The ties that drive

Sporting News, The, August 6, 2001 by Lee Spencer

Dale Earnhardt Jr. has journeyed through a diverse upbringing and become a champion--the type of man his father could respect

It's not your typical family tree with branches stretching elegantly toward the sky.

The Earnhardt clan more closely resembles a Joshua tree, with gnarled, contorted limbs leading in myriad directions. But the timber that has grown out of the Carolina clay is strong, flourishing in the face of the ever-changing fortunes of racing to become one of motorsports' most prolific dynasties.

Although the most recent patriarch--seven-time Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt--died at the age of 49 in a last-lap crash in February at Daytona, there remains a family determined to carry on the dream that first captivated Dale's father, Ralph Earnhardt, more than a half-century ago.

And there remains a son, Dale Jr., driven to succeed so he could gain his father's attention off the track the same searing motivation that pushed his father a generation before.

In the months after Dale Earnhardt died, it was no surprise that Junior's performance suffered on the track. He contends he still was focused, but the results didn't back that up, not until he won the pole and finished eighth--his first top 10 finish in more than two months--at Texas Motor Speedway.

"If you're looking at it from a performance standpoint, we probably could have been better during the first half of the season," Junior says now, "but we had some bad luck"

Then came the return to Daytona. Earnhardt's widow, Teresa, the CEO of Dale Earnhardt Inc., did not return, the memory of the crash too painful and the scars from the family's legal right to prevent the release of the autopsy photos too fresh. Junior went to Florida early but not immediately to the track. He partied with his homeboys and some of the Miami Dolphins cheerleaders at the beach.

"I went to the track that Tuesday afternoon," Junior says. "Nobody was out there but some people who work there. I kind of just drove around. I sat down in Turns 3 and 4 for a while and kind of thought and looked around and soaked it all in so when I got ready to get into the racecar, I could get in the car and be confident to go out there. That kind of helped."

He ran second in the Daytona 500, a finish that was ensured by his father's crash. This time, in the Pepsi 400, Junior was prepared to seize victory, and he won convincingly--leading 116 of 160 laps and moving from seventh to first in fewer than two laps after a late-race restart. "To go back in there and win that race, I was just blown away" he says. "I just couldn't believe it."

It was racing's feel-good story of the year.

Junior says the years he watched and raced against his father were the best teaching tools in the battles against Daytona and Talladega, tracks at which NASCAR mandates restrictor plates be used to slow the cars. But against The Intimidator, the master of restrictor-plate racing, those lessons often were ineffective.

"I always kind of got toward the front, and then it was always him who was the one pulling the tricks on me that made me fall back," Junior says. "I was always worried about where he was. I knew he was going to be racing for the lead--side by side or have it all to himself."

That motorsports cat-and-mouse game, along with his team's top-notch equipment, built Junior's on-track confidence. But his father's absence was the crucial element in the Pepsi 400.

"Without him in that race, I felt invincible," Junior says. "I had everything that he had, knowledge and confidence, what he ... took to those races. I just felt like I couldn't be touched."

Richard Childress, Dale Earnhardt's team owner and friend for the last 20 years of his life, doesn't think there was any one thing that stands out among the lessons father taught son.

"It wasn't so much Dale molding Dale Jr. as Dale Jr. wanting to be Dale Jr.," Childress says. "Dale went out and did his thing. But he had someone watching every move he made, and that was Dale Jr. It was just like Dale watching his father, Ralph, race."

To understand the Earnhardt strength of will and the compulsion to succeed, look at the environment that has enveloped family members from birth. Dale Jr. is a third-generation champion whose grandfathers, both of them, built cars for a living. The Littlest E seemed almost genetically predisposed to racing.

(Reduce speed: Dizzying ascent up that Joshua tree begins here.)

Junior's grandfather Ralph was a well-known racer and engine builder in Kannapolis, N.C., otherwise known as Towel Town because of a dependence on a single employer, Cannon Mills. The 1956 champion of the Late Model Sportsman division (now known as the Busch Series), Ralph Earnhardt learned to stretch every penny as far as it would race.

Other relationships that exist today within the Earnhardt clan were forged generations ago. Junior's crew chief (and uncle), Tony Eury Sr., remembers watching his father, Ralph Eury, race against Ralph

Earnhardt. The rivalry became a friendship after the elder Eury came to the Earnhardts to fix a home radiator, and the conversation turned to racing. Earnhardt was racing dirt-track cars out of the garage that still stands next to the family homestead at Coach and Sedan streets. When Eury moved up a racing class, Earnhardt built his engines, and their sons played and wrestled while the fathers worked and raced.