The Intimidator: Dale Earnhardt’s Life In The Fast Lane

This is Lee Habib, and this is “Our American Stories,” the show where America is the star and the American people. Very rarely can one man encapsulate the image of a particular sport to the average observer. In basketball: perhaps Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Magic Johnson. Notice it’s not a singular name, but in NASCAR, only one name comes to mind for most people, and that’s Dale Earnhardt, who died on this day in February of two thousand and one. And the millions of us who are watching, well, we’ll never forget that day. Here to tell the story of Dale is Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo Sports and the author of “Earnhardt Nation.”

Take it away, Jay.

Daytona International Speedway can house as many as one hundred and fifty thousand fans, and on this day the entire track was sold out. It was a beautiful day, blue skies, warm weather. It’s the kind of weather that everybody else in the country is looking at Daytona and saying, “Man, I wish I was there.” Down below in the pits, you could see the cars lined up in a row, one after the other, and on pit row it’s absolute chaos. There are drivers there, there are crew chiefs there, there’s family there, there’s media there.

But right there by the number.

Three, right there by Dale Earnhardt’s black Goodwrench number three is Teresa Earnhardt, sharp and businesslike, in a deep purple blazer, black slacks, and sunglasses. She kisses him once, her right hand curled around the back of his head. Then she kisses him again. They’re not long kisses or deep, meaningful ones. They’re loving but routine kisses a wife gives her husband as he heads.

Off to his job.

Broadly speaking, the Daytona 500 is called NASCAR’s Super Bowl. That’s not quite fair for a number of reasons. First of all, the Daytona 500 is older than the Super Bowl, and second of all, the Daytona 500 can house more people at the track than the Super Bowl can, sometimes by as much as a factor of three. Also, most importantly, the Daytona 500 starts the season rather than ending it. And on this particular Daytona 500, you had the start of a new century, at the start of a new millennium, and you had the start of a new era in NASCAR, and you had both young drivers and old drivers in the field, drivers like Dale Earnhardt, drivers like Bobby and Terry Labonte, drivers like Mark Martin, who had been around for a long time.

And then you had new drivers who were coming along, like.

Dale Earnhardt Jr., like Matt Kenseth, and then like Jeff Gordon.

Here at Daytona, I’m going with a man who has gone more races here at Daytona than anybody in history. Dale Earnhardt, “the Intimidator,” will pull.

It to Victory Lane with a checkered flag. Balls Steve is in favor. The Daytona 500 had a very special meeting for Dale Earnhardt, and he always loved this race more than any other, chased it for many, many years. On this day he was preparing to run the race when NASCAR was experiencing a seismic change. The significance was: Fox Sports had just begun broadcasting NASCAR. This was going to be their first race, and the reason why this was significant was it marked NASCAR’s elevation into a higher level.

Of American sports.

For many, many years beforehand, NASCAR had been spread out over as many as seven broadcast networks. You had to check every single weekend to figure out where the race was going to be.

What channel it was going to be on.

Fox comes in, and off of about ten years’ worth of success broadcasting the NFL, they said, “You know what? We’re going to broadcast NASCAR now. We’re going to make NASCAR huge.” And what they did was, in their characteristic Fox way, made it into an event, made it into a spectacle, and at the center of that spectacle was Dale Earnhardt.

Can you win your second 500 today?

We got a good shot at. I got a good race car. Little wind day, a little exciting.

Don’t see something you probably hadn’t never seen on Fox.

He was going to be the star for Fox going forward. They were going to have him; have the entire season centered on him. They were going to be bringing Dale Earnhardt into the Fox NFL studios later that year. They had an entire plan, and this was legitimizing NASCAR in the eyes of the world. It had been thought of as a Southern hillbilly sport, a bunch of rednecks running around in circles, and this was a sign that the entire country was going to be taking NASCAR more seriously. So it had all of the trappings, all of the celebration, all of the build-up that you would expect with a major Fox event.

Every driver dreams of winning that Daytona 500.

Michael Waltrip dreams just of winning this.

Rate, any rate.

The Daytona 500 is two hundred laps of racing on a two-and-a-half-mile track, hence the five hundred in the race’s name, and for many of those two hundred laps you have drivers who were kind of jockeying for position. It’s one of the two biggest tracks on the NASCAR circuit. It’s a superspeedway, which means drivers can go all out, hammered down, mash the pedal to the floor, and never let up all the.

Way around the track to go.

What that also means is that the wrecks can be a lot more devastating. It can be a lot more catastrophic. It’s a high-speed chess match, except that in this case the chess pieces off and fly unto the air, and you have that on Lap 175 when Robby Gordon hit the back of Ward Burton’s car. Ward Burton runs into Tony Stewart, and Tony Stewart’s car flips almost vertical, with the car pointing straight up and down. Now, the sad irony of this is that the car narrowly misses Dale Earnhardt’s number three. If Stewart had come down on Earnhardt’s car, if he clipped it, if he caused a little bit of damage, who knows how the rest of the day would have turned out. But in the end, what happened was, in order to clean up this wreck, they stop the race. They prepare for the final few laps of the race, and at this point what we have is Dale Earnhardt himself up at the front of the pack alongside Michael Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt Jr.

These are two.

Drivers who are the drivers for Dale Earnhardt’s own team. So Earnhardt had his own interests at heart, but he also had these two drivers to look out for as well. And so as the final laps of the race wound down, it became apparent that what Earnhardt was doing was setting up these two drivers to win.

They were at the front of the field.

Michael Waltrip in first, Dale Jr. in second, Dale Sr. in third, and what Dale Sr. was doing was playing defense. He was, as the old saying goes, driving three wide all by himself. He was trying to hold off the entire rest of the field to give his two drivers a chance to win. Now, in the final turn of the two thousand and one Daytona 500, what happened was it got to be too much.

Behind them, come out.

Dale Sr. gets turned into the wall by a Sterling Marlin’s car. It drives straight into the wall, and what happens then is that the car, Dale Sr.’s car, hits the wall at an angle, at a sharp impact, and then rolls back down the hill. Now, seeing a wreck at the end of the Daytona 500 is not all that uncommon. It happens an awful lot of is as drivers are trying to jockey into position for that final run at the checkered flag. What happened in this case was Dale Sr.’s car drifts back down into the infield and then nothing.

When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Dale Earnhardt’s life here on “Our American Stories.” Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past. Know that all of our stories about American history are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t cut to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we return to “Our American Stories” and our story on Dale Earnhardt with Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo Sports and author of “Earnhardt Nation.” When we last left off, Jay was talking about the end of Earnhardt’s life. But to fully understand the man, we have to start from the beginning. Let’s get back to the story.

Take Sunset Road off Interstate 77, just north of Charlotte. Cruise past the local McDonald’s, Arby’s, and other classic symbols of Americana. Turn on Statesville Road and drive past the exhibit halls of the Metrolina Trade Show Expo, home of dusty rows of discount DVDs, decades.

Old Beanie Babies.

Park in the open field near the rusty fence that encloses something large beyond. From this distance, he can’t quite tell what. There’s a bouquet of plastic flights jammed into the chain-link fence, a jarring splash of brilliant purple amid rust and ruin. The flowers mark the entry to the long-defunct Metrolina Speedway, a place every bit as legendary here as old Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The chains that held the fence together lie on the ground, their locks beside them. If you like, you can walk right in. A short, root-cracked paved road leads up to the top of the grandstands. The sign that used to arc over this walkway, “Welcome to Metrolina Speedway” (the “I,” a stylized number one), is long gone, as are the red and white painted ticket booth at the base of the hill and the press box atop the grandstand. All that’s left now are those grandstands, giant steps of painted concrete looking out on emptiness. Graffiti-covered walls circumscribed the track’s half-mile oval. Weeds and time have claimed it all. Look a little closer, though. Use little imagination. Once two dozen cars wheeled through these turns, spitting red Carolina clay of the exhaust and oil-scented, the sound of their engines so loud it was just one unified, bone-rumbling hum. In these stands, families cheered on sons and brothers and fathers, and on rare occasions, daughters, who threw themselves hard into the turns, and often hard into the walls, where something they labored over for days, months, even years could be reduced to scrap in moments. Imagine the desperation of crews trying to coax life out of a dead engine. Imagine the exultation of drivers using wits, cunning, brains, and balls to triumph over a field of sons of just every bit as crafty as they were. The races often ran on Saturday night. Yes, but what happened here was as holy and sanctified as anything you’d experienced the next morning. This desolate track is the place where family bonds were forged, broken, and then forged even stronger. This once proud arena is the place where the most famous story in racing first hit redline speed.

A few miles up the.

Road stands Kannapolis, North Carolina, a small towny miles away from Charlotte.

This is a.

Company town built to house the workers who worked at the Cannon Mills. People who lived there worked in the mill morning, noon, and night. Every day except Sunday, the mill would run, and every day except Sunday, the workers would leave their houses, work at the mill for their shift, and return home. It was a very programmed and defined existence, and this is exactly where the legend of Dale Earnhardt was born. Kannapolis was the home of Ralph Earnhardt, who was born in nineteen twenty-eight and dropped out of school in sixth grade to work in the Cannon Mills. He was expected to live his entire life the way that so many of his neighbors did.

Grow up, go to school.

For a time, work in the mills, raise a family, and keep on working until he retired. But Ralph Earnhardt was built to something different than most mill workers, and Ralph Earnhardt had a need and a desire to race. He had a talent for it, and he nurtured it, and he raced as much as he possibly could while doing mill work. At the same time, he found the millwork to be unnecessarily confining, and he found the freedom of racing to be what brought him happiness. So in nineteen fifty-three, after having spent years working full-time and then racing in his off-hours, he decided, “I’m going to give racing full-time a try.” He told his wife Martha this. She was horrified. They had a bunch of children there. They had five children, including young Dale, who was born in nineteen fifty-one. And yet what Ralph did was managed to turn himself into a single-person enterprise responsible for every single part of the racing machine, from driving the car in races, to getting the car to and from races, to repairing it during the week when he wasn’t racing, and he managed to pull it off. He managed to run an entire racing operation for many, many years, and as he he did, he built himself into one of the most significant figures in early NASCAR history. When Ralph Earnhardt was racing, it was a very different landscape than what we see today or even what Dale Earnhardt saw on his day. There was a lot of racing on dirt, there was a lot of racing on concrete, but there wasn’t a whole lot of organization to.

Either of them.

A lot of drivers learned their racing style through bootlegging. You learn to drive a car pretty quickly and pretty well when you’re running from the law. And they learned how to handle a car; they learned how to set up a car; they learned how to wheel a car in a way that even today’s drivers would would have trouble matching. When Ralph Earnhardt made the decision to go full-time into racing, he made the promise to his wife Martha that the children would not starve, that they wouldn’t go hungry, that they wouldn’t lose their house. And having that always burning behind him made him that much more responsible and that much more driven to do everything possible to win. The way that NASCAR works now, even the last-place finisher gets a paycheck. But at the time when Ralph Earnhardt was racing in all these little unsanctioned events all over North Carolina and all over the South, if you finished much further below second, you didn’t get anything, and worse, you could get your car wrecked, and you could come out in the hole by several hundred or even thousand dollars if things didn’t work out that way. That was a way for you to. It certainly focused your interest and your desire and your willpower in terms of racing, if you knew that you were racing for your family’s groceries that week. One of the innovations that Ralph Earnhardt brought to racing was something called tire stagger. And what this is, is a way for a driver to have his tires last longer and provide better grip.

You’ve got to have strong tires. You’ve got to have tires that will hold you onto the track. And Ralph Earnhardt figured out a little bit of geometry in the sense that if you think of a car going in a right line, then the tires are going to wear equally. But if you think of a car going around a turn, going around a left-hand turn, then the left-side tires are going to be traveling a shorter distance than the right-side tires. This means the right-side tires are going to blow out quicker because there’s more mileage being put on them over the course of a race. Ralph Earnhardt figured this out and started putting larger tires on the outside. Therefore, there was more tread to be worn off as they were driving around. He was able, using this, to outlast his competitors, to stay tight on a track when many of them couldn’t, and he was able to use this technique to prolong the life of his tires, to prolong the life of his cars, and basically keep himself off a wall. He figured this out with a sixth-grade education. Obviously, it’s been refined to a much, much greater degree at this point, but Ralph was one of the first people to figure this out and use this in a race to start winning races and bringing home that money. Dale Earnhardt was born in nineteen fifty-one, and he grew up in kind of a perfect encapsulation of a certain kind of Americana. He played Cowboys and Indians in the yard. As a kid, he played with cap guns. He would race go-karts, and he would play it in the afternoons, and his mom would call him home for supper. So it was the sort of idyllic upbringing that really laid the foundation for him. But along with that, he had the kind of classic American, silent, reserved father who would not often give a lot of praise, both because that was Ralph Earnhardt’s personality.

And because he didn’t see the need in it.

He focused more on what was right in front of him, and what was in front of him was trying to win a race. Dale Earnhardt grew up idolizing his father. Dale adored Ralph, Dale worshiped Ralph, and he spent hours and hours out in the garage paying attention to what his father was doing, trying to learn from his father, trying to understand what it was that his father was doing under the hoods of all these cars. Dale Earnhardt decided to race for the same reason that his father had. He was good at it and it kept him out of the mill.

And we’ve been listening to Jay Busby tell one heck of a story about Dale Earnhardt and his father, and we learned that his fathe