Driver #8: Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

(Page 1: The Future Has Arrived)

The Daytona 500 is known as the Great American Race. Some insist on referring to it as the Super Bowl of racing. I like the Super Bowl, but I think that having every team and every NASCAR superstar in one race is more compelling than a game with only two teams. No matter what you choose to call it, the 500 is the biggest race of the NASCAR Winston Cup season.

I am Ralph Dale Earnhardt Jr., driver of the No. 8 Budweiser NASCAR Winston Cup car. The 2000 season is my first in American racing's biggest league. I drove five races in the Winston Cup series as a practice run last year, but now an entire season looms ahead for me and my team. Some of the media and fans are calling me the most heralded and hyped rookie in NASCAR's fifty-plus-year history. That kind of crap puts a lot of pressure on me, but no more than I put on myself.

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Call me what you want. Most call me Dale Jr. Or Dale. Or Junior. Or Little E. My dad started calling me Junebug when I was young. Hell, I'll answer to any of 'em.

I am the second-oldest son of a racing legend, seven-time NASCAR Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt, whose skill behind the wheel and an ironhanded, commonsense approach to life created a huge self-made success on the track, in the boardroom, and in the family room.

My life is full of contradictions. On the one hand, if you believe everything you read, I'm some kind of rising superstar; I've even been called the future of NASCAR. But on the other hand, I'm really just a normal guy. I was born October 10, 1974, and like most other guys in their twenties, I like nothing more than to chill out at home, have a cold beer and hang with my buddies. Some people think of me as a hell-raising partyer, known to occasionally play the drums on stage with famous rock bands. Truth is, much of the time I'm quiet, introspective, and sometimes almost painfully shy. I think I'm a lot like other people my age, and I hope I'm also growing to be a lot like my dad. If I can ever come close to my father—being successful on and off the track and with my family—I'll be all right.

My dad has won thirty-four races here at Daytona—more than twice as many races as anyone else—including wins in the Daytona 500, the 125-mile qualifying races, the International Race of Champions, the Busch Clash, the Firecracker 400, and the Busch Series races. Yet he lost the Daytona 500 nineteen times before winning in his twentieth start in 1998. I thought Dad was just as great before he won that race as he was after he won, but some say your career is incomplete without winning it at least once. It's like someone saying an athlete was unsuccessful in their career—no matter how great their stats were—if they didn't win the Super Bowl, World Series, or Olympic gold. I guess, because I saw Dad try so hard and still not win it so many times, I feel differently. Sure, I want to win it right now, but it's not everything.

When Dad finally won the Daytona 500, it was one of his greatest victories. People remember that race for the way every crew member from every team ran out on pit lane to give him a high five after he had won. I think that showed how much he was liked and respected among his competitors despite his "Intimidator" nickname and reputation. After slapping hands with hundreds of crew guys, he went out in the grass and did donuts for a few minutes. It was a great moment and I remember how happy he was afterwards.

This is my first Daytona 500. Literally. I've never even seen one in person. I was always in school each February and couldn't travel to watch my dad race until the summer months. Just driving into the infield of the track through the tunnel underneath Turn 4 is exciting. The history and the prestige of this place are just so immense that I can't wait to say I've raced in the Daytona 500. No matter what else I do in life, no one can ever take that away from me.

Or, should I say, I hope this is my first Daytona 500. As a rookie driver with a rookie team, there is no guarantee at all that our car will even be in the starting field. More than fifty teams are trying to gain one of the forty-three starting positions, and just because my team and I have won the last two Busch Series championships (NASCAR's version of Triple-A baseball), that doesn't help us at all now.

I can't imagine not making the starting lineup. There has been so much buildup to this one event that the pressure is immense on the whole team. It's the first race of the year, and people have been talking about Daytona since an hour after the 1999 season ended. Hell, for me it goes back more than eighteen months to the day that we announced to the world that Dale Earnhardt Inc. (DEI) was pairing up with Budweiser to move up to the Winston Cup series in the year 2000. It was exciting and terrifying at the same time.

Every sponsor makes big plans for this race, and every team spends the entire off-season preparing their best new cars just to make it into the starting field. Anything the crew can imagine (or purchase) is put into the car to win this one race. I have a good team behind me, but strange things can happen, so you hope and hope and hope that all goes well. I don't know how I could face my fans and my sponsors if I failed to qualify. I may as well take the rest of the year off.

In the Busch Series, we always had a fast car here, but I never finished better than fourteenth place in the two races at Daytona. My first race was in 1998, and it ended with my car flipping down the back straightaway at something like 170 miles per hour. As I was flipping, all I could see was earth, sky, earth, sky, earth, sky. . . . When I flipped for the final time, the ground looked as if it was being thrown at me like a giant prop from the movie Twister. Only after the car came to a stop did I realize I had landed upside down. It was as wild and exhilarating as any ride I've ever taken. When you clear your head and realize you're not seriously hurt, you think, Hell yeah! That was wild!

The Daytona 500 is the climax of two weeks of practice and qualifying, as well as other special races like the Bud Shootout (reserved exclusively for last year's Bud Pole position winners), two 125-mile qualifying sprints, an IROC race, which is a fight between twelve champion drivers in identical cars (I'll be racing against Dad in that one, too), a 300-mile Busch race, a NASCAR truck series race, and a helluva lot more.

Copyright © 2002 by Dale Earnhardt, Jr. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of http://www.twbookmark.com. Click here for ordering information for "Dale Earnhardt, Jr.: Driver #8" at Amazon.com.