Washington Post story written by Kent Babb, a former colleague/friend (and Spartanburg native) who is great at longform storytelling.
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By Kent Babb
MOORESVILLE, N.C. — For as long as he can remember, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has had a recurring dream. He’s at some racetrack, in a garage or the pits, and there’s his daddy talking to some guys.
Dale Sr. is in flannel and jeans, like he just came off the farm. He looks the same as the day he died: Eyes still narrow, hair just as dark, creases rippling off his mustache like rings in a pond. Junior wants to walk toward him, maybe ask a question that’s been percolating for years.
But he can’t move.
“I want to go, ‘Hey!’ But that’s not working,” he says. “I’m as close as I can get.”
Ancient civilizations believed dreams were spiritual rendezvous points where the dead could check in on the living. Until recently, Junior says, he could count on one of these visits about once a year. And since he’s not allowed at his dad’s actual grave, he always tries to avoid waking up.
He just stands there, watching and listening, for as long as he can.
Before Junior’s birthday one year, he glanced in a mirror. The face staring back was old. Sun spots, gray hairs, lines around his lips and eyes. NASCAR’s cocky boy wonder, with his cap perpetually backward and his tips forever frosted, was long gone.
“I don’t feel this old,” he told me last fall. “I kind of got to this point in my life before I expected to.”
Middle age is sneaky like that, and though Junior is still lively and trim, he’s just another husband and father whose glory years are gone. A big night used to be mainlining Bud Heavy until sunlight slipped between the pines outside his secret drinking hole. Now it’s a koozie hiding a nonalcoholic brew.
In October 2023, Junior turned 49. That’s the same age his dad was in 2001, when, before the last turn on the last lap of the Daytona 500, Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s car bumped into Sterling Marlin’s, sending the iconic No. 3 careening into the wall at 160 mph.
“We’ve lost Dale Earnhardt,” NASCAR President Mike Helton said when he announced, two hours after the crash, that Dale Sr. was dead.
Seventeen million people had watched it live, a seemingly minor collision that turned haunting the moment driver Kenny Schrader looked through Earnhardt’s window and frantically waved for emergency personnel. In the quarter-century since, Schrader has never spoken about what he saw.
Until then, crashes were as intertwined with the sport as cigarettes and beer. (Its top two levels: the Winston Cup and Busch series.) Wrecks at racetracks claimed the lives of eight drivers in the 1980s and ’90s, and initiating contact and walking away from crashes was why Dale Sr., nicknamed “The Intimidator,” was so popular.
Now, after a wreck he couldn’t walk away from, NASCAR had no choice but to confront and overhaul its outdated safety mechanisms. No driver has died since.
“A horrible thing,” Junior said on his podcast, “The Dale Jr. Download,” in 2023. “The whole sport had to go through it.”
Beneath something so unprecedented was a most relatable thing: a shell-shocked young man who had lost his dad. Gone in that same instant were the answers to a million questions, lessons to be learned, the hope of some beer-fueled conversation that would smooth out wrinkles of the past.
“They were just developing this relationship,” says Kelley Earnhardt Miller, Junior’s older sister. “To have that pulled out from under him, to have it taken away, was a second tragedy.”
It’s a lonely feeling, and one I happened to know. Fourteen months after Junior’s dad died, so did mine.
Michael Babb wasn’t famous, but as a bass guitarist for a 1970s Southern rock band, he had come close. After High Cotton broke up, my father came home, bringing addictions to drugs and alcohol with him.
I was 15 when, for the first time, I confronted him about his drinking, and we got into a fistfight. I never listened to High Cotton’s record, deciding it couldn’t possibly be good. He loved NASCAR, which meant I hated it. I was into real sports, and when I shared my dream of a career writing about baseball or football, he didn’t understand.
I was studying journalism in college in 2002 when my grandmother called. “They think he’s gone,” she said. His heart had become enlarged, and while he was painting a house one day, it just stopped.
He was 51. That’s all I know, and because a pipeline of information got shut off, that’s most of what I ever will.
I’m 43 now, and since the day my dad died, there has been something unsettling about the idea of turning 51. I’ve learned this is common among people who’ve lost a parent young, or what is called an “off-time” death. Psychologists suggest these feelings of anxiety and fear, alongside a gradually intensifying urge to learn about your bloodline, are like a final stage of grief. And it’s one that most people, and in particular men, rarely talk about or explore.
I did want to talk about it, preferably with someone who understood. And though I never took to NASCAR, I knew Junior and I belonged to the same unfortunate club. I wondered if he thought about it, if he dreaded turning 49, how he was coping as he approached the age his daddy was.
So, before his birthday in 2023, I asked if he’d be open to talking. He said yes.
Of the dozen stops on North Carolina’s “Dale Trail,” none is more important and solemn than a quiet grove in downtown Kannapolis. Dale Earnhardt Sr. grew up here and put the town on the map, and following his death, it became the epicenter of despair.
Now, past cypress shrubs, are seven stairs that represent the number of Dale Sr.’s Cup championships. Benches are grouped in sets of three, a nod to his car number. At the center is a nine-foot bronze statue.
“OUR FRIEND AND CHAMPION,” reads one of the plaques.
In places like this, the homegrown star belongs to everyone. Especially when, like Kannapolis, the place is one of a thousand Southern mill villages that sprouted a century ago, spun cotton into yarn and then, when the textile industry cratered, plunged into decay.
Dale Sr., a high school dropout, actually worked those looms. He married young and had his first son, Kerry, at 18. But he didn’t know how to be a husband or a father, so he abandoned both and took off for some dirt track to chase his dream.
Earnhardt fans love all that, because their fantasy was his life. He achieved wealth and superstardom in America’s most blue-collar sport, doing so with a defiance and fury that made you either love or hate him.
By the time Kelley and Junior were born, both to Dale Sr.’s second wife, Brenda, the local legend had gone regional. He skipped out of town to enter races outside Charlotte or Atlanta, paying entry fees instead of his bills, and the last car that drivers wanted to see in their mirror in those years was the damn No. 3, because that meant they were about to get passed or knocked out of the way.
Dale Sr. didn’t see racing as dangerous. That was a myth, he once declared, propagated by “Yankees.” When NASCAR started requiring drivers to wear a five-point harness in 1976, the response to nearly a dozen deaths over the previous decade-plus, Dale Sr. said the added safety measures made the sport more hazardous.
“The only reason I broke my collarbones was because I had my safety straps on,” he told a reporter in 1980, the year he won five races and his first Cup championship.
The folks back home loved that, and soon the whole sports world was taking notice. By the end of the 1980s, a million people a year were attending NASCAR races, more tuned in for live broadcasts and Fortune 500 companies were angling to sponsor top drivers.
Dale Sr. went back to Kannapolis when he could, but never for long. He skipped his kids’ bedtime, soccer games and high school graduations. When Dad was around, Junior made sure Dale Sr. saw him playing with toy cars and turning cardboard into a miniature speedway.
“Always wanting that attention,” Kelley says now. “Wanting to be noticed.”
Dale Sr. had become a hero to millions of kids, including his own. Kelley stopped fighting for her dad’s affection, but Junior never did. After races, he could often be seen elbowing through the crowd to be photographed next to his dad.
When that didn’t work, a teenage Junior found new ways to get Dale Sr.’s attention. He smoked cigarettes and played video games with friends from nearby Mooresville, which they called the “Dirty Mo.” Dale Sr. liked Hank Williams Jr. and Alannah Myles; Junior preferred the Stone Temple Pilots and Rob Base. He slept past noon, let the dishwasher and trash overflow, assembled an impressive collection of soiled dishes under his bed.
For better or worse, it all led to the heavy sound of Daddy stomping toward his room.
When Junior was 6, Dale Sr. had started his own racing team, Dale Earnhardt Inc., and bought hundreds of acres near Kannapolis. NASCAR was becoming a national curiosity, with Dale Sr. as its pitchman, carrying the brand in commercials for McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. In time, every speedway in America overflowed with shirts and flags and decals with the slanted “3,” and kids built models of Earnhardt’s menacing GM Goodwrench car.
Junior, meanwhile, got himself sent to military school. That didn’t take, so Dale Sr. got his son a job changing oil at Dale Earnhardt Chevrolet, but he quickly got fired. When Dad tried connecting with Junior by bringing him to the track or letting him get behind the wheel of one of Dale Sr.’s cars, Junior showed only a talent for wrecking them.
In the 1990s, Dale Sr. was trying to break Richard Petty’s record of seven Cup championships. His son was living in a double-wide, smoking and drinking with his buddies, on his daddy’s land. One day Dale Sr. stormed in and scolded Junior for wasting his life, and the two went at it.
Junior erupted, accusing his father of caring more about strangers than his own family. His son? The kid saddled with the same name? He couldn’t even get the attention, Junior told him, of a “pimple on your ass.”
Hidden on Junior’s property, along the banks of a narrow creek, is a vast graveyard. There are at least 80 bodies out there, scattered across an unmarked wooded area accessible only by ATV.
Here, in rural North Carolina, lie the charred remains of the car Juan Pablo Montoya crashed into a track dryer during the 2012 Daytona 500, the tub of an IndyCar that Will Power once wrecked and quasi-recognizable cars once driven by Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin.
“I’ve never paid a dime for any of them,” Junior says. “They’re just trash.”
So why collect them? What’s the point in dispatching Sonny Lunsford, an old buddy with a flatbed, to haul away somebody else’s junk?
In 1998, Junior got serious enough about racing that his dad gave him a shot to drive one of his cars full time in the Busch Series, essentially NASCAR’s Class AAA league. Considering Junior’s clearest talent was destroying these hyper-engineered machines, he had no idea why.
The only advice Dale Sr. gave him? “Don’t lift,” he told Junior, because success requires fearlessness. Cars are often separated by inches, even as they try to avoid (or initiate) contact while approaching 200 mph on turns with gravity-defying inclines. No matter the consequences, good drivers never lift their foot off the accelerator.
Yes, sir. Junior won seven races in 1998, when he was just 23, and six more the next year, claiming consecutive Busch Series championships. He showed a familiarly aggressive style and a rare gift for feeling the air open up around his car, flying past competitors and, in 2000, into the big leagues. Damned if he didn’t win two Cup races, same as his daddy.
Still, it took getting to Victory Lane for his dad to tell him he was proud. If Junior didn’t win, Dale Sr. didn’t show up.
Junior was 26 when the 2001 season began. That year’s Daytona 500, the most important event on the NASCAR calendar, featured Junior and Senior sitting sixth and seventh, right next to each other, as they started their engines. Both were among the favorites to win, with Dale Sr. trying to win Daytona for the second time in four years.
On the last lap, Junior’s teammate Michael Waltrip was leading, and Junior was in second. That’s when he saw his dad’s car in his rearview. But he wasn’t trying to pass or wreck him. In third place, Dale Sr. was blocking Sterling Marlin from a late surge, protecting a win for the team he owned.
Junior doesn’t remember much about what came next. After he and Waltrip crossed the finish line, someone said something about a crash. A golf cart took Junior and Danny Earnhardt, Junior’s uncle and a member of Dale Sr.’s pit crew, to a van. Then a crowded hospital lobby, where he saw anguished faces and a curtain. He looked behind it and saw his dad, who had been pronounced dead.
Junior doesn’t remember the trip back to Kannapolis, either, or convening with extended family at his grandmother’s house. Instead of processing what happened, he distracted himself by trying to be everyone’s rock. No one saw him cry. A week after Daytona, he was at the track in Rockingham, North Carolina, acting as if nothing happened.
Thousands of fans waved flags with Dale Sr.’s No. 3 on them, and 23 seconds after the race started, Junior crashed into the wall. It isn’t grief he recalls feeling. It’s numbness.
“I didn’t care if I died,” he says. “I didn’t want it to happen, but I was miserable in general all the time. I didn’t give a f---.”
Two months later, during a practice in Fontana, California, he crashed again. He says it took that wreck to “get my s--- together” and focus on not dying. But there were other stresses back home.
Dale Sr.’s last will and testament hadn’t been updated since 1992, when Kelley and Junior were 20 and 18. It transferred the entirety of his estate — the race team, the property, nearly two dozen trademarks — to Dale Sr.’s third wife, Teresa, whom he had married after divorcing Junior’s and Kelley’s mother. Junior’s car and his No. 8 now belonged to his stepmother.
Kelley says she and Junior were never invited to look through sentimental possessions, childhood items or family photos. Teresa rejected their input, she says, when planning Dale Sr.’s funeral and choosing a grave site.
His final resting place is less than a mile off Highway 3, behind a tall screened fence, down a dirt road, protected by cameras and more fencing. Not far from a pond is a walkway that leads to a mausoleum with EARNHARDT stamped in gold. Kelley says Teresa invited her and Junior to see it after their dad’s interment.
Kelley hasn’t been back. She says it’s understood that she and her brother are unwelcome. “She’s so extreme,” she says of Teresa, “that we might get arrested.”
I tried to reach Teresa Earnhardt directly but couldn’t. Her lawyers declined my interview requests and did not respond to a question about whether Kelley and Junior actually are prohibited from visiting their dad’s grave.
Junior, for his part, says he “might have” gone back by himself once. Fueled by some combination of liquid courage and that Earnhardt defiance, he admits, he invited himself to “sit and think.”
That was at least 20 years ago, he says, around the same time NASCAR was issuing sweeping changes in the wake of Dale Sr.’s death. Drivers complained about having to wear head and neck restraints, and cars had to be outfitted with stronger roll bars and carbon fiber seats. Speedway walls were updated with upgraded barriers that dissipated energy during a crash.
Cars were expensive enough before the changes, but by 2002, teams were cutting full shells off car bodies to replace them with the newly mandated materials. Junior hated the idea of sending those shells to the scrapyard, so whenever he wrecked, he asked Sonny to tow the car home and dump it in the yard. Other teams offered their cars, too, and a collection grew: Darrell Waltrip’s No. 11, covered in leaves and twigs; Mike Wallace’s No. 52, sitting among the skinny trees; Kevin Harvick’s No. 29, resting in peace behind Montoya’s.
There is, noticeably, nothing ever driven or owned by Dale Sr. Teresa controls those things, too, and Kelley suspects that’s the real reason her brother did this.
“There’s just this longing,” Kelley says, “to put pieces together.”
Junior shrugs at that theory, but it’s hard to deny what the assemblage amounts to: a graveyard he doesn’t have to sneak into. Each car body is a rusting monument, just five miles from his dad’s more traditional memorial, to stories and recollections and moments in time. He built a place he can visit whenever he wants, for as long as he’d like, thinking about things such as the oddities of grief and how it leads a son to gather up twisted metal because it’s one of the only ways to feel close to his dad.
Junior dreaded turning 40, in part because that’s when he thought people naturally slow down. Some drivers go so far as suggesting that having kids makes you two-tenths of a second slower, but considering there’s no evidence for this, it’s just a convenient excuse for these Peter Pans to put off responsibilities while they chase each other for a living.
When he was in his 20s and early 30s, nobody staved off adulthood quite like Junior. Before the graveyard, he had Sonny build a thousand-square-foot tree house on his land, which he calls Dirty Mo Acres. He added a paintball course and a small herd of bison. A bit farther down the hill, he started dreaming up plans for the town of Whisky River.
“We needed a place to party,” Sonny says of Junior’s bachelor paradise. Specifically one that, unlike the local bars, had no last call.
At Junior’s direction, Sonny brought in three 18-wheelers’ worth of reclaimed Kannapolis timber and spent nine months constructing an Old West main drag: barbershop, mercantile, post office. The hub was a saloon, naturally, across the street from a church and the jail. “We didn’t even start until 10, 11 o’clock at night,” Sonny says.
While Sonny built, Junior kept the pedal down. Five months after his dad’s fatal crash at Daytona, Junior dominated the same track to win the Pepsi 400. Then the Daytona 500 itself three years later. This cemented him as NASCAR’s most beloved figure, named the sport’s most popular driver for the first time in 2003. Nobody else won the award for 15 years. Budweiser was paying $1 million per race to sponsor Junior’s red No. 8 Chevy, which, like his dad’s black Goodwrench car, was becoming inextricably sewn into the fabric of Americana.
It was Junior, after all, who had won in Dover, Delaware, 12 days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — and then circled the mile-long oval with an American flag dancing outside his window.
He was, like his dad, a perfectly imperfect brand ambassador — relatable, sure, as the guy who fired up his car at Pocono Raceway with a gash on his head after a drunken swan dive into the shallow end of a pool. He occasionally started his own engine with a breakfast Bud and a lung dart and once scoured his house for anything carbonated because he demanded the hot tub have more bubbles.
At his 30th birthday party, in 2004, Junior’s buddies rented out an Irish pub in Mooresville. They closed it down, a Marilyn Monroe look-alike sang “Happy Birthday,” and somehow a few of them wound up in a boxing ring, where a professional bull rider gave Junior a black eye.
Refusing to grow up, 30 wound up being the age he stopped winning.
Junior blew off postrace analysis meetings to play Madden in his bus and had so much beer delivered to him that the distributor accused him of reselling it. His fans ignored the fact that, over a 108-race stretch, he won just three times. He withdrew, sparred with reporters, told girlfriends that he was never settling down.
Yet people were buying so much merchandise and companies were so keen on sponsoring him that Junior averaged about $20 million in yearly earnings. He made a cameo in Will Ferrell’s “Talladega Nights,” flew to Monaco for dinner with Jay-Z and Beyoncé before appearing in a music video and traveled to nearby Concord, North Carolina, in his private helicopter to race NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal in a made-for-TV spectacle.
On the flight back to Mooresville, he looked through the window at a field below.
“There’s Daddy,” he told Mike Davis, his longtime road manager and branding specialist.
In 2007, Kelley and Junior got tired of working for a company their father started but was now controlled by their stepmom. They announced they were starting their own racing team, JR Motorsports, and leaving behind Junior’s famed No. 8 Bud car. When Junior won in Brooklyn, Michigan, in 2008, his first victory in two years, it was in a No. 88 owned by Rick Hendrick and sponsored by Amp, an energy drink.
He wouldn’t win again for four more years. In 2012, he crashed during a tire test at Kansas Speedway, leaving him with the first of several of concussions that would force him to miss starts for the first time. His reaction time and peripheral vision weren’t sharp, and he was experiencing balance problems that, because Junior is Junior, he measured in beer.
“Small headache,” he wrote in his phone’s Notes app, which became the basis of “Racing to the Finish,” his 2018 memoir. “Drunk, one beer feeling.”
“I got out of the car and felt 1 or 2 beers drunk,” he wrote another time.
“Felt lazy and 1 beer drunk rest of the day.”
He occasionally appeared on what was ostensibly his own podcast, except Davis and another guy hosted it. The guy it was named for wanted almost nothing to do with it.
“Kind of got ugly,” Junior said after finishing 30th at Watkins Glen.
“Tough luck,” he said after placing 35th at Chicago.
“Frustrating,” he said after not finishing at all in Charlotte.
Before the 2014 season, Steve Letarte had become as much life coach as crew chief. Because it wasn’t age that was slowing Junior down. It was immaturity, brain injuries and increasing self-doubt. That year at Talladega Superspeedway, where Dale Sr. won 10 times, Junior went into the pits before stomping the accelerator in an attempt to make up time.
Then, up ahead, he saw a massive crash unfolding. He did the one thing Daddy told him he couldn’t: Junior lifted. And the worst part? There was no crash. He had avoided a collision that existed only in his imagination.
“My team was like, ‘What was that?’” Junior says now. “I really couldn’t hide what I’d done. They knew. They watched it. That’s when I was like, ‘Hmm, I wonder if I’m going to do this much longer.’”
With Letarte in his ear, Junior, 39, won four races in 2014. That October, Kelley and Junior’s girlfriend, Amy Reimann, threw him a blowout party for his 40th. The band 21 Pilots played, Kid Rock mingled, and the night came alive out in Junior’s woods.
Everybody congregated in the saloon at Whisky River, drinking and singing and pounding the keys of an old red piano. At some point long before sunrise, the guests noticed the birthday boy was gone, having slipped into the darkness after walking past a painting of an aging cowboy.
My dad, like Junior’s, is a frequent subject of my dreams. He is as I remember: beaten-down and resentful, frizzy gray hair, knuckles swollen with rheumatoid arthritis and flecked with paint.
He’s frozen in time, even as my 20s and 30s have come and gone. Eight years ago, I became a father myself. I want to know more about the old band and why it broke up, to tell my two daughters about him, to answer questions about him and therefore myself.
The dreams often end with me feeling guilty. He’s at home, surrounded by guitars he rarely plays. But not wanting to bother him, I just haven’t called.
I explain this to Junior.
“Teresa said something really interesting one day very recently after he passed away,” he says. “She said that missing someone you love is selfish, because you want them there for you. I always kind of kept that in the back of my mind. It made me try not to be selfish.
“But I do miss him. God, I wish he was here for me. I want him. I want to hug him. I want to talk to him, and I need him.”
Once he accepted this, he realized that there’s nothing selfish about grief. So he stopped caring about what anybody else thought and tried to think of new ways to connect.
These days, people close to Junior joke that, if you’re up late trying to score some obscure piece of Dale Sr. memorabilia on eBay and keep getting outbid, it’s probably Junior who’s outbidding you. Indeed, the last username you want to see in an auction history is DMA7488, who has bought and sold more than a thousand items since 2013 and, with an estimated net worth of $300 million, isn’t about losing.
Vintage racing hats, early Dale Sr. shirts, scale models of cars his daddy once drove. Most sellers have no idea it’s Junior, but one figured it out. Junior bought so many of the seller’s die-cast cars that the two started emailing, and they recently spent an hour on the phone discussing the details of a custom 1976 No. 8 Chevy, the first car Dale Sr. raced at Daytona.
His phone is a portal, taking him to racing fan sites to look for photographs Junior has never seen. Pictures of the icon or the ghost? That’s not the objective. It’s the man. Junior says he has a dozen photo streams, organized by “chapters” of his dad’s life. There, in “Dad 70s Sportsman,” is a bushy-haired kid whose car is sponsored by a construction company. Here, in “1980-81,” is a young man toasting victory with a Coke cup.
“What hotel did they stay in?” Junior wrote on social media, alongside a black-and-white picture of the actual Chevy Nova his dad drove. “Did they eat at any local restaurants? Who all went down there with him? Was he nervous? I want to time travel.”
These folders are precious, to be sure. But there’s one he rarely shows anyone. “Just Dad” contains photos of Dale Sr. lounging at home or tinkering in his shop. Junior shows me a picture of his daddy at sunset, that familiar profile backlit as a fishing line drops into Lake Norman.
Junior is smiling.
“Just being a person,” he says.
In 2015, the portal took him to 18th-century Bavaria, where Johannes Ehrenhardt Sr. and his son boarded a passenger ship bound for Philadelphia. Two decades later, Johannes Jr. would be granted a tract of farmland in the British colony of Carolina. There, he would turn over the same dirt where, much later, his descendants would plant seeds and play games and, starting with Junior’s grandfather, lay rubber.
Junior was so moved that, standing next to Amy in the ancient chapel where the Ehrenhardts once worshiped, he dropped to a knee and proposed marriage.
He was 40 and engaged, two things he once believed would slow him down. But he won three times in 2015, after reaching victory lane just eight times in his 30s. The next season, he finished second in three of his first eight races.
Then his concussion symptoms returned. There were no horrific crashes. Just dozens of minor ones, each jostling his neck and head. He struggled to tie shoelaces and buckle a belt, and his reaction time and vision had dulled.
“Angry for no reason,” he wrote in his Notes app. He told no one, not even Amy.
“Close to puking,” he wrote later.
“Seems to be getting worse.”
He pledged to donate his brain and was ruled out for the final 18 races of 2016. During his time off, he took interest in a new project: actually hosting his own podcast. His plan was to interview racing buddies and the sport’s pioneers, and soon “Dirty Mo Acres” was adding a dedicated studio. As time passed, Junior noticed that his questions and guests seemed to follow a trend.
“We’re at that part of our lives,” he says, “where we’re reconciling with our past.”
After my dad died, I felt an urgency to accomplish every goal and live as much as possible before age 51. I needed to be established in my career, to have started a family, to see the world in what felt like a truncated time. Even as I notched those things, I wondered what my dad would’ve thought.
You never stop wanting to impress your parents, even after they’re gone. There’s a longing to speak as equals.
“I would love to say, ‘Hey, when I pissed you off that day,’” Junior says, “‘you were right. What an a--hole I was. I was not using my head.’”
But when all you have are memories, yours and those held by others, you protect them. Concussions were now threatening Junior’s long-term brain circuitry, and after the 2017 season, he retired. When he spun out at Daytona, after the front of Kyle Busch’s car sent Junior’s careening into a wall, that was it.
However much time he had left, he didn’t want to spend it in pursuit of more wins. He wanted closure. Junior had traditionally avoided conversations about his dad’s death, partly because he didn’t remember much about that day. Now armed with a microphone, he interviewed guests about the things they remembered, trying to bring a blurry picture into focus.
Mike Helton, the NASCAR president in 2001, described the moments before his announcement that Earnhardt was gone. “We just lost the greatest driver we’ve ever had. What am I supposed to say?” Helton said.
Then came Kenny Schrader, who, after peeking into Earnhardt’s car window after the wreck, frantically waved for emergency personnel. Schrader had never revealed what he had seen, and Junior didn’t want him to do so on the podcast. Instead, he wanted to read Schrader something.
“You’re one of the few to see the darkest moment for my dad,” he said, reading from a laptop. “You have intimate knowledge of those moments; you are a keeper of that delicate information.
“I feel pain for you to have to carry that memory. But you carry it for me. You carry it for Kelley. … I know you might sometimes wish that you weren’t the one, but I’m glad it was you.”
And Sterling Marlin, whose collision with Earnhardt had preceded the crash and, in the weeks afterward, spurred death threats.
“I hope that you’ve carried no sliver of guilt,” Junior told him.
Junior turned 46, an age his grandfather Ralph had died before reaching, and kept asking questions.
“What were some of the not-so-great things about him?” Junior says. “We’ve been talking about how insane amazing he was all these years, and sometimes it’s fun to talk about how real he was.”
So Junior and Kelley asked their mother, Brenda, why she and Dale Sr. had divorced. He was addicted to racing, yes. But there was also a clear avoidance of responsibility. His own father’s fatal heart attack had shaken him, kicking off a few years of emotional instability and financial distress. Rather than confront his own grief, he distracted himself — driving, tinkering or disappearing into the woods.
Hank Parker Sr., a pro fisherman and one of Dale Sr.’s closest friends, came on to tell Junior about one of their hunting trips. As they were waiting for a deer, Parker’s son called, and Parker told his boy he loved him. Dale Sr. looked jealous.
“I don’t know how to love my kid like you love your kid,” Parker said his friend told him.
“He was never able to express to you how much he loved you,” Parker went on. “Never was able. You always felt like he loved you when you won and he didn’t when you didn’t win.”
Junior just let him talk.
“I’ve always wanted, somehow,” Parker continued, “to get you and grab hold of your shoulders and tell you how hurt he was that he didn’t know how to express his love for you. … It also showed me a side of him that was sad.”
Last year, Junior’s longtime crew chief, Tony Eury Sr., was his guest. It was the same day JR Motorsports announced that, after Teresa Earnhardt let the trademark expire on the old No. 8 Bud car, Kelley and Junior had bought it back. He and Eury were talking about Dale Sr.’s fateful decision so many years ago to put Junior, after all those wrecks and so many arguments, into one of his cars.
“You knew he wasn’t happy. He let you know,” Eury said. Dale Sr. wasn’t sure Junior even wanted to race. “I said: ‘Dale, they’re kids. Put him in it. Spend your money on him, and we’ll go see.
“‘We’ll know in a year if he’s got it or not.’”
It’s September 2024, the end of summer, sunset on a humid Friday. Junior is 49. Since retiring from full-time racing, he does one or two tracks a year. This time it’s Bristol Motor Speedway, where, in 1979, Dale Sr. got his first win.
Junior won’t say it, but everyone knows this is his last NASCAR race. There’s something poetic about a circle closing here, at the precise moment a new rotation begins. Junior and Amy’s two young daughters, 6-year-old Isla and 3-year-old Nicole, are here on pit road, smelling the singed rubber and hearing the air guns, as Daddy stands next to his car.
He picks up Nicole and points toward the speedway lights, then his blue No. 88 car.
“I’m trying to see if it might register with my girls that I did that. That I do this,” Junior says. “This is what our family does.”
Junior kisses Amy and high-fives Isla. Then he climbs in and buckles his head and neck restraint. Junior knows it won’t be long before his girls start asking about the man they see in so many pictures, eyes hidden by sunglasses, usually looking fearsome. That’ll be a good day, he says, to ride over to Kannapolis and, because they can’t visit the grave, show them the statue.
It belongs to everybody, he’ll explain, because “The Intimidator” was everybody’s. But Papa Dale? The man Junior has spent the past decade getting to know? He’s theirs, and the two little girls with strawberry hair don’t have to share him.
“He was this guy. He did this thing. Then he died,” he’ll say.
“I hope that one day, they go: ‘Hey Dad, tell me about Daytona. Tell me about winning the Daytona 500 in 2004. Tell me about going to Victory Lane when you were a kid. What was like that?’
“I want them to get to a point to where they’re asking me about that part in my life. It may take some time. There’s a lot to talk about.”
As I wrote this story, I reached out to my dad’s old bandmates, to ask about the man I never got to meet.
Before he was my dad, they said, Michael was a prankster who’d do anything for a laugh. The band toured the East Coast, opening for the Doobie Brothers and the Allman Brothers, and a disagreement with Ted Nugent’s road crew nearly led to an onstage brawl, lead singer Jeff Logan told me. Logan and Phillip “Flip” Myers, the band’s drummer, disagree on why things eventually fell apart. Too little money, Jeff says. Creative differences with legendary producer Allen Toussaint, Flip says. They recorded a second album that was never released.
“We were damn close to breaking through,” says Flip, who’s 76. “I think about it every day.”
Not long after we spoke, a package from Jeff arrived: an 8-track of High Cotton’s first record, a remastered CD, a half-dozen pictures of a man in his early 20s, lively and grooving. I handed the packet to Lilah and Lucy, my daughters. The guy with the dark hair flowing from beneath a cowboy hat? That’s Grandpa Michael.
That day in Bristol, Junior finishes seventh and climbs out of his car. Someone hands him a water on pit road, and he drains it and asks for a beer. Fans line a walkway, yelling for an Earnhardt one more time, and drivers walk over for high-fives and hugs. Junior empties the one can, so somebody brings out a cooler. He reaches in and slips another Bud (Select) into a koozie.
This was a race, sure. It was also a goodbye, the kind drivers used to not get. Junior changes out of his fire suit and into a T-shirt and jeans, opening a third beer as he walks over to mingle with fans. A staffer hands Junior his glasses, and lines ripple across his cheeks as he smiles for selfies.
It’s nearly midnight when Amy and several friends join, another party just getting started. I ask Junior about the podcast guest he wants most, the one he can never have. But if he could, what would be his first question? What is it he wants to ask his father?
He pauses, thinking about it, and smiles.
“How’d I do?” he says.
Last October, just three weeks after Bristol, Junior woke into what felt like a dream. His dad wasn’t in this one; in fact, the visits stopped around the time Junior turned 49. Instead, he was in a beach house in the Lowcountry, a wife and two daughters next to him in bed.
It was his 50th birthday.
He made it, reaching an age his daddy never did, the last person to ever pass the great Dale Earnhardt. The family spent a lazy day on the coast.
“Just Amy and my girls,” he says.
They went to a local joint with a balcony, and Kelley Venmoed Amy to buy her little brother a drink. The four of them sat there for hours, all Junior wanted, just feeling the breeze and listening to his girls for as long as he could.
=============
By Kent Babb
MOORESVILLE, N.C. — For as long as he can remember, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has had a recurring dream. He’s at some racetrack, in a garage or the pits, and there’s his daddy talking to some guys.
Dale Sr. is in flannel and jeans, like he just came off the farm. He looks the same as the day he died: Eyes still narrow, hair just as dark, creases rippling off his mustache like rings in a pond. Junior wants to walk toward him, maybe ask a question that’s been percolating for years.
But he can’t move.
“I want to go, ‘Hey!’ But that’s not working,” he says. “I’m as close as I can get.”
Ancient civilizations believed dreams were spiritual rendezvous points where the dead could check in on the living. Until recently, Junior says, he could count on one of these visits about once a year. And since he’s not allowed at his dad’s actual grave, he always tries to avoid waking up.
He just stands there, watching and listening, for as long as he can.
Before Junior’s birthday one year, he glanced in a mirror. The face staring back was old. Sun spots, gray hairs, lines around his lips and eyes. NASCAR’s cocky boy wonder, with his cap perpetually backward and his tips forever frosted, was long gone.
“I don’t feel this old,” he told me last fall. “I kind of got to this point in my life before I expected to.”
Middle age is sneaky like that, and though Junior is still lively and trim, he’s just another husband and father whose glory years are gone. A big night used to be mainlining Bud Heavy until sunlight slipped between the pines outside his secret drinking hole. Now it’s a koozie hiding a nonalcoholic brew.
In October 2023, Junior turned 49. That’s the same age his dad was in 2001, when, before the last turn on the last lap of the Daytona 500, Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s car bumped into Sterling Marlin’s, sending the iconic No. 3 careening into the wall at 160 mph.
“We’ve lost Dale Earnhardt,” NASCAR President Mike Helton said when he announced, two hours after the crash, that Dale Sr. was dead.
Seventeen million people had watched it live, a seemingly minor collision that turned haunting the moment driver Kenny Schrader looked through Earnhardt’s window and frantically waved for emergency personnel. In the quarter-century since, Schrader has never spoken about what he saw.
Until then, crashes were as intertwined with the sport as cigarettes and beer. (Its top two levels: the Winston Cup and Busch series.) Wrecks at racetracks claimed the lives of eight drivers in the 1980s and ’90s, and initiating contact and walking away from crashes was why Dale Sr., nicknamed “The Intimidator,” was so popular.
Now, after a wreck he couldn’t walk away from, NASCAR had no choice but to confront and overhaul its outdated safety mechanisms. No driver has died since.
“A horrible thing,” Junior said on his podcast, “The Dale Jr. Download,” in 2023. “The whole sport had to go through it.”
Beneath something so unprecedented was a most relatable thing: a shell-shocked young man who had lost his dad. Gone in that same instant were the answers to a million questions, lessons to be learned, the hope of some beer-fueled conversation that would smooth out wrinkles of the past.
“They were just developing this relationship,” says Kelley Earnhardt Miller, Junior’s older sister. “To have that pulled out from under him, to have it taken away, was a second tragedy.”
It’s a lonely feeling, and one I happened to know. Fourteen months after Junior’s dad died, so did mine.
Michael Babb wasn’t famous, but as a bass guitarist for a 1970s Southern rock band, he had come close. After High Cotton broke up, my father came home, bringing addictions to drugs and alcohol with him.
I was 15 when, for the first time, I confronted him about his drinking, and we got into a fistfight. I never listened to High Cotton’s record, deciding it couldn’t possibly be good. He loved NASCAR, which meant I hated it. I was into real sports, and when I shared my dream of a career writing about baseball or football, he didn’t understand.
I was studying journalism in college in 2002 when my grandmother called. “They think he’s gone,” she said. His heart had become enlarged, and while he was painting a house one day, it just stopped.
He was 51. That’s all I know, and because a pipeline of information got shut off, that’s most of what I ever will.
I’m 43 now, and since the day my dad died, there has been something unsettling about the idea of turning 51. I’ve learned this is common among people who’ve lost a parent young, or what is called an “off-time” death. Psychologists suggest these feelings of anxiety and fear, alongside a gradually intensifying urge to learn about your bloodline, are like a final stage of grief. And it’s one that most people, and in particular men, rarely talk about or explore.
I did want to talk about it, preferably with someone who understood. And though I never took to NASCAR, I knew Junior and I belonged to the same unfortunate club. I wondered if he thought about it, if he dreaded turning 49, how he was coping as he approached the age his daddy was.
So, before his birthday in 2023, I asked if he’d be open to talking. He said yes.
Of the dozen stops on North Carolina’s “Dale Trail,” none is more important and solemn than a quiet grove in downtown Kannapolis. Dale Earnhardt Sr. grew up here and put the town on the map, and following his death, it became the epicenter of despair.
Now, past cypress shrubs, are seven stairs that represent the number of Dale Sr.’s Cup championships. Benches are grouped in sets of three, a nod to his car number. At the center is a nine-foot bronze statue.
“OUR FRIEND AND CHAMPION,” reads one of the plaques.
In places like this, the homegrown star belongs to everyone. Especially when, like Kannapolis, the place is one of a thousand Southern mill villages that sprouted a century ago, spun cotton into yarn and then, when the textile industry cratered, plunged into decay.
Dale Sr., a high school dropout, actually worked those looms. He married young and had his first son, Kerry, at 18. But he didn’t know how to be a husband or a father, so he abandoned both and took off for some dirt track to chase his dream.
Earnhardt fans love all that, because their fantasy was his life. He achieved wealth and superstardom in America’s most blue-collar sport, doing so with a defiance and fury that made you either love or hate him.
By the time Kelley and Junior were born, both to Dale Sr.’s second wife, Brenda, the local legend had gone regional. He skipped out of town to enter races outside Charlotte or Atlanta, paying entry fees instead of his bills, and the last car that drivers wanted to see in their mirror in those years was the damn No. 3, because that meant they were about to get passed or knocked out of the way.
Dale Sr. didn’t see racing as dangerous. That was a myth, he once declared, propagated by “Yankees.” When NASCAR started requiring drivers to wear a five-point harness in 1976, the response to nearly a dozen deaths over the previous decade-plus, Dale Sr. said the added safety measures made the sport more hazardous.
“The only reason I broke my collarbones was because I had my safety straps on,” he told a reporter in 1980, the year he won five races and his first Cup championship.
The folks back home loved that, and soon the whole sports world was taking notice. By the end of the 1980s, a million people a year were attending NASCAR races, more tuned in for live broadcasts and Fortune 500 companies were angling to sponsor top drivers.
Dale Sr. went back to Kannapolis when he could, but never for long. He skipped his kids’ bedtime, soccer games and high school graduations. When Dad was around, Junior made sure Dale Sr. saw him playing with toy cars and turning cardboard into a miniature speedway.
“Always wanting that attention,” Kelley says now. “Wanting to be noticed.”
Dale Sr. had become a hero to millions of kids, including his own. Kelley stopped fighting for her dad’s affection, but Junior never did. After races, he could often be seen elbowing through the crowd to be photographed next to his dad.
When that didn’t work, a teenage Junior found new ways to get Dale Sr.’s attention. He smoked cigarettes and played video games with friends from nearby Mooresville, which they called the “Dirty Mo.” Dale Sr. liked Hank Williams Jr. and Alannah Myles; Junior preferred the Stone Temple Pilots and Rob Base. He slept past noon, let the dishwasher and trash overflow, assembled an impressive collection of soiled dishes under his bed.
For better or worse, it all led to the heavy sound of Daddy stomping toward his room.
When Junior was 6, Dale Sr. had started his own racing team, Dale Earnhardt Inc., and bought hundreds of acres near Kannapolis. NASCAR was becoming a national curiosity, with Dale Sr. as its pitchman, carrying the brand in commercials for McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. In time, every speedway in America overflowed with shirts and flags and decals with the slanted “3,” and kids built models of Earnhardt’s menacing GM Goodwrench car.
Junior, meanwhile, got himself sent to military school. That didn’t take, so Dale Sr. got his son a job changing oil at Dale Earnhardt Chevrolet, but he quickly got fired. When Dad tried connecting with Junior by bringing him to the track or letting him get behind the wheel of one of Dale Sr.’s cars, Junior showed only a talent for wrecking them.
In the 1990s, Dale Sr. was trying to break Richard Petty’s record of seven Cup championships. His son was living in a double-wide, smoking and drinking with his buddies, on his daddy’s land. One day Dale Sr. stormed in and scolded Junior for wasting his life, and the two went at it.
Junior erupted, accusing his father of caring more about strangers than his own family. His son? The kid saddled with the same name? He couldn’t even get the attention, Junior told him, of a “pimple on your ass.”
Hidden on Junior’s property, along the banks of a narrow creek, is a vast graveyard. There are at least 80 bodies out there, scattered across an unmarked wooded area accessible only by ATV.
Here, in rural North Carolina, lie the charred remains of the car Juan Pablo Montoya crashed into a track dryer during the 2012 Daytona 500, the tub of an IndyCar that Will Power once wrecked and quasi-recognizable cars once driven by Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin.
“I’ve never paid a dime for any of them,” Junior says. “They’re just trash.”
So why collect them? What’s the point in dispatching Sonny Lunsford, an old buddy with a flatbed, to haul away somebody else’s junk?
In 1998, Junior got serious enough about racing that his dad gave him a shot to drive one of his cars full time in the Busch Series, essentially NASCAR’s Class AAA league. Considering Junior’s clearest talent was destroying these hyper-engineered machines, he had no idea why.
The only advice Dale Sr. gave him? “Don’t lift,” he told Junior, because success requires fearlessness. Cars are often separated by inches, even as they try to avoid (or initiate) contact while approaching 200 mph on turns with gravity-defying inclines. No matter the consequences, good drivers never lift their foot off the accelerator.
Yes, sir. Junior won seven races in 1998, when he was just 23, and six more the next year, claiming consecutive Busch Series championships. He showed a familiarly aggressive style and a rare gift for feeling the air open up around his car, flying past competitors and, in 2000, into the big leagues. Damned if he didn’t win two Cup races, same as his daddy.
Still, it took getting to Victory Lane for his dad to tell him he was proud. If Junior didn’t win, Dale Sr. didn’t show up.
Junior was 26 when the 2001 season began. That year’s Daytona 500, the most important event on the NASCAR calendar, featured Junior and Senior sitting sixth and seventh, right next to each other, as they started their engines. Both were among the favorites to win, with Dale Sr. trying to win Daytona for the second time in four years.
On the last lap, Junior’s teammate Michael Waltrip was leading, and Junior was in second. That’s when he saw his dad’s car in his rearview. But he wasn’t trying to pass or wreck him. In third place, Dale Sr. was blocking Sterling Marlin from a late surge, protecting a win for the team he owned.
Junior doesn’t remember much about what came next. After he and Waltrip crossed the finish line, someone said something about a crash. A golf cart took Junior and Danny Earnhardt, Junior’s uncle and a member of Dale Sr.’s pit crew, to a van. Then a crowded hospital lobby, where he saw anguished faces and a curtain. He looked behind it and saw his dad, who had been pronounced dead.
Junior doesn’t remember the trip back to Kannapolis, either, or convening with extended family at his grandmother’s house. Instead of processing what happened, he distracted himself by trying to be everyone’s rock. No one saw him cry. A week after Daytona, he was at the track in Rockingham, North Carolina, acting as if nothing happened.
Thousands of fans waved flags with Dale Sr.’s No. 3 on them, and 23 seconds after the race started, Junior crashed into the wall. It isn’t grief he recalls feeling. It’s numbness.
“I didn’t care if I died,” he says. “I didn’t want it to happen, but I was miserable in general all the time. I didn’t give a f---.”
Two months later, during a practice in Fontana, California, he crashed again. He says it took that wreck to “get my s--- together” and focus on not dying. But there were other stresses back home.
Dale Sr.’s last will and testament hadn’t been updated since 1992, when Kelley and Junior were 20 and 18. It transferred the entirety of his estate — the race team, the property, nearly two dozen trademarks — to Dale Sr.’s third wife, Teresa, whom he had married after divorcing Junior’s and Kelley’s mother. Junior’s car and his No. 8 now belonged to his stepmother.
Kelley says she and Junior were never invited to look through sentimental possessions, childhood items or family photos. Teresa rejected their input, she says, when planning Dale Sr.’s funeral and choosing a grave site.
His final resting place is less than a mile off Highway 3, behind a tall screened fence, down a dirt road, protected by cameras and more fencing. Not far from a pond is a walkway that leads to a mausoleum with EARNHARDT stamped in gold. Kelley says Teresa invited her and Junior to see it after their dad’s interment.
Kelley hasn’t been back. She says it’s understood that she and her brother are unwelcome. “She’s so extreme,” she says of Teresa, “that we might get arrested.”
I tried to reach Teresa Earnhardt directly but couldn’t. Her lawyers declined my interview requests and did not respond to a question about whether Kelley and Junior actually are prohibited from visiting their dad’s grave.
Junior, for his part, says he “might have” gone back by himself once. Fueled by some combination of liquid courage and that Earnhardt defiance, he admits, he invited himself to “sit and think.”
That was at least 20 years ago, he says, around the same time NASCAR was issuing sweeping changes in the wake of Dale Sr.’s death. Drivers complained about having to wear head and neck restraints, and cars had to be outfitted with stronger roll bars and carbon fiber seats. Speedway walls were updated with upgraded barriers that dissipated energy during a crash.
Cars were expensive enough before the changes, but by 2002, teams were cutting full shells off car bodies to replace them with the newly mandated materials. Junior hated the idea of sending those shells to the scrapyard, so whenever he wrecked, he asked Sonny to tow the car home and dump it in the yard. Other teams offered their cars, too, and a collection grew: Darrell Waltrip’s No. 11, covered in leaves and twigs; Mike Wallace’s No. 52, sitting among the skinny trees; Kevin Harvick’s No. 29, resting in peace behind Montoya’s.
There is, noticeably, nothing ever driven or owned by Dale Sr. Teresa controls those things, too, and Kelley suspects that’s the real reason her brother did this.
“There’s just this longing,” Kelley says, “to put pieces together.”
Junior shrugs at that theory, but it’s hard to deny what the assemblage amounts to: a graveyard he doesn’t have to sneak into. Each car body is a rusting monument, just five miles from his dad’s more traditional memorial, to stories and recollections and moments in time. He built a place he can visit whenever he wants, for as long as he’d like, thinking about things such as the oddities of grief and how it leads a son to gather up twisted metal because it’s one of the only ways to feel close to his dad.
Junior dreaded turning 40, in part because that’s when he thought people naturally slow down. Some drivers go so far as suggesting that having kids makes you two-tenths of a second slower, but considering there’s no evidence for this, it’s just a convenient excuse for these Peter Pans to put off responsibilities while they chase each other for a living.
When he was in his 20s and early 30s, nobody staved off adulthood quite like Junior. Before the graveyard, he had Sonny build a thousand-square-foot tree house on his land, which he calls Dirty Mo Acres. He added a paintball course and a small herd of bison. A bit farther down the hill, he started dreaming up plans for the town of Whisky River.
“We needed a place to party,” Sonny says of Junior’s bachelor paradise. Specifically one that, unlike the local bars, had no last call.
At Junior’s direction, Sonny brought in three 18-wheelers’ worth of reclaimed Kannapolis timber and spent nine months constructing an Old West main drag: barbershop, mercantile, post office. The hub was a saloon, naturally, across the street from a church and the jail. “We didn’t even start until 10, 11 o’clock at night,” Sonny says.
While Sonny built, Junior kept the pedal down. Five months after his dad’s fatal crash at Daytona, Junior dominated the same track to win the Pepsi 400. Then the Daytona 500 itself three years later. This cemented him as NASCAR’s most beloved figure, named the sport’s most popular driver for the first time in 2003. Nobody else won the award for 15 years. Budweiser was paying $1 million per race to sponsor Junior’s red No. 8 Chevy, which, like his dad’s black Goodwrench car, was becoming inextricably sewn into the fabric of Americana.
It was Junior, after all, who had won in Dover, Delaware, 12 days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — and then circled the mile-long oval with an American flag dancing outside his window.
He was, like his dad, a perfectly imperfect brand ambassador — relatable, sure, as the guy who fired up his car at Pocono Raceway with a gash on his head after a drunken swan dive into the shallow end of a pool. He occasionally started his own engine with a breakfast Bud and a lung dart and once scoured his house for anything carbonated because he demanded the hot tub have more bubbles.
At his 30th birthday party, in 2004, Junior’s buddies rented out an Irish pub in Mooresville. They closed it down, a Marilyn Monroe look-alike sang “Happy Birthday,” and somehow a few of them wound up in a boxing ring, where a professional bull rider gave Junior a black eye.
Refusing to grow up, 30 wound up being the age he stopped winning.
Junior blew off postrace analysis meetings to play Madden in his bus and had so much beer delivered to him that the distributor accused him of reselling it. His fans ignored the fact that, over a 108-race stretch, he won just three times. He withdrew, sparred with reporters, told girlfriends that he was never settling down.
Yet people were buying so much merchandise and companies were so keen on sponsoring him that Junior averaged about $20 million in yearly earnings. He made a cameo in Will Ferrell’s “Talladega Nights,” flew to Monaco for dinner with Jay-Z and Beyoncé before appearing in a music video and traveled to nearby Concord, North Carolina, in his private helicopter to race NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal in a made-for-TV spectacle.
On the flight back to Mooresville, he looked through the window at a field below.
“There’s Daddy,” he told Mike Davis, his longtime road manager and branding specialist.
In 2007, Kelley and Junior got tired of working for a company their father started but was now controlled by their stepmom. They announced they were starting their own racing team, JR Motorsports, and leaving behind Junior’s famed No. 8 Bud car. When Junior won in Brooklyn, Michigan, in 2008, his first victory in two years, it was in a No. 88 owned by Rick Hendrick and sponsored by Amp, an energy drink.
He wouldn’t win again for four more years. In 2012, he crashed during a tire test at Kansas Speedway, leaving him with the first of several of concussions that would force him to miss starts for the first time. His reaction time and peripheral vision weren’t sharp, and he was experiencing balance problems that, because Junior is Junior, he measured in beer.
“Small headache,” he wrote in his phone’s Notes app, which became the basis of “Racing to the Finish,” his 2018 memoir. “Drunk, one beer feeling.”
“I got out of the car and felt 1 or 2 beers drunk,” he wrote another time.
“Felt lazy and 1 beer drunk rest of the day.”
He occasionally appeared on what was ostensibly his own podcast, except Davis and another guy hosted it. The guy it was named for wanted almost nothing to do with it.
“Kind of got ugly,” Junior said after finishing 30th at Watkins Glen.
“Tough luck,” he said after placing 35th at Chicago.
“Frustrating,” he said after not finishing at all in Charlotte.
Before the 2014 season, Steve Letarte had become as much life coach as crew chief. Because it wasn’t age that was slowing Junior down. It was immaturity, brain injuries and increasing self-doubt. That year at Talladega Superspeedway, where Dale Sr. won 10 times, Junior went into the pits before stomping the accelerator in an attempt to make up time.
Then, up ahead, he saw a massive crash unfolding. He did the one thing Daddy told him he couldn’t: Junior lifted. And the worst part? There was no crash. He had avoided a collision that existed only in his imagination.
“My team was like, ‘What was that?’” Junior says now. “I really couldn’t hide what I’d done. They knew. They watched it. That’s when I was like, ‘Hmm, I wonder if I’m going to do this much longer.’”
With Letarte in his ear, Junior, 39, won four races in 2014. That October, Kelley and Junior’s girlfriend, Amy Reimann, threw him a blowout party for his 40th. The band 21 Pilots played, Kid Rock mingled, and the night came alive out in Junior’s woods.
Everybody congregated in the saloon at Whisky River, drinking and singing and pounding the keys of an old red piano. At some point long before sunrise, the guests noticed the birthday boy was gone, having slipped into the darkness after walking past a painting of an aging cowboy.
My dad, like Junior’s, is a frequent subject of my dreams. He is as I remember: beaten-down and resentful, frizzy gray hair, knuckles swollen with rheumatoid arthritis and flecked with paint.
He’s frozen in time, even as my 20s and 30s have come and gone. Eight years ago, I became a father myself. I want to know more about the old band and why it broke up, to tell my two daughters about him, to answer questions about him and therefore myself.
The dreams often end with me feeling guilty. He’s at home, surrounded by guitars he rarely plays. But not wanting to bother him, I just haven’t called.
I explain this to Junior.
“Teresa said something really interesting one day very recently after he passed away,” he says. “She said that missing someone you love is selfish, because you want them there for you. I always kind of kept that in the back of my mind. It made me try not to be selfish.
“But I do miss him. God, I wish he was here for me. I want him. I want to hug him. I want to talk to him, and I need him.”
Once he accepted this, he realized that there’s nothing selfish about grief. So he stopped caring about what anybody else thought and tried to think of new ways to connect.
These days, people close to Junior joke that, if you’re up late trying to score some obscure piece of Dale Sr. memorabilia on eBay and keep getting outbid, it’s probably Junior who’s outbidding you. Indeed, the last username you want to see in an auction history is DMA7488, who has bought and sold more than a thousand items since 2013 and, with an estimated net worth of $300 million, isn’t about losing.
Vintage racing hats, early Dale Sr. shirts, scale models of cars his daddy once drove. Most sellers have no idea it’s Junior, but one figured it out. Junior bought so many of the seller’s die-cast cars that the two started emailing, and they recently spent an hour on the phone discussing the details of a custom 1976 No. 8 Chevy, the first car Dale Sr. raced at Daytona.
His phone is a portal, taking him to racing fan sites to look for photographs Junior has never seen. Pictures of the icon or the ghost? That’s not the objective. It’s the man. Junior says he has a dozen photo streams, organized by “chapters” of his dad’s life. There, in “Dad 70s Sportsman,” is a bushy-haired kid whose car is sponsored by a construction company. Here, in “1980-81,” is a young man toasting victory with a Coke cup.
“What hotel did they stay in?” Junior wrote on social media, alongside a black-and-white picture of the actual Chevy Nova his dad drove. “Did they eat at any local restaurants? Who all went down there with him? Was he nervous? I want to time travel.”
These folders are precious, to be sure. But there’s one he rarely shows anyone. “Just Dad” contains photos of Dale Sr. lounging at home or tinkering in his shop. Junior shows me a picture of his daddy at sunset, that familiar profile backlit as a fishing line drops into Lake Norman.
Junior is smiling.
“Just being a person,” he says.
In 2015, the portal took him to 18th-century Bavaria, where Johannes Ehrenhardt Sr. and his son boarded a passenger ship bound for Philadelphia. Two decades later, Johannes Jr. would be granted a tract of farmland in the British colony of Carolina. There, he would turn over the same dirt where, much later, his descendants would plant seeds and play games and, starting with Junior’s grandfather, lay rubber.
Junior was so moved that, standing next to Amy in the ancient chapel where the Ehrenhardts once worshiped, he dropped to a knee and proposed marriage.
He was 40 and engaged, two things he once believed would slow him down. But he won three times in 2015, after reaching victory lane just eight times in his 30s. The next season, he finished second in three of his first eight races.
Then his concussion symptoms returned. There were no horrific crashes. Just dozens of minor ones, each jostling his neck and head. He struggled to tie shoelaces and buckle a belt, and his reaction time and vision had dulled.
“Angry for no reason,” he wrote in his Notes app. He told no one, not even Amy.
“Close to puking,” he wrote later.
“Seems to be getting worse.”
He pledged to donate his brain and was ruled out for the final 18 races of 2016. During his time off, he took interest in a new project: actually hosting his own podcast. His plan was to interview racing buddies and the sport’s pioneers, and soon “Dirty Mo Acres” was adding a dedicated studio. As time passed, Junior noticed that his questions and guests seemed to follow a trend.
“We’re at that part of our lives,” he says, “where we’re reconciling with our past.”
After my dad died, I felt an urgency to accomplish every goal and live as much as possible before age 51. I needed to be established in my career, to have started a family, to see the world in what felt like a truncated time. Even as I notched those things, I wondered what my dad would’ve thought.
You never stop wanting to impress your parents, even after they’re gone. There’s a longing to speak as equals.
“I would love to say, ‘Hey, when I pissed you off that day,’” Junior says, “‘you were right. What an a--hole I was. I was not using my head.’”
But when all you have are memories, yours and those held by others, you protect them. Concussions were now threatening Junior’s long-term brain circuitry, and after the 2017 season, he retired. When he spun out at Daytona, after the front of Kyle Busch’s car sent Junior’s careening into a wall, that was it.
However much time he had left, he didn’t want to spend it in pursuit of more wins. He wanted closure. Junior had traditionally avoided conversations about his dad’s death, partly because he didn’t remember much about that day. Now armed with a microphone, he interviewed guests about the things they remembered, trying to bring a blurry picture into focus.
Mike Helton, the NASCAR president in 2001, described the moments before his announcement that Earnhardt was gone. “We just lost the greatest driver we’ve ever had. What am I supposed to say?” Helton said.
Then came Kenny Schrader, who, after peeking into Earnhardt’s car window after the wreck, frantically waved for emergency personnel. Schrader had never revealed what he had seen, and Junior didn’t want him to do so on the podcast. Instead, he wanted to read Schrader something.
“You’re one of the few to see the darkest moment for my dad,” he said, reading from a laptop. “You have intimate knowledge of those moments; you are a keeper of that delicate information.
“I feel pain for you to have to carry that memory. But you carry it for me. You carry it for Kelley. … I know you might sometimes wish that you weren’t the one, but I’m glad it was you.”
And Sterling Marlin, whose collision with Earnhardt had preceded the crash and, in the weeks afterward, spurred death threats.
“I hope that you’ve carried no sliver of guilt,” Junior told him.
Junior turned 46, an age his grandfather Ralph had died before reaching, and kept asking questions.
“What were some of the not-so-great things about him?” Junior says. “We’ve been talking about how insane amazing he was all these years, and sometimes it’s fun to talk about how real he was.”
So Junior and Kelley asked their mother, Brenda, why she and Dale Sr. had divorced. He was addicted to racing, yes. But there was also a clear avoidance of responsibility. His own father’s fatal heart attack had shaken him, kicking off a few years of emotional instability and financial distress. Rather than confront his own grief, he distracted himself — driving, tinkering or disappearing into the woods.
Hank Parker Sr., a pro fisherman and one of Dale Sr.’s closest friends, came on to tell Junior about one of their hunting trips. As they were waiting for a deer, Parker’s son called, and Parker told his boy he loved him. Dale Sr. looked jealous.
“I don’t know how to love my kid like you love your kid,” Parker said his friend told him.
“He was never able to express to you how much he loved you,” Parker went on. “Never was able. You always felt like he loved you when you won and he didn’t when you didn’t win.”
Junior just let him talk.
“I’ve always wanted, somehow,” Parker continued, “to get you and grab hold of your shoulders and tell you how hurt he was that he didn’t know how to express his love for you. … It also showed me a side of him that was sad.”
Last year, Junior’s longtime crew chief, Tony Eury Sr., was his guest. It was the same day JR Motorsports announced that, after Teresa Earnhardt let the trademark expire on the old No. 8 Bud car, Kelley and Junior had bought it back. He and Eury were talking about Dale Sr.’s fateful decision so many years ago to put Junior, after all those wrecks and so many arguments, into one of his cars.
“You knew he wasn’t happy. He let you know,” Eury said. Dale Sr. wasn’t sure Junior even wanted to race. “I said: ‘Dale, they’re kids. Put him in it. Spend your money on him, and we’ll go see.
“‘We’ll know in a year if he’s got it or not.’”
It’s September 2024, the end of summer, sunset on a humid Friday. Junior is 49. Since retiring from full-time racing, he does one or two tracks a year. This time it’s Bristol Motor Speedway, where, in 1979, Dale Sr. got his first win.
Junior won’t say it, but everyone knows this is his last NASCAR race. There’s something poetic about a circle closing here, at the precise moment a new rotation begins. Junior and Amy’s two young daughters, 6-year-old Isla and 3-year-old Nicole, are here on pit road, smelling the singed rubber and hearing the air guns, as Daddy stands next to his car.
He picks up Nicole and points toward the speedway lights, then his blue No. 88 car.
“I’m trying to see if it might register with my girls that I did that. That I do this,” Junior says. “This is what our family does.”
Junior kisses Amy and high-fives Isla. Then he climbs in and buckles his head and neck restraint. Junior knows it won’t be long before his girls start asking about the man they see in so many pictures, eyes hidden by sunglasses, usually looking fearsome. That’ll be a good day, he says, to ride over to Kannapolis and, because they can’t visit the grave, show them the statue.
It belongs to everybody, he’ll explain, because “The Intimidator” was everybody’s. But Papa Dale? The man Junior has spent the past decade getting to know? He’s theirs, and the two little girls with strawberry hair don’t have to share him.
“He was this guy. He did this thing. Then he died,” he’ll say.
“I hope that one day, they go: ‘Hey Dad, tell me about Daytona. Tell me about winning the Daytona 500 in 2004. Tell me about going to Victory Lane when you were a kid. What was like that?’
“I want them to get to a point to where they’re asking me about that part in my life. It may take some time. There’s a lot to talk about.”
As I wrote this story, I reached out to my dad’s old bandmates, to ask about the man I never got to meet.
Before he was my dad, they said, Michael was a prankster who’d do anything for a laugh. The band toured the East Coast, opening for the Doobie Brothers and the Allman Brothers, and a disagreement with Ted Nugent’s road crew nearly led to an onstage brawl, lead singer Jeff Logan told me. Logan and Phillip “Flip” Myers, the band’s drummer, disagree on why things eventually fell apart. Too little money, Jeff says. Creative differences with legendary producer Allen Toussaint, Flip says. They recorded a second album that was never released.
“We were damn close to breaking through,” says Flip, who’s 76. “I think about it every day.”
Not long after we spoke, a package from Jeff arrived: an 8-track of High Cotton’s first record, a remastered CD, a half-dozen pictures of a man in his early 20s, lively and grooving. I handed the packet to Lilah and Lucy, my daughters. The guy with the dark hair flowing from beneath a cowboy hat? That’s Grandpa Michael.
That day in Bristol, Junior finishes seventh and climbs out of his car. Someone hands him a water on pit road, and he drains it and asks for a beer. Fans line a walkway, yelling for an Earnhardt one more time, and drivers walk over for high-fives and hugs. Junior empties the one can, so somebody brings out a cooler. He reaches in and slips another Bud (Select) into a koozie.
This was a race, sure. It was also a goodbye, the kind drivers used to not get. Junior changes out of his fire suit and into a T-shirt and jeans, opening a third beer as he walks over to mingle with fans. A staffer hands Junior his glasses, and lines ripple across his cheeks as he smiles for selfies.
It’s nearly midnight when Amy and several friends join, another party just getting started. I ask Junior about the podcast guest he wants most, the one he can never have. But if he could, what would be his first question? What is it he wants to ask his father?
He pauses, thinking about it, and smiles.
“How’d I do?” he says.
Last October, just three weeks after Bristol, Junior woke into what felt like a dream. His dad wasn’t in this one; in fact, the visits stopped around the time Junior turned 49. Instead, he was in a beach house in the Lowcountry, a wife and two daughters next to him in bed.
It was his 50th birthday.
He made it, reaching an age his daddy never did, the last person to ever pass the great Dale Earnhardt. The family spent a lazy day on the coast.
“Just Amy and my girls,” he says.
They went to a local joint with a balcony, and Kelley Venmoed Amy to buy her little brother a drink. The four of them sat there for hours, all Junior wanted, just feeling the breeze and listening to his girls for as long as he could.
