So when Dale walked off, I just had to sit there. All by myself. On Fantasy Island.
But I wanted to tell somebody. I couldn’t wait for practice to be over. In fact, I couldn’t wait for the weekend to be over, for the season to be over. I didn’t give up on the rest of the 2000 season. But the races I most looked forward to were the ones coming up in 2001, the ones I’d be racing in for Dale Earnhardt, Inc.
The person I wanted to tell first was Buffy. She was waiting in the bus. She was as nervous as I was to learn the answer from NAPA. So when I got out of the car, I went straight to the bus. We high-fived like you see on TV. Then I told her, “We gotta call Momma.” We did, and Mom couldn’t believe it. After sharing the news with my family, it was time to share it with the NAPA family.
To do that, Dale and I headed west aboard N1DE, his Learjet, to attend a big NAPA convention in Las Vegas. It was going to be a quick trip: We left Statesville Wednesday around noon and would return there twelve hours later, after spending six or seven hours in the air and a few more with the NAPA folks in Vegas.
When we got to Vegas, Dale introduced me to the NAPA family as his “next winning driver.” Me, the driver of the new NAPA #15 car.
Back on the jet heading east, you probably would have thought we’d sleep or just relax. But that wasn’t how Dale rolled. He liked to play gin rummy. The game was Rummy 500; the first to get to five hundred points won. That could take a while.
Three hours and twenty minutes later when we landed in Statesville, the score was 640 to 620. The game went into overtime. You see, I was leading when we got to five hundred, but not by much, and Dale said I had to win by twenty points. And by the time we got off the plane he had beaten me.
I’d told Buffy. Buffy and I told Momma. Dale and I told NAPA. Now it was time to tell the world. We needed to hurry up and do the telling.
We wanted the announcement to have a little drama. But keeping secrets in the NASCAR world is never easy. There’s people you have to tell. If you’re starting a team, you have to let your team know. You’ll need a sponsor. You have to tell your sponsor your plan. You have to hire people. They’ll want to know what they’ll be working on. Sometimes, by the time you get around to the formal announcement, everybody already knows.
Whether everybody knew what Dale was going to announce or not, they wanted to hear him explain—not what he was doing but why he was doing it. So when Dale and Teresa announced a press conference at DEI headquarters, there was a huge turnout.
I drove up in a NAPA delivery truck with a giant blue-and-yellow hat on top of it.
I didn’t so much mind the first question that was asked. I just didn’t like how it was asked.
“Why Michael?” one of the reporters asked in a tone that was nowhere close to flattering.
Dale’s answer sounded familiar to me. I’d heard it before, and it sounded just as great as ever.
“Because Michael will win in my car.”
CHAPTER 17
TESTING, TESTING
It was a pretty but cold Tuesday morning in Sherrills Ford when the alarm went off at six. I kissed Buffy on the forehead and told her I was off to test with my new racing team. I knew the path to victory for me—winning in NASCAR’s top division—ran straight through Rockingham, North Carolina. If I was going to have success in 2001, I’d have to win my team over in Rockingham.
The short-long wait for NAPA, my show-me-where-to-sign negotiations with Dale, the press conference announcing to the world that I’d be joining one of the best teams in NASCAR—all that was accomplished now. Laying down laps on the track was what I was facing next.
I had to prove to my new team I was that guy, the guy who could take us all to Victory Lane.
The NASCAR season starts every year with the Super Bowl, the big one, the Daytona 500. But when the checkered flag falls at Daytona, we have only five days to be in Rockingham, North Carolina, ready for race number two. You see, while some races are more prestigious than others, they all pay the same number of points. And to be the NASCAR champion, you need the most points. So in the grand scheme of things, that makes Rockingham or any other race just as important as Daytona.
They call the track in Rockingham “the Rock.” It is located just a couple of hours down the road from Charlotte, the epicenter of NASCAR. All the top Cup teams turn up each January in Rockingham to test their new cars. I knew this was an especially important test for me. This was my first test with my new team. The majority of the races are on tracks like Rockingham. Daytona and Talladega, they are different animals. It takes a different kind of car and a different kind of driving to be successful at those places. And despite my overall crappy record, no one ever questioned my Daytona prowess. I always got props there and at Talladega, the two resistor-plate tracks. It was most all the other places we raced like the Rock where people questioned my skills.
This was a real getting-to-know-each-other period for me and my team—and me getting to know my new car as well. One thing I wanted them to know about me was that I could win anywhere.
One thing was for sure: One way or the other, good or bad, first impressions were going to be made.
I had circled the Rockingham test on the calendar the day I signed to drive for Dale. I knew a good test at Rockingham would be a sign that we could run well anywhere. I needed a good test. I had to get my new team to buy into me being their driver. It takes a team to win in NASCAR, everyone believing in each other. A good test would be a good start toward that.
I was coming off a couple pretty tough years in NASCAR Cup competition. Two top fives in two years was all I had to hang my hat on. I’m sure everyone at DEI knew that, as well as they knew that by the end of the 2000 season I had pushed my losing streak to 462. That’s right: 0–462. My goal during the off-season was to win my new team over. As long as I was smart and drove hard, I believed they would overlook my record because Dale had.
As I drove toward the Rock, I put together in my head what my goals were for this first test day with my new team. I had raced for Dale at Rockingham twice before in his Busch Series car. I finished second there in 1994, nearly taking the win late from Mark Martin. That was that time Dale called me the P-word. There was a late caution that day, and I jumped on the radio to the crew and said: “Give me two tires and a bottle of water.” I was running second and was confident I could win with my strategy.
“We’re taking four tires and you don’t have time for water, your P-word,” Dale shouted back. “Just shut up and drive.”
I’m not a camel, I thought. And I’m not a P-word either. But I muttered to myself: “I hear you, Big E. I’ll just shut up and drive.”
I laugh every time I think about Dale saying that. But in the upcoming two-day test, there was a different P-word that would be key to success.
Patience.
I wanted to be fast, of course. But we were not going to Rockingham to set a track record. My crew chief, Scott Eggleston, had told me we were just going there to gather information. “Collect data,” I believe was the phrase he used. And DEI had a fancy way of collecting data I had never used before. Telemetry. When I got out on the track, this telemetry would shoot real-time information back to the crews in the pit area. They could see what I was doing while I was doing it. The cars would be analyzed very closely, and I knew I would be too. I’d never had a car that could tell on me before. I knew it would be important that day for my impressions from the seat to match up with what the engineers were seeing on their computer screens. I’d always been envious of other drivers whose teams used this fancy testing equipment. Now it was making me nervous.
When I’d about made it to Rockingham, I decided to call Dale. He answered the phone with: “You there yet?”
“I’m near,” I said. “You got any advice?”
Dale’s message mainly related to what I had said earlier. It related to patience: “Don’t overdrive your car. Don’t push it too hard. Just try to feel your car.” I knew all that. Every race-ca
r driver knows that. Sounded like a bunch of clichés to me. I guess I was hoping he was going to wave some magic wand over me that would make me faster than I’d ever been before. But I knew better than that. There’s no magic in racing. It’s pretty black-and-white. It’s whoever can get their car to handle better than the next guy. And when it’s time to go at the end of the race, go hard.
So my job mainly was just to log some laps in my #15 NAPA Chevy so my crew could collect their data. And that’s what I did. For eight hours. Lap after lap. And while I tried to be patient in getting them their data, it was difficult. All that repetition was driving me nuts.
Computers don’t lie. And although I didn’t know a huge amount about all the data we were collecting, the data that was most important to me was on the top left corner of the screen, and that was lap time. And Steve Park’s was way better than mine. So was Dale Junior’s.
These damn teammates that I wanted so badly, and this telemetry that I was so envious of—they were making this day a real pain. The ride back from Rockingham that evening felt twice as long as the one down. To make it worse, Dale called.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
I wondered if that was a question he knew the answer to or genuinely was wondering.
“Not good,” I told him. “Junior and Park were both fast. A couple of tenths a lap faster than me.”
“What did I tell you this morning?” he shot back, a question I didn’t think I was supposed to answer.
“Patience,” he said. “This is your first day on the track with your new team. Take your time. Get to know your guys. Tonight, all three teams will get together and come up with a plan for tomorrow. That’s what teammates are for.”
I was an old dog who needed to learn some new tricks. How in the world would I know what teammates were for? I’d never had any of those. But I had them now. And I needed to learn how to use them.
Something I decided on my own, however, was I didn’t much like logging laps just so they could collect their stupid data. I wanted to change some stuff. And we didn’t change much of anything all day.
That was one thing I did enjoy about my old crew chief, Bobby Kennedy. We didn’t have any data-collecting devices. He just looked at me and said: “What do you want to try?” And I looked at him and said the same.
That was the way I used to do things. But that was the old dog. The new one needed to be patient. Old Dog was about to get New Dog in trouble by being too pushy. But Old Dog’s record sucked.
So I just did what Dale told me to do at Rockingham back in 1994. I just shut up and drove.
When I returned for day two of the test, the same data-collecting continued. About halfway through the day, the engineers told me they had all the data they needed and asked me if there were any changes I wanted to try.
Finally! My patience had paid off. There were a couple of spring changes that had helped at Rockingham before, and I wanted to try them again. They could collect some data on that.
I wanted to give some input and see if it helped the car’s performance. I felt like it would. And I didn’t want to leave this important getting-to-know-each-other session without giving my crew some idea of how I wanted the car to feel.
Was I ever glad I did!
Two front spring changes and a sway bar later and—boom! The lap times were just as fast as my teammates’. And just as consistent. It made sense to me. A car’s a car. Dale’s cars probably had the best engines I’d ever had. And the aerodynamics were way more refined than anything I’d ever driven as well.
So if you have a good motor and you have a good car and the driver knows what he’s doing, the lap time should show it and all that telemetry can ride right along.
And those engineers with their college degrees looking at their squiggly lines, I don’t care if they take credit for it. I just want to be fast.
Now, as the test was ending, I was just that.
Fast.
The ride home that day was a whole lot cheerier than the one the day before. The day before, I didn’t want to answer when Dale was calling. And now I couldn’t wait to call him.
His little project had stepped up and run some fast laps for him. Then again, isn’t that why he hired me?
CHAPTER 18
DAYTONA BOUND
I’d done my share of losing over the past fifteen years—and maybe a couple of other people’s share too. But I didn’t feel like a loser anymore.
I didn’t care what the record book said. I didn’t care what condescending questions the reporters might ask. The Michael Waltrip who was on his way to Daytona in 2001 under Dale Earnhardt’s wing? This Michael was undefeated, and he was walking around acting like it. This Michael knew he could win. And back at the factory in Mooresville, the team knew it too.
During the winter, I had done my job. I had won my team over. They believed in me now. None of them seemed the least bit concerned about my stupid record, and neither was I. We were just race-car people, heading for the first and biggest race of the year. Man, I felt like a kid again, like that kid back in Kentucky who used to sit at his desk at Stanley Elementary School just waiting for his parents to scoop him up and deliver him to NASCAR’s holy land.
Most years at Daytona, the pre-race routine was pretty much the same.
You had to get your picture taken in your new uniform. I stood there proudly in my NAPA blue. You had to do interviews about the upcoming season. I did one after another. It seemed like everyone wanted to ask about me driving for Dale.
Why not? This year, my story was better than most. I was the guy who’d never won, driving for the guy whose name meant winning. It was a solid two days of media swirl.
What an unlikely pair we were! Just like we’d always been: the Intimidator and the Intimidated. No one could question Dale’s record. Everyone had questioned mine.
Back in my little world in Sherrills Ford, I was the guy in charge. People looked to me for direction. Put me with Dale though: He was Batman and I was Robin. Holy skid marks, Dale! Whatever you say!
Over the years, wherever we were, people would look at us and think: What do those two have in common? If we were on the boat, it was “Why’s the guy in the funny sunglasses and the mustache hanging around with the dude in the loud pink shorts?” In New York City, “Why’s the champ having dinner with the seventeenth-place guy?” It didn’t matter where we were, people didn’t get it. Now here we were in Daytona, and suddenly, to me at least, we didn’t seem that different at all. This was serious business here. We’d come with one thing in mind: taking the Daytona 500 trophy back home to North Carolina with us.
I wanted everyone to see us as one. Owner and driver, one and the same, working together for a common goal. We were there to win. As we prepared for the race, I could tell that this was Dale’s mind-set as well. I wasn’t “goofy Mike” in Daytona, like I could be when we were on the boat. I was his driver. He had been working with me for months, making sure I was mentally prepared to win.
Dale was cool. I guess he thought he was being subtle. But I got it. I’d heard his interviews. He’d say, “You better watch that #15 car. You better watch Michael. Keep your eyes on Michael. He’s the sleeper in Daytona this year.”
He was using the pre-Daytona media to send messages to me. Messages I was getting. I didn’t 100-percent-for-sure know at the time where these messages were coming from. Looking back now it was as plain as the mask on Batman’s face. Dale’s plan was to make sure I knew what he expected from me. And that was a win.
I know now he was just saying it to make sure I heard it. Gotcha, boss! Loud and clear!
Everything up until practice began on Friday was just hype, spreading the story of Dale’s new driver. We were delivering our story to the media and the fans. That’s what this period was for. There were no cars on the track yet. NASCAR needed us to be doing something to make sure all the tickets got sold.
“Say something even if you make it up,” they were probably thinking. But we wer
en’t making anything up at all. We were there with one goal in mind.
Everyone’s dream of winning the race seemed downright plausible, even the championship. Before this race began, everyone was tied for the lead in points. Even a winless driver with a new team had no fewer points than a seven-time champion did.
Las Vegas had set my odds of winning the 500 at 40 to 1. Most would say that was optimistic. They probably should have been more like 462 to 1. Maybe more. My goal was to make the 462 joke irrelevant.
Daddy used to say, “Money talks, and bullshit walks.” I’m not sure how that applies here. But as practice was getting ready to begin, it seemed to relate. All the P.R. B.S. was fixing to take a backseat to what mattered the most: cars on the track. Whaddaya got? What can you do? How fast can you go? It was time to “put up or shut up.” That was something else Dad said. And that definitely applied today.
The first practice session of the year at Daytona was always the most anticipated. Not just because it was the first practice, but because it was Daytona. Winning at Daytona can define your career. And when practice starts, if you’ve got a fast car, that means you have a shot. In my case, with a new team, we couldn’t afford to waste a lot of time trying to catch up. We needed to be up front right from the beginning.
When I rolled onto the track for the first official practice session with my new #15 car and my new team, we were plenty fast. Very competitive.
As I made my way through the days and nights at Daytona, I was feeling quite comfortable. In qualifying that was held the week before, our NAPA team posted a solid time. We were top fifteen, earning us a solid start in our qualifying race that Thursday. My car was very fast, and I was very ready.
You know how much I’ve always loved the qualifying races at Daytona.
Now here we were, twenty-five years later. I didn’t wake up in a hotel that morning after driving all night from Kentucky in a smoke-filled Chevy. When I woke up I was through that tunnel, in the infield, in my bus.
In the Blink of an Eye Page 11
