH1 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 is 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 OK. 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 pulls back on the shifter and says, “Check this out.” The engine seems to constrict slowly, tightening like a coil, roaring and snarling as if it is angry at us, and then, after three slow seconds of build, the engine growling louder all the time, it reaches 2,500 rpm and there’s a loud pop! like a gun, and we slingshot off, leaping in a millisecond from forty mph to eighty - like light speed in the Millennium Falcon or something - and suddenly we’re flying down the backstretch, zipping past cows and tractors and horses and go-carts as the malevolent funk of Dr. Dre booms out the window: Nowadays, everybodywannatalk, liketheygot sumpintosay, but nuttincomesout whentheymovetheirlips, justabunchagivverish, andmotherfuckersackliketheyforgotaboutDre...It sounds so alien in this Waltons-ish country town, like music from another planet. And Junior is cool with both.

 

          Vegas two days later, a Friday, is cloudless blue sky, heavy wind, a lot of sun. Out of the Motor Speedway, it’s qualifying day for Sunday’s race, the CarsDirect.Com 400. The fifty-five guys vying for forty-three spots in the race go out one at a time, tearing around the track as fast as they can. Today’s top twenty-five finishers are guaranteed spots in the race, their starting positions based on their qualifying speeds.

          The hours before qualifying are for practice. Crews 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 at communicating to his crew what will make the car go faster. After laps, the guys - Favio, B, Brendan, Keith, Jeff and Tony Jr. - jump all over the car, soldering, clipping, pouring, cramming like in the minutes before a final exam, wrenching, wiping, welding, tweaking the $250,000 beast, $50,000 engine and $6,000 transmission, turning the engine into “a time bomb”, as Stevie Crisp, Junior’s manager, calls it. “All loose and sloppy and about to all fall to hell.”

          Whereas Sunday is about being consistently fast for four straight hours, qualifying is one lap of brute strength and ball-out sheer speed - so the qualifying engine isn’t made to last. For example, to improve the aerodynamics, they take 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 faster you will go,” Crisp says. “It’s like runnin’ with Vaseline ’tween your cheeks. If you’re lubed up, you can really haul ass.”

          At 11 A.M., after four practice laps, Junior is the eighth-fastest qualifier. At a quarter past noon, after fifteen laps, he has fallen to sixteenth place, but he isn’t worried. The tries haven’t been changed all morning, and at high speeds tires wear down really fast, making them crown, which means your contact 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 on ice. At one o’clock, the crew finally throws on stickers (new tires), and Junior beats around the big oval like there’s 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 at last it’s time for the qualifying lap, Favio and the guys wheel the Chevy out to the track. Soon after, Junior joins them. As he walks down pit road, the Allman Brother’s “Midnight Rider” is booming on the track’s loudspeakers, and 20,000 fans are in the stands cheering, 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 on his racing shoes, the black wraparound shades and the stubble and chiseled chin and the movie-star cheekbones, shit, Junior looks like got-damn Steve McQueen.

 

 

 

And on (Brake) drum, Dale Jr.: Nascar's first son of grunge sitting in with some friends.

 

 

          He slides into the doorless beast, straps on his crimson skull-and-crossbones helmet, pulls on his black gloves and goggles, then screws on the steering wheel, which sits about a foot and a half from his face, so close that he can’t slide in or out of the beast without unscrewing it, so close so that he can drive using his forearm muscles instead of his back and shoulder muscles. There is only one seat (roll bars are where the passenger seat would be), and that sat is form-fitted to Junior’s body like shrink-to-fit jeans. There are gauges for water, oil and fuel, and a tachometer to register rpms, but no speedometer, because it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going, just that you’re going faster than everybody else. There is a thin rearview mirror about two feet wide, and a clear tube Junior can suck on to get water, and on Sunday there will also be a black tube stuck down his suit to blow cool air, because the interior gets up around 100 degrees, and sometimes, during the summer, 130. One more thing: All the teams paste decals of headlights and brake lights onto their cars to heighten the illusion that they’re driving the same sort of car that Bob has out in the driveway.

          Ironically, stock-car racing is the most popular form of racing in America because it seems to be the most pedestrian. Back in the Sixties, guys bought regular Chevelles or Dodge Chargers, yanked out the passenger seats, threw in some roll bars and went racing. Nowadays the cars are constructed by the race teams themselves - I actually saw someone bending and molding a big piece of sheet metal into a door - and they’re nothing like any car you ccan buy from Chevy. But Junior’s “Chevy” shows up on TV, shaped like the car Bob owns, with headlights and brake lights - which doesn’t even make sense because why would a race car need headlights? They drive during the day! - and Bob says to himself, “Hey, that car’s just 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 like 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 two. When his turn comes, he flicks the lever to start the engine, and the beast cackles loudly, then begins 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 drops his arm, and Junior steps on the gas and flies off like a low-slung comet, sounding like the humming of a six-foot-long hornet an inch from your ear, and when the lap is over and the speed is flashed on the board - 172.216 mph, a new track record - the crowd thunders. He has bested the old record - correction, demolished it - by more than two miles an hour.

          He parks, and his team runs over to celebrate. “When ya drove into the corner,” says 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 seems as though you took that first corner without braking - an impossibility! We thought you’d never get off the gas! You the man, baby!”)

          Junior jumps out of the car, ecstatic. “It doesn’t matter if we git the pole [position],” he says, beaming like a kid getting good presents at Christmas. “That was awesome!”

          But when ESPN and local TV rush over to get a comment, he mutes his excitement: “The car handled really good. I don’t know if it’ll stand up as far as the pole goes, but it’ll be up there somewhere toward the front. My expectations at the first of the week were to come in here and make the top twenty-five, and that hasn’t changed.”

          After the cameras disappear, Junior says, “I don’t wanna sit here and go, ‘Whoo-hoo!’ and then get beat, and have everyone go, ‘What an asshole.’”

          And sure enough, his track record lasts about six minutes. Ricky Rudd tops him by three-tenths of a second.

          Junior looks down the track and sees his father walking onto pit road for his qualifying run. “There’s Dad,” he says. “Let’s go talk to him. A hundred bucks says my daddy give me shit for gittin’ beat. He don’t say,  ‘Nice goin’.’ He’ll say, ‘Why’d you get beat?’”

          Junior jogs down the track and catches his old man. Before Junior can say a word, Dad ribs him in a barbed but loving town, “What happened? Why ain’t ya first? What’d ya do wrong?”

          “I don’t know,” Junior says with a laugh. Photographers snap wildly behind them.

          “What should I do?” Dad says as another car flies by. “What were ya doin’?”

          Junior says, “Run deep, brake hard, turn left.” It was about the most smartass thing he could say without being rude.

          “Run deep, brake hard?” Dad laughs. Terry Labonte, another top driver, is walking by. Dad grabs Labonte’s arm and says, “Listen to him,” then turns back to Junior. “How ya get ‘round there, now?”

          “Run deep, brake hard, turn left.”

          The veterans laugh. “He don’t even know how he did it!” Dad says. There is a pause. Then Dad pats Junior on the shoulder, silently saying, “Good job.”

          A little later, Junior is back in his trailer, watching other cars qualify on ESPN2. no one beats Ricky Rudd, and only one other driver, Scott Pruett, beats Junior. At the press conference for the top three qualifiers, a reporter asks Junior’s relationship with his father.

          “Well,” Junior says, “durin’ practice and qualifyin’ it was ‘Dad, car owner.’” Junior actually races for Dale Earnhardt Inc., in a car owned by Dad, although the car Dad races doesn’t actually belong to him, 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,’” Junior says. “Then when the race starts, it’s diff’rent. Last week at Rockingham, 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 is asked, If you were leading on the last lap and Dad was right behind you, would Dad use on of his legendary tricks to spin you out and take the checkered flag for himself? Junior doesn’t pause: “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 in 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 dance halls, speak-easys and bootleggers in cars big enough to carry 100 gallons of the stuff - maybe 700 pounds - and still fast enough to outrun the cops: Ford or Pontiac sedans with killer engines and real stiff suspensions - liquor cars. Racing’s first superstar, Junior Johnson, was a moonshiner. He could always outrun the cops, until they got radios.

          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-car racing, now the country’s most popular spectator sport - bigger than football or baseball or basketball, bigger even than professional wrestling. On any of the thirty-six weekends a year, as many as 150,000 people or more show up to watch NASCAR at the tracks, and many millions more watch on TV. “In the South,” says Crisp, a natural comedian, “ya see stock-cars everywhere - 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.”

          In the late Forties, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was founded. It presided over a sport where the track and the stands and everything in between were filled with good ol’ boys. Crisp describes the average fan: “He hunts, his dad taught him to hunt, and his dad taught him to hunt. He drinks Jack Daniel’s 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.”

          Dale Earnhardt Jr. has a pickup truck, loves dogs and maintains a certain down-homeness about him, but 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 the 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 on what’s 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 s’posed 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, ‘cause 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, some of whom aren’t from the South - Matt Kenseth from Wisconsin, Tony Stewart from Indiana - and some 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 says. “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. It’s not easy to refuse all 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, are the head and neck of a deer.

 

          On a Friday night, the Speedway is quiet and empty, and around ten Junior heads out for a walk around the track and another story. “I’d just started drivin’ my late-model car,” he says. The late-model series is the lowest rung of organized stock-car racing. “We had this shitbox of a car, and we wereracin’ at this track with all the big dawgs.” The Speedway’s rock-concert bright lights are on. The only sound, besides our feet on the concrete, is the muffled snarl of dirt-track racing half a mile away.

          “My crew chief was an old-timer everyone knew, named Gary Hargett, and he ordered a brand-new car for me 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 ‘fore we even start on it. You guys should get it midway through the season.’ And then he says, ‘By the way, where’s your driver at?’ And I was standing a little ways away and Gary’s like, ‘He’s over 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, but that’s how we do back home. After the race, Rick come up to Gary and said, ‘That was pretty awesome. We’ll start on your shit Monday.’ And Rick’s been a good friend ever since. But I always remembered what Rick said, and everywhere I go, when I walk in 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 in Concord, North Carolina, an hour’s drive from his house in 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, at 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 to Norfolk, Virginia. “She didn’t have the means to git us another house or take care of us,” Junior says, “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 says, and talks happily of her plan to retire and move back to the Charlotte area within the next year. “She’s awesome.”

          When Junior arrived in his dad’s custody, racing was a very small sport. “The racks they raced at were shit holes,” Junior says. “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. says, “I was workin’ and racin’ and goin’ all the time.”

          “We’d go upstairs and sit down on the couch,” Junior says, “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.  He was so in his racin’ thing , you could hardly sometimes have a conversation with him, ‘cause his mind was on what he was thinkin’ about.” It’s been suggested by people who know them that Junior became driver to get his father’s attention. Both deny it. But there seems to be a kernel of truth to it.

          Dad grew up at the track, watching his father, Ralph, a champion stock-car driver in the Fifties. Dale drove his black number 3 Chevy to a record-tying 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 most revered drivers in the history of the sport.

 

 

 

We are the champions: Dale Sr. (Far Left) after winning a race in Daytona, in February, and Dale Jr. after his first victory, April 2nd.

 

          He took his winnings to Mooresville and built a great palace of a racing shrine, perhaps the greatest ever constructed by NASCAR money, lovingly called the Garage Mahal. There are security guards in cowboy boots and red button-down shirts that say Dale Earnhardt Inc., surrounded by corporate offices for DEI’s 600 employees, all of Dad’s trophies, old winning cars preserved for public view and big glass display cases for the tuxedos he wore to the Winston Cup banquets during his championship seasons and the gowns worn by his wife and the cute pink polka-dot toddler’s dress sported by their daughter Taylor and pictures of Ralph Earnhardt and all the commercials Dad and Junior have made and a gift shop with all sorts of souvenirs - spoons, toy bears, pins, watches, shirts, robes, beer steins, shot glasses, tiny model cars (all of which earned Junior around $2 million last year), and, this just in, a Dale Earnhardt Monopoly set. The game 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 affix to your car to give the impression you bought it at the old man’s dealership.

          As all of this is 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 grease monkey for $180 a week. “I got to where I could do an oil change in eight minutes,” he says. “I was really proud of that.”

          Then one Saturday night in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, he races 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 everybody else went to play with it. I learned everything - 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 drunk up the sodas. And that’s just people skills.”

          In time, he moved 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. “But growin’ up as a kid, I didn’t try to drive race cars, 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.’ 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 ten o’clock Sunday morning, Junior is 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 is just over an hour away, and there is about as much tension in the air as there is in your house before you drive to the 7-Eleven for milk.

          “The Last American Hero is real red-neck-y,” Crisp says of the film many consider the best ever made on racing.

          “But it’s the only racin’ movie that’s about racin’,” Junior says. “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.”

          “Hear Like a Wheel is uncool,” Shane says of the Bonnie Bedelia film, “’cause they had it like she’s gittin’ her ass beat by her boyfriend.”

          “What about Days of Thunder?” someone asks about the Tom Cruise movie. All at once everyone says, “Sucked!”

          “Grand Prix kicks ass,” Crisp says.

          “Here’s Le Mans,” Junior says. “A bunch of people sittin’ aroun’ for five minutes. Then, all of a sudden, snap, they’re racin’, then, snap, they’re all sittin’ around. No dialogue whatsoever. It’s like someone actually followed the guy around, filmin’ him.”

          “Yeah,” Shane says. “It was realistic.”

          “Yeah, it was real,” Junior says, “but it didn’t have a plot and shit like Grand Prix. Who was the guy in Grand Prix?”

          “James Garner,” everyone says.

          “I like that guy,” Junior says.

          “The girl liked him in Grand Prix,”  Shane says.

          “’Member? And her husband got in a wreck and she turned out to be a bee-itch!” Crisp says as though he were Snoop Dogg. The room crumbles in hysterics. “She was a big beeee-itch! A biznitch!”

          There is no pre-race ritual, no discussion of strategy, no prayer, no psyching. It seems strange. Junior is moments away from the event that defined his week, and, more, is about to spend four hours risking his life, and he seems largely unconcerned. You don’t do anything special before you go out to race?

          Junior looks puzzled, as if the idea of doing something special had never occurred to him.

          “I think ya do a lot of soul-searching,” Shane says. “I don’t think you notice it, but you usually walk around in a daze.”

          “One think I do,” Junior says, “is, when I walk out the trailer door, I don’t wait up for people.”

          “His mind is already there,” Shane says.

          “I go at my pace. Real fast.”

          “Almost to the point where if ya didn’t know him, you’d think he was rude,” Crisp says.

          “It would wear me down to psych myself up all mornin’,” Junior says. “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 till 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? ‘Cause if I finish bad, I’m depressed as hell for the next week.”

          That’s it? C’mon! You could die today!

          With a childlike innocence, Junior says, “Ya think?”

          Everyone laughs.

          “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 is 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. But guys normally walk away.”

          Suddenly he turns 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!”

          Then Junior says, “Last week we were drivin’ up to the racetrack, 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 racetrack 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 pauses. “When I turn seventy, 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 & roll music.”

 

 

 

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