Speed, Guts, and Glory

by Joe Garner

  Transformed from Intimidator to icon, the legend of Dale Earnhardt still looms larger than life, and like so many battles in his storied career, the memory of his Daytona 500 victory lives on.

  Dale Rides the Air at Talladega

  “Dale could will his car to do whatever the hell he wanted it to do,” crew chief Andy Petree once said of the Intimidator. He'd seen it. The miraculous rallies. The prodigious passes. The mysterious bursts of speed through holes that didn't exist.

  And when it came to high-speed drafting, the Man in Black became the Prince of Darkness.

  “This man could see the air,” a stupefied Dale Jarrett once said. “He denied it, but I saw him do things that proved it.” And what he did at the Winston 500 at Talladega on October 15, 2000, still has people scratching their heads in wonder.

  That weekend began on a sour note for Earnhardt with the eleventh-hour introduction of even more restrictive restrictor plates, horsepower-sapping devices designed to curb “unsafe” speeds on big tracks like Talladega and Daytona.

  Ever the lone wolf, Earnhardt detested the bunched-up, pack-style racing they engendered, although he'd virtually written the book on the art. Disgusted with the wet-blanket move, he traipsed back to the garage clutching the modified device in front of him like a sack of dog waste.

  The next afternoon, running early in a nose-to-tail conga line on the 2.66-mile tri-oval, he discovered that NASCAR's changes had drastically altered the track's drafting dynamics.

  A driver could search the whole race and not find the right groove, and Earnhardt spent much of the afternoon doing just that. High, low, front, back—nothing seemed to work. But his brain was spinning furiously, calculating the possibilities.

  Dale Earnhardt (3) of Kannapolis, N.C., leads Mike Skinner (31) of Susanville, California and Dale Earnhardt Jr (8) of Kannapolis, North Carolina, during the Winston 500 on Sunday afternoon, October 15, 2000, at the Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega, Alabama. Earnhardt won the race.

  Boxed in and running eighteenth with just five laps remaining, it seemed his bag of tricks was dry. And then it happened. He gave Rich Bickle a nudge high and moved by him. Four laps to go. On the backstretch, he discovered a tunnel and blew by six more cars. Then another. With three laps left, he was eighth. He scuttled to the outside, then the middle, then back again, riding the draft. Competitors dropped. Earnhardt was fourth.

  Earnhardt weaved to break the draft and held off the jackals for his 10th career win at Talladega, as 140,000 delirious fans rubbed their eyes in amazement. Was it possible? Was he even human?

  “The Intimidator is scraped and beaten…but he will not be denied!” shouted ESPN broadcaster Jerry Punch. “Two laps to go…Wow!”

  Heading into the finale, they were running three-wide at the point, with Earnhardt on the outside. Kenny Wallace, hanging on Earnhardt's backside with Joe Nemechek inches behind, popped the Intimidator, sending their three-car draft line flying past the others. And then there was no getting around the number 3 car.

  Earnhardt weaved to break the draft and held off the jackals for his tenth career win at Talladega, as 140,000 delirious fans rubbed their eyes in amazement. Was it possible? Was he even human?

  “He's behind me and he still wins?” asked a befuddled Jeff Gordon, who finished fourth. “My gosh, are you kidding me?”

  The jubilant forty-eight-year-old Earnhardt, in serious contention for a championship for the first time since 1995, hopped from his car and danced a jig in front of the press box. “They need to work out, don't they?” he wisecracked of his competitors. “I'm not a bit tired.”

  Later, before retiring to his trailer for a celebratory vodka-and-Sunny Delight, he marveled at his accomplishment. “It's beyond me,” he confessed. “You saw it. I couldn't believe it.”

  The astonishing victory—his seventy-sixth in a career of mind-boggling wins—would be his last.

  “The Intimidator” Is Born

  He was tenacious. He was fearsome. He was seat-of-the-pants, white-knuckle racing at its finest. And following his dogfight at The Winston in Charlotte on May 17, 1987, Dale Earnhardt would forever be known as “the Intimidator.”

  “That's about the nearest thing you can get to good old grassroots racing,” Rusty Wallace remarked of the rowdy showdown, which featured a hefty dose of metal-scraping, a fistfight or two, and enough trash talk to rival professional wrestling. “Earnhardt drove like an absolute madman.”

  A madman piloting a 700-horsepower lawn mower.

  The mayhem began during the $200,000 competition's final portion, a ten-lap shootout that saw Earnhardt and Bill Elliott go toe-to-toe from the opening bell. Just seconds into the race, pole sitter Elliott, pinched to the apron by Earnhardt and Geoff Bodine, clipped Bodine, allowing Earnhardt, who started fourth, to squeeze by on the inside for the lead. Elliott fell in behind, taking a few neighborly whacks at the number 3 car's bumper.

  Then, with seven laps left, it got vicious. Coming out of Turn 4, the rivals exchanged paint, and Elliott sent Earnhardt careening off the track and into the infield grass. A mere mortal would have lost control and watched ruefully as the field whizzed by. But Earnhardt mashed the accelerator, rocketing down the lawn at 170 mph before regaining the track fifty yards later…ahead of Elliott. The grandstands went berserk.

  The plow through the pasture didn't end it. Elliott had payback coming. A lap later, with the culprit on his outside, Earnhardt squeezed him to the wall. Elliott's left rear fender crumpled, cutting a tire. Earnhardt then chased down Terry Labonte, who'd snaked ahead while Dale was dispensing his unique brand of automotive justice, to take the win by 0.74 second.

  It was a breathtaking display of dominance, but Elliott wasn't impressed. He roadblocked Earnhardt on the cool-down lap. Words were exchanged. Crew members pounded their knuckles. Near the pits, Kyle Petty and Rusty Wallace began trading wallops over the finer points of sportsmanship. The entire garage seemed primed to explode. But Earnhardt and Elliott managed to settle things like gentlemen, with threats and finger-pointing.

  “If a man has to run over you to beat you, it's time to stop,” Elliott fumed. “I'm sick of it. Everyone knows his style. If somebody doesn't do something about this, we're coming back next week and we'll see what happens.”

  Earnhardt didn't sweat the bounty on his head and in typical fashion issued a bare-knuckle challenge of his own. “Elliott put me in the grass and that upset me,” he said. “It's all over now, as far as I'm concerned. But if Bill still wants to do something about it, I'll stand flat-footed with him any day.”

  Earnhardt would finish 1987 by taking the points championship for the second straight year, notching a career-high eleven victories. But his legendary “Pass in the Grass” performance would outshine them all, standing as a testament to the unparalleled skill and tough-as-nails attitude that made him the Intimidator.

  Earnhardt Ties the King in Cup Titles

  It took NASCAR's most revered driver, Richard Petty, twenty years to establish a record most thought could never be matched. It took Dale Earnhardt just fifteen to make them think again.

  Between 1980 and 1993, Earnhardt amassed a jaw-dropping six championships—'80, '86, '87, '90, '91, and '93, more than all his active competitors combined—and was already being lionized as one of racing's all-time greats. By the fall of 1994, leading once again in the points race and needing just one more title to catch Petty, the Intimidator seemed poised to join the King at royal court.

  For the high school dropout who never imagined he'd win a single championship, let alone seven, his days sweating in the textile mills of Kannapolis, racing dirt tracks for rent money, and hightailing it from angry creditors must have seemed light-years away.

  And so was his competition. Heading into Rockingham for the twenty-ninth race of the season on October 23, 1994, Earnhardt was so far ahead of second-place Rusty Wallace that all he needed to do to reach the record books was lay back and place twenty-eighth or better in the final three cont
ests.

  Right, and Secretariat could have loped to victory in the Triple Crown.

  In front of a packed house at North Carolina Motor Speedway, the forty-three-year-old master put on a clinic, showcasing all the competitiveness, grit, and pure driving skill that had brought him to the brink of NASCAR immortality.

  Starting twentieth, he worked his way forward, diving into turns and blasting down straightaways, to lead by Lap 173. He'd fallen back during the middle stretch, but with 77 laps to go, he'd take the point again, slingshotting past Rick Mast. Mast's number 1 Ford clearly had the speed over Earnhardt's Chevy, but dog the master as he might, Mast, like so many frustrated competitors before him, couldn't find his way around the number 3 car. “Earnhardt's bumper gets mighty wide there at the end,” he'd lament.

  The shootout ended with Earnhardt taking the checkered flag just 0.06 seconds ahead of Mast for his fourth win of the season and clinching the championship two races ahead of schedule. He was in seventh heaven.

  Dale Earnhardt celebrates with his Winston Cup Series Trophy after winning the AC Delco 500 and sealing the title at the North Carolina Motor Speedway in Rockingham, North Carolina.

  Dale Earnhardt of Kannapolis, North Carolina, celebrates his win in the Goody's 500 in Bristol, Tennessee, Saturday, August 28, 1999.

  At the post-race press conference, an emotional Earnhardt dedicated the title to his old buddy Neil Bonnett, killed earlier that year during a practice run at Daytona, and then paid homage to the army of old-school vets whose noses he'd tweaked as a young ruffian filled with piss and vinegar.

  “A lot of folks have helped me get where I am,” he told the crowd. “The Pearsons, Pettys, Jarretts, Allisons, and Yarboroughs—they were aggressive racers and that's the way I drive. They made me a better racer.

  “But Richard Petty is still the King and he'll always be the King. I'm a seven-time champion.”

  Years earlier, Petty himself had weighed in on Earnhardt's future in the sport.

  “When you saw [Dale] coming, you braced yourself,” he said. “You knew that if he didn't calm down, he wasn't going to make it. But you also knew that if he ever got all that talent and attitude harnessed, he was going to be pretty darn good.”

  Just how good, not even the King could have imagined.

  The Intimidator Returns

  For sheer audacity, it would be difficult to beat Dale Earnhardt's no-holds-barred, wrecking-ball assault at the 1995 Goody's 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway on August 28, 1999. But leave it to the Man in Black to top himself. Four years after his infamous “smack in the back” propelled Terry Labonte sideways across the finish line at the storied half-mile oval, Earnhardt would provide the Bristol crowd with an even more memorable final-lap fiasco. And this time, Labonte wouldn't be smiling.

  Earnhardt entered 1999 coming off a couple unremarkable seasons, by his standards. While he'd finished in the top ten in points in both '97 and '98, he'd notched just a single win in sixty-five races, a far cry from his twenty-four victories and four Winston Cup championships in the first half of the decade. At forty-eight, perhaps time was catching up with him. After all, even his youngest son, twenty-four-year-old Dale Jr., had now joined the slew of NASCAR fledglings trying to run him down.

  But Old Ironhead was showing flashes of his earlier brilliance. He'd finished in the top ten in fourteen of twenty-three races. He was feeling strong. And like a veteran heavyweight, he was itching to demonstrate that his wicked knockout punch hadn't deserted him. And so the curtain rose on Bristol.

  Under a full moon, 140,000 fans watched rapt as Earnhardt and Terry Labonte exchanged the lead four times over the last 121 laps. The duel turned fiery with just two laps to go, as Labonte, after pitting for fresh tires, roared back from fifth place and edged up beside Earnhardt going into the third turn. The two bumped as Labonte fought for the point on the outside. In Turn 4 they scraped paint again, and this time Labonte shot onto the frontstretch with the lead.

  But if Earnhardt's rhubarb years on the South's short tracks had taught him anything, it was this: nobody steals your victory without a price. The gloves came off. With less than a yard separating the two heading into the final lap, Earnhardt went low into the first turn and caught Labonte's bumper. A plume of white smoke exploded from the number 5 car's tires and Labonte went spinning through traffic down the backstretch, spewing profanities into his radio as he met the wall. Game, set, match.

  Drowning the cheers, a chorus of boos and middle-finger salutes met Earnhardt as he crossed the finish line for his seventy-third career victory. With corks popping, the grinning champ defended his move. “I didn't mean to wreck him,” he said. “I just wanted to rattle his cage a bit. But I bumped him too hard and turned him loose.”

  The apology didn't sway many. “There are some guys that will race you clean,” said Ricky Rudd, who finished third. “The guy that spun Terry is not one of those guys. But you've got to think of that when you pass him. You can't give him that free shot.”

  Indeed. The hard-nosed bad boy of NASCAR hadn't built his reputation over twenty years by donning kid gloves and making nice, and he certainly wasn't about to soften with age. “This is racing,” he was fond of saying. “It ain't tennis.” The Intimidator was back.

  The Dogfight at Bristol

  The cramped half-mile oval at Bristol has always been a stock car gladiator's dream. With way too much horsepower in way too small a space, the track seems tailor-made for crowd-pleasing destruction. Hot tempers, busted fenders—it was everything Dale Earnhardt lived for. Sprinkle a few August showers on the concrete, and voilà, you get one of the greatest knock-down, drag-out battles of the Intimidator's career and one of NASCAR's wildest finishes.

  Just three weeks after his historic win at the Brickyard put the public on notice that he was still in the points race, Earnhardt sent a stern message to his competitors: get in my way and I'll run right through you. A mere 32 laps into the soggy Goody's 500 on August 26, 1995, the Man in Black made good on that promise, swapping chrome with Rusty Wallace as the two battled for fourth place and spinning Wallace's number 2 Ford into the wall on the straightaway. A furious Wallace bumped Earnhardt during the ensuing caution, and race officials banished the Intimidator to the back of the class for playing too rough.

  The neighborhood bully wouldn't be denied. He relentlessly muscled his way to the front again before being clipped. And then again. And again. Collisions, slow pits—it didn't seem to matter; each time Earnhardt fell behind, he'd cut a new swath of destruction through the field and his battered black machine would be back again, breathing menacingly down the leader's rear bumper.

  The final charge came with 70 laps to go. Stuck in ninth position, Earnhardt worked his way up to sixth by Lap 472. Fifteen more and he was in second, a quarter-lap behind front-runner Terry Labonte, who appeared to have enough room to coast to a comfortable win. “I really didn't think he had enough laps to catch us,” Labonte said. “Then I got caught.”

  Heading into the last lap, Labonte was forced to brake behind a herd of lapped cars. Sensing the drama, Bristol's record crowd of 79,000 rose to its feet. Here came Earnhardt, flying into the final turn, just behind the logjam. And then, POW! Earnhardt plowed into the back of Labonte's number 5 Chevy, which slammed off Greg Sacks's car, but still slid sideways over the finish line for the win. Labonte then careened head-on into the outside wall, coming to rest with the front end nearly in the driver's seat and the back a pile of crushed metal. Earnhardt took second.

  With the spectacular 500-lap dogfight in the books, it seemed inevitable that tempers would boil over. But the post-race fireworks didn't come from Labonte, who took the whole episode in stride (“I don't ever remember going across the finish line sideways for a win,” he joked), but from Rusty Wallace, who was still fuming over his early on-track run-in with Earnhardt.

  As Earnhardt spoke with reporters, Wallace approached and hurled a water bottle, which grazed Earnhardt's head. “You better watch that [e
xpletive] bumper,” Wallace growled. Bystanders quickly stepped between the two men. “I ain't forgetting this,” Wallace shouted. “Yours is coming.” The Intimidator just smirked at his adversary and winked. “Hey, don't forget nothing,” he drawled.

  Earnhardt and Gordon Battle at the Brickyard

  Heading into the 1995 season, the Man in Black seemed invincible. He'd just captured his record-tying seventh Cup championship—his fourth in five years—joining Richard Petty atop the pantheon of NASCAR's all-time greats. Now, at age forty-four, he was the odds-on favorite to topple the King's mark by winning an eighth.

  But a young competitor was thumping on his fender. At twenty-three, fresh-faced Jeff Gordon had taken Rookie of the Year honors in 1993 and racked up fourteen Top 10 finishes in 1994, including a major win in the first-ever Indianapolis Brickyard 400. The talk around the garage was that this could be the year the kid pried the pistol from the grizzled warrior's hands.

  The Intimidator was having none of it. He hit 1995 like a bat out of hell, placing in the top five in six out of seven races, with a win and three second-place finishes. But a series of midseason setbacks took their toll. By the time NASCAR rolled into Indianapolis on August 5, the champ had slipped from first to a distant third in the standings and Gordon was beginning to pull away. With twelve races left, and one of racing's most prestigious contests staring him in the face, Earnhardt needed to make a statement.

  He didn't disappoint. Following a four-hour rain delay, Indy's 325,000 waterlogged fans were treated to a dandy 160-lap battle. In a replay of 1994, Earnhardt brushed the wall early but maintained control, as Gordon jumped out to a quick lead from the pole. Earnhardt would later joke that the damage to his right front fender made his car faster, but he seemed content to hang back for much of the afternoon while the lead changed hands some sixteen times.