Haul A** and Turn Left (2 page)

—Dodge owner

RAY EVERNHAM

once Gordon’s crew chief

A
nother driver who bridges the generation gap is Dale Earnhardt Jr., and, naturally, part of the reason is the legacy of his late father. Just being the Second Coming of Dale isn’t enough, though. Earnhardt Jr. manages to be mindful of where he came from without coming across as a cheap imitation of his father. No one’s ever going to call him Intimidator II. He’s his own man, as distinct a representative of his own generation as a bearer of the family flame.

“I don’t have near as much common sense as he had, and he banked on that just about all day, every day of his life,” he says of his father.

Junior wears his caps backward, speaks with conviction of his hatred of bigotry, listens to music as loud and raucous as the growl of his Chevy V-8, and displays a disarming informality that is both popular with the ladies and appealing to the masses.

After all, it was Junior who, after winning the Daytona 500 in 2004, responded to a congratulatory call from George W. Bush by saying to the president of the United States, “It was real good to meet you today. Take it easy.”

Wonder how many times Bush has had someone tell him to take it easy?

He finished second in the race in which his father lost his life, and, for a while, he mourned the loss of a man he had always loved but only recently come to understand. Like all men with the racing fever in their blood, he understood the need to climb back into the car and compete again.

In 2004, Earnhardt Jr. had to cope with personal adversity after being burned in a sports car crash. The brush with disaster may have slowed him a bit, but it was difficult to notice. Sounding very much like his old man, he scoffed at any notion that perhaps it might not have been prudent to take a chance by spending a weekend away from the stock car wars by racing on a road course.

“If the opportunity presented itself, and if they parked that [Corvette] C5 out there right now, I’d climb in it again,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “It’s what I do. I love to drive, and I love to race.”

“Junior has gotten to that point where he reminds me a lot of his dad,” said Jeff Gordon, a rival of both.

No one—not his father, not even Richard Petty—has ever been more popular with fans than Dale Earnhardt Jr. Each week his introduction is greeted wildly by grandstands as full of bright red, the color of Earnhardt Jr.’s car, as any Nebraska home crowd. His 2004 Daytona 500 victory occurred two years and 362 days after the death of his father. In other words, this pivotal NASCAR moment occurred three days shy of three years after the death of Number Three.

The son’s rapid rise to prominence led some detractors to suggest that NASCAR officials were making it easy for Junior. He responded not with anger but rather a cool matter-of-factness.

“NASCAR couldn’t run a legitimate business if there was a teacher’s pet,” he said.

He was just as apt later that same year when he pulled off a rather spectacular victory at the short track in Richmond, Virginia.

“For five minutes, I felt like my daddy,” he said.

“[Owner] Richard Childress recently went polar-bear hunting up in the Northwest Territory near Antarctica.”

—Fox commentator

LARRY McREYNOLDS

“We’ve got heavy hearts in the backs of our minds.”

—KURT BUSCH

expressing his feelings on owner Jack Roush after Roush was injured in a 2002 plane crash

“I’ve always said your legacy is what you leave behind you.”

—DARRELL WALTRIP

enlightening Fox TV viewers

“I drove down the middle, and I figured the hole was going to close. What I didn’t figure, though, was that it was going to close on top of me.”

—MICHAEL WALTRIP

describing a twenty-nine car pileup in a 2002 Busch Series race at Talladega

H
arry Gant, who retired after the 1994 season, is mystified by autograph seekers, though even today he signs more than his share.

“Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” says Gant. “These people will line up down the street in the pouring rain, just to get me to sign my name on a piece of paper or a postcard.

“You know, I always liked Elvis, but I didn’t rightly care how he signed his name. I’d like to have known him. I wouldn’t have minded singing along with him, or at least hearing him sing, but get his autograph? Nah.”

Stock car racing has seldom seen a hero less affected by success than Gant, who still lives in his hometown, Taylorsville, North Carolina. Gant used to run a steakhouse there, and he is also a cattleman and an accomplished woodworker. When Gant retired, other drivers asked him if he was still going to be around at the track.

“Heavens, no,” he replied. “You ever seen the traffic around these places? I built myself a piece of furniture for my television set. I can roll the set right out on my deck and watch the race right out there in the fresh air if I see fit.”

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, but it … wouldn’t have been worth what I had to do to get it.”

—DALE EARNHARDT JR.

explaining why he resisted the temptation to spin out Ryan Newman in the 2002 all-star race, the Winston

“I bumped him; that’s part of it. I think we needed a yellow so we could put on a good show there at the end.”

—KURT BUSCH

after not resisting the temptation to spin Robby Gordon out in the same race

“Lowe’s Motor Speedway is one of those tracks where the sun usually sets in the west.”

—Motor Racing Network’s

BARNEY HALL

“Maybe if Jeff Gordon had been a little braver, he might’ve won.”

—KEVIN HARVICK

after being told that Gordon, who finished second at Chicagoland Speedway in 2002, had called his driving through the grass “a stupid move”

K
urt Busch, the 2004 Nextel Cup champion, is fond of big words, of which there are some that he actually knows the meaning. Busch is kind of like the kid who went off to college for a year and came home thinking he knew everything. In fact, he did attend the University of Arizona for a year.

The owner of Busch’s number 97 Ford, Jack Roush, also likes stringing syllables together, but Roush’s use of the language is far more authoritative than that of his young driver. The truth is that Roush is probably a bad influence, linguistically, on Busch. Busch, if prompted, would probably say Roush was a bad influence “vocabularically.”

After a qualifying run, Busch once said he had “circumferenced the track.” After Ryan Newman’s first pole of 2005, Busch called Newman’s Dodge “ludicrous fast.”

During Daytona Speedweeks in 2003, he said rival team DEI (Dale Earnhardt Incorporated) had “a threshold on the front of the competition.” He added that “the DEI cars have some sort of wrath that nobody else has.” He said of own his team, “It’s real solidifying to know that the group is solid.”

Hard to argue with that.

Referring to his spectacular sophomore season (in NASCAR, not college) which included three victories in the final five 2003 races, Busch said, “It’s been somewhat of a tailspin and somewhat more of a comfort level to know what I’m capable of and to know where the team is at right now.”

“Sorry teams don’t usually win the Brickyard, or anywhere else, if you think about it.”

—MARK MARTIN

“I’ve got some really good words for him. Unfortunately, I can’t say them on TV. I wish I had something I could’ve shot at him.”

—WARD BURTON

angry at Dale Earnhardt Jr. after a crash at Bristol in August 2002

“The Chevrolet has had more nose jobs than Michael Jackson.”

—STERLING MARLIN

complaining about a NASCAR rules change

N
o one ever outran Ernie Irvan, who retired in 1999, in a race of verbal blunders. The best example occurred in a telephone press conference in 1997, shortly after Irvan had been told by Robert Yates that he would no longer drive Yates’s number 28 Ford after that season.

With an army of journalists listening in, Irvan said, “You know what they say: When the going gets tough, the tough get happening.”

When asked if Yates had given him a reason for his dismissal, Irvan said, “Well, you know, I went to Robert, and he didn’t really give me a reason. He just hee-hawed around the subject.”

Then a reporter asked Irvan if he was concerned at being “a lame duck.”

“Somebody asked me that the other day, and I didn’t really know what the guy meant,” Irvan replied. “I never played baseball when I was a kid.”

In the span of about ninety seconds, Irvan had dozens of reporters laughing uncontrollably, heads facedown in their computer keyboards, punching the table with their fists.

“We had the wrong gear, wrong springs, wrong shocks, and wrong car. We had the right beer, but other than that, we got stomped.”

—STERLING MARLIN

sponsored by Coors Light, at Dover in September 2004

“When I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I was trying to act like I was forty-five or fifty. I’m not saying that didn’t help me get a long way in this sport, but, now that I’m thirty-one, going on thirty-two, I want to get back some of those years.”

—JEFF GORDON

before the 2003 Daytona 500

“Fast and smooth. You don’t have to be aggressive as long as you’re fast and smooth.”

—RYAN NEWMAN

J
eff Gordon was not always the self-assured, polished spokesman he is today. When he was in his early twenties, he had become a superstar on the track but remained uncertain off it. He often relied on the protective influence of crew chief Ray Evernham and drove journalists mad with responses that seemed rehearsed and predictable.

In 1995, when Gordon was closing in on his first championship, he conducted a press conference at Atlanta Motor Speedway, which then hosted the final race of the season. Journalists were informed in advance that Gordon would not answer any question concerning the championship and would only respond to questions specifically referring to the specific race. This stipulation, of course, defeated the purpose of holding a press conference.

It took a resourceful writer to smoke Gordon out.

Jim McLaurin, then covering NASCAR for
The State
newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, was up to the task.

“Jeff,” he said, “I know you won’t answer any questions about the championship. What I want to know is why you won’t answer any questions about the championship.”

Most everyone in the room erupted in laughter. Gordon couldn’t keep a straight face. And he did talk about the championship he would wrap up two days later.

“He drives off the end of his hood. He can’t see past his ears.”

—TERRY LABONTE

referring to Kurt Busch after an Indianapolis crash in 2003

“If we ever had fan interference in this sport, it’d be a lot worse than a dropped ball.”

—KEN SCHRADER

noting the controversial incident in the 2003 Cubs—Marlins baseball playoff series

“We all knew what the deal was when we got into it. It’s not like we started a five-day-a -week, nine-to-five job and all of the sudden somebody said, ‘Hey, we need you working more hours, traveling all over the country, and being gone just about every weekend.’ This didn’t surprise anyone. When we signed up we knew how many weeks, how many races, had a pretty good idea of where they were going to be, and knew what we had to do. Nobody fooled us into it”

—KYLE PETTY

B
efore the start of the 2005 season, I asked Carl Edwards if anyone had ever told him he was so wholesome and enthusiastic it made them sick.

This youthful believer in truth, justice, and the American way replied, “Oh, yeah. I get that all the time.”

Twenty-five years, Edwards’s age at the time, might be a relatively mature length of age for some, but not for race drivers, who strap themselves into outrageously fast vehicles and live out their frenetic dreams. Missouri gave the world Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and Edwards—from Columbia, Missouri, not Mark Twain’s Hannibal—is descended from that fictional heritage.

It’s not hard to imagine Edwards, sitting in some high school classroom, daydreaming about winning the Daytona 500. He’s all “yes, sir” and “no, sir,” reciting his sponsors even to an audience of world-weary journalists who wouldn’t mention Scotts fertilizer (one of Edwards’s sponsors) if they were standing up to their knees in a weed-infested garden.

Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Edwards daydreaming even now—that is, except for the fact that he’s living out his dreams with the world as his witness.

Jeff Gordon has his own brand of wine. Carl Edwards deserves his own line of comic books. He couldn’t get a movie deal because his story is too hokey. In a way, it’s a shame that Edwards isn’t an actor because, now that Mickey Rooney’s day is past, he alone could play Andy Hardy. If Jack Roush could build Edwards a Ford out of Lincoln Logs, he’d try to race it. Edwards is one of the last people alive who could say, “Gee whiz, that’s swell,” and keep a straight face.

The occasion of Edwards’s first Nextel Cup victory, the Golden Corral 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway on March 20, 2005, was just as hokey, uplifting, and, well, swell as everything else about him.

“I was trying to get by Jimmie [Johnson], which is just about impossible,” said Edwards after doing so on the final lap. “It just worked out at the end. I can’t believe it worked out.”