Whether it’s Dale Earnhardt or Dale Earnhardt Jr., the Earnhardt name is synonymous with racing at the world center of racing.
Combined, the elder Earnhardt has 34 wins across multiple racing series over a career that spanned 26 years. In the same vein, the younger Earnhardt has 17 across multiple series.
In the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, Junior first raced on the high banks of Daytona International Speedway on February 20, 2000, coming home 13th in the 42nd running of the Daytona 500. On the return trip in July, he finished 35th.
The following year, he led 13 laps and pushed teammate Michael Waltrip to his first career victory in the 43rd 500. On the final lap, however, Dale Earnhardt — his team owner and father — got loose in Turn 4, turned up the track and slammed head-on into the wall, suffering a fatal basilar skull fracture.
On a number of occasions, Junior has told the story of how a week before NASCAR returned to Daytona for the July 7 Pepsi 400, he took a lap around the track, parked his vehicle in Turn 3 and walked until he reached the grassy knoll spot in Turn 4 where his father’s wrecked car came to a rest.
He did so because he believed it was a placed he wanted to visit. Even to this day, 16 years later, he still takes the time to look at that grassy knoll in Turn 4 every time he comes to Daytona. More importantly, his reason for doing so initially was to know what emotions would bubble up to the surface so he could deal with them at that moment, rather than during the race.
“I told myself what I was going through is the same sadness that some guy somewhere in the Midwest is dealing with right now,” he said in a feature on NBCSN. “Who am I to go on and on about how hard it was, because somebody, somewhere right now is dealing with a loss.”
Earnhardt had the dominant car in the Pepsi 400, leading over 100 laps. But on the final restart with six laps to go, he was running sixth behind Johnny Benson, Dave Blaney, Ken Schrader, Jeremy Mayfield and Tony Stewart. Rounding Turn 1, Stewart went high to pass Mayfield, and the two gave Earnhardt a run that he tried to use up high. Stewart blocked it, but Earnhardt dove to the inside and took fifth exiting Turn 2. He passed Schrader, who was denied the bottom line by Mayfield entering Turn 3, to take fourth.
With help from Mike Wallace, he drove to the outside of Mayfield in the tri-oval to take third with five to go. He side-drafted Blaney to take second down the backstretch and set his sights on Benson.
He carried the momentum past Benson on the high side through Turn 3, took the lead with four to go and was pushed by teammate Waltrip to victory.
“It’s going to be Dale Earnhardt Jr., using lessons learned from his father to go from sixth to first and score the victory in the Pepsi 400,” said NBC play by play announcer Allen Bestwick as the field was coming to the checkered flag.
The next two years at Daytona were hit and miss for Earnhardt with finishes of 29th, sixth, 36th and seventh.
On February 15, 2004, six years to the date his father won his first Daytona 500, Junior passed Stewart with 19 to go and drove on to victory in the 46th running of the Daytona 500.
In the 10 years between his 04 and 2014 victory, he finished top-10 11 out of 19 starts.
Entering the 54th running of the Daytona 500 in 2014, Earnhardt was in the midst of a 55-race winless drought. He wasn’t much of a factor in the first quarter of the race, hanging around mid-pack. But after a lengthy rain delay, he drove his car to the front, led 54 laps in the process and scored the victory in what turned out to be his first multi-win season in a decade.
A year later on Independence Day weekend, he led over half the race in a clinical performance on his way to victory lane.
He was taken out of the 56th running of the Daytona 500 by a late wreck, finished 21st in last year’s Coke Zero 400 and was caught up in a multi-car wreck, while leading, halfway through the 58th running of the Daytona 500.
With four wins and 19 top-10 finishes in 35 career Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series starts, Earnhardt has been pretty great through the years at Daytona.
If you asked Earnhardt what’s made him great over the years, he’ll tell you it’s the cars.
“I know this is not a lot of fun to write, but it’s the cars. We have had some really, really good cars here,” he said. “When I get the car that I need or when I’ve had the cars that I have had that were so good here, you could just do whatever you wanted with them. If you know a little bit about what you are doing, you can make some things happen and control the race. I say that because I have had some races here that I haven’t had the car that I felt that I needed – me personally. And, I know without that kind of a race car, I don’t feel confident in getting the job done. The car has always been really critical.
“When we had our string of runs at DEI (Dale Earnhardt, Inc.) from (20)01 to (20)04, we could be here or Talladega in XFINITY or the Cup level and those were some really amazing cars, and some really smart people…we had kind of the whole thing. We had the guys that knew how to create the bodies the way they needed to be, and we also had some great motors with (Ritchie) Gilmore and those guys working on those engines. We just had a really awesome, perfect situation for a while there for the plate stuff.
“I knew that Hendrick (Motorsports) had the same kind of strength having raced against them. So, when I got in those cars, it was no surprise to me that we ended up coming up here in some pretty fast stuff. Probably should have won more races than we did.
“It starts with the car. You go out there and practice. It either surprises you – I had my car yesterday do a couple of things that I thought ‘WOW, this is alright’. Sometimes you go out there and practice that first practice and you are a little underwhelmed, and then you are kind of concerned and you work on it, and hopefully, improve, but sometimes you don’t. You take a car like that into the race, it is just hard to be confident in making choices and making moves and being on the offense and doing stuff all the time. When your car is really, really strong, you’ll try any run you get because you just know that if it doesn’t work, it’s not going that bad; you are not going to fall back too far. There’s not a whole lot of risk in trying whatever you want to try. So the cars are a big part of it.”
