I had all the enthusiasm I’d had when I was that twelve-year-old boy though. Today was going to be my day. I wanted to deliver a statement to the whole NASCAR world: Anyone who wanted to win the Daytona 500 on Sunday would have to beat me to do it. I wanted there to be no doubt about that.
I was going to make that point loud and clear in my qualifying race. And that was just a couple of hours away.
CHAPTER 19
DALE’S PLAN
It was time to strap myself in for my first race of the 2001 NASCAR season, the twin 125-mile qualifiers for the Daytona 500.
These twins would set the field for Sunday’s running of the Great American Race. This was the first opportunity for my team and me to show our owner and the whole NASCAR world that we were here and we were going to contend. Confidence was no problem at all. Dale had been getting me ready for this day since he hired me in 2000—actually even before that, with his you’d-win-in-my-car speeches. He believed I could win. He believed in me. He had gotten me to the point where I believed it too.
And then there was the late restart. I had positioned myself perfectly to win that day and make a statement. I wanted to show the competition that I and my team had what it took to win in Daytona. Instead of delivering that statement, I made a mistake behind the wheel that cost me the race.
Eager to show everyone I was there to win, I messed up. I just simply missed a shift. I didn’t shift cleanly from second to third gear and lost my momentum. When the momentum was lost, so was the race.
I had it all set up. I could see exactly what I needed to do to win my qualifying race, but I didn’t execute. And I was right. What I saw would have won me that race. However, my missed shift caused me to finish eighth or ninth.
That night, my mistake ate at me. No wonder you’ve never won a race, I thought. You can’t even shift gears. All the work Dale had done to prepare me mentally to win the 500 was in jeopardy.
He had gotten me into such a great place. Now I was confused. I didn’t think I had what it took to win, not after what I had just done. That’s where I was mentally, not exactly the frame of mind you want to take into any race, much less the Daytona 500.
I was really beating myself up over what had happened. That night, I tried to explain it all to Buffy. As any wife would, she tried to comfort me. “That’s just part of it,” she said. “Get over it. You’ll do great on Sunday. Just remember: You put yourself in a position to win today. You can do it again Sunday.”
I certainly appreciated her effort, but I can’t say it did me much good. When I went to bed that night, my head was filled with doubt.
At Daytona, the motor-home area where the drivers stay is adjacent to the garage where the race cars are parked. The drivers’ and owners’ coaches are located in this area during race week. We’re all running back and forth to the garage area, hosting meet-and-greets with our sponsors, trading stories and gossip with each other, and, sometimes, making predictions about the race.
My motor home was parked near Jeff Gordon’s and Sterling Marlin’s, and Dale Earnhardt’s was off to the left. Thursday night’s sleep was not very therapeutic. When I got up Friday morning, I did my best to file away in my mind what had happened the day before. But it still had me a little messed up. As I walked by Dale’s motor home, I heard a sharp “Hey!”
It was Dale’s unmistakable bark.
I looked over and saw a small opening in the front door. Dale’s head was sticking out.
“Get over here,” he said.
That’s just how Dale was. Short, direct, and very much to the point. Sometimes, even if he was in a great mood, that’s what you’d get. Blunt sentences, never any doubt about what he was trying to say. And now I, his brand-new driver and longtime friend, who didn’t know how to shift gears, was fixing to get an earful, I was sure.
Man, I thought, I bet he’s gonna cuss me. He’s gonna cuss me out for screwin’ up that restart yesterday when I should have won that race.
And he’d be right. That’s exactly what I’d done. There was no excuse. I ain’t twelve, I thought. I’m thirty-seven. I can shift a gear, right? Do your job and you win. Oh, me! This is gonna be painful.
Dale never yelled at me. Except for that one day in Rockingham when he called me the P-word. That was actually funny, but this wasn’t going to be. I wasn’t sure how Dale would handle the mistake I made. As I approached him and thought about it, I had no idea what I would get.
“Where you goin’?” he asked through the door of his bus as I walked up.
“To the garage area to check on the boys,” I told him.
Dale glared at me, then motioned for me to come inside. I was uncomfortable. When I entered the bus, it was just Ty and Dale sitting there. Dale surprised me again. Instead of asking what the hell happened, his demeanor instantly lightened up. He said in an enthusiastic tone: “We’re gonna win this race Sunday.”
Okay, I thought. Excuse me? What did he just say? How could he say that after what I did yesterday? Was he not paying attention?
“Damn, Dale,” I said. “I shoulda won that race.”
“What?” he said. “I shoulda won that race. Not you. I didn’t win it either. Listen. That don’t matter. Yesterday’s yesterday. Forget about that. Pay attention to me. I’m gonna tell you how we’re gonna win this race Sunday. With the rules the way they are this year, it’s a different animal. It’s gonna be wide open out there.”
There, right there, another Dale lesson was being taught. All week long—heck, for months—he’d been preparing me for this race. And now here we were on Friday morning, talking for the first time after my screwup the day before, and he didn’t seem to care about it in the least.
He was past that. Worrying about not winning on Thursday wasn’t going to help us now.
“We’re gonna win Sunday,” he said. “That’s what we’re here for, and that’s what we’re gonna do.”
Dale clearly had something in mind. Why hadn’t he mentioned it before? I don’t know. But he was telling me about it now.
“You can’t win here alone anymore,” he said. “It ain’t like it used to be. We gotta work together—me, you, and Dale Junior.” He repeated the last phrase. “Me, you, and Dale Junior. Together we’re gonna win the race.”
We had a fourth driver on the team, Steve Park. So I said, “Yeah, and Park can help, too, right?”
If three working together was good, four had to be better.
I guess not.
Dale shook his head. “Nah, I wouldn’t count on that,” he said. “He don’t understand the draft as well as we do. I wouldn’t count on him being around.”
Well, shoot, I thought to myself. Park’s pretty good. He won DEI’s first Cup race at Watkins Glen. But that wasn’t what I said. What I said was, “Okay. Cool. How exactly are we gonna do this?”
“We’re gonna work together—it’s that simple,” Dale said. “Whichever of us gets to the front, at the end we’re gonna push and we’re gonna make sure that person stays in the front. That’s the only way to win at Daytona with the rules we got. It’ll be the three of us against all of them at the end.”
I liked the way that sounded. Dale went on. “I won at Talladega, going from eighteenth to the lead in two laps,” he said. “And the reason why is ’cause Kenny Wallace got hooked to my back bumper and he didn’t let me go. We just went together. Herman was dedicated to me and that’s why I won that race.”
“And Herm got second,” I said.
(We called Kenny Wallace “Herman.” I don’t know exactly why. In NASCAR, it seems most everybody has a nickname. Dale had three or four. For some reason, I don’t have any.)
“This time,” Dale said, “you, me, and Dale Junior—we’re gonna be dedicated to each other, and that’s how we’re gonna do it.”
That sounded like a good idea to me. That finish at Talladega was amazing. He raced from the middle of the pack to the win in just two laps. No one had ever done that before. Then again, no one had ever don
e a lot of things that Dale had done.
I guess the way Dale had won Talladega and what he’d seen in the qualifiers on Thursday had him thinking about what we needed to do Sunday. He had a plan and wanted to make sure I understood it.
All this talk was new to me. I may have looked a bit confused because Dale threw a Sharpie at me and said: “You understand what I’m sayin’, right?”
Ouch! Right between the eyes!
He repeated: “We will get together at the front. And when we do, we’re staying there. Locked together.”
“Yes, sir, boss, I get it loud and clear. You can count on me.”
I had never had teammates in a race before. I was liking how this felt. We had a plan. That makes sense, right? If you go into a battle, you’d better have a plan. The Daytona 500 has always been a battle. And in 2001, it was set to be the most competitive, toughest fight in the history of the 500.
Dale had it all figured out, and I was down with the plan. Dale spoke confidently, making sure he drilled the message into my head.
One question I did have, however, was Dale Junior.
“Did you tell Dale Junior the plan?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about Dale Junior,” Dale said. “I’ll tell him. He’ll do what I say. We just have to survive early. Do whatever you need to do to make sure you’re around at the end. Whoever gets to the front first stays there.”
Dale spoke confidently, making sure he’d drilled the message into my head. He had.
This was less than twenty-four hours after my screwup. I’d spent the night wanting to slit my own throat. I hated not having performed like I should have, like Dale expected me to. But all of a sudden, it was Friday morning and Dale was saying what he said—and I was back in business.
I walked off that bus and said, “Woo-hoo! Heck, yeah!”
Just minutes after that, as I thought about that meeting in Dale’s bus, I was sure I’d never had anybody talk to me like that before. Heck, I’d never had a teammate. Now I had a whole team. And I’d had an owner lay out a real plan. And that owner was Dale Earnhardt.
Forgive me if it took Dale yelling at me to understand what he was saying. But, look, this whole idea, this strategy of working together with the other drivers and being committed to one another—that wasn’t only new to me, it was new to NASCAR. I had never looked in my mirror for one second and thought that the driver behind me was there to help me. I’m pretty sure no other driver ever had either.
I always thought the other guy was there to take my spot away and shuffle me out.
But if the three of us could be there at the end—well, maybe not. We would be in it together.
Dale’s strategy was for us to work together. As Dale explained it, we were going to team up in order to make sure we put our cars at the front of the pack. This is just a different way of thinking about racing. My job had always been to block the guy behind me. He’s got all this extra power because I’m busting the air in front of him.
If I don’t block him, he’s going to pass me. That’s what we do. That’s how you race. Or at least that’s how we always had. But like Talladega in 2000, the rules for the 2001 Daytona 500 were extremely different. The action would be intense. The only flaw in Dale’s plan, as I saw it, was how hard it would be for the three of us to race to the front of forty other cars at the end. I loved the plan, but it seemed a little unrealistic.
That was obvious to me even as I was sitting in Dale’s motor home getting his idea into my head. “Down to the end” is a long way away from lap one. There’s a lot of stuff that’s going to go on. If we were going to be able to work together at the end, we would first have to make it through the start.
There are forty other cars out there. There are two hundred laps. We would be all over that track—blown engines, wrecks, a lot of stuff would happen. But you know, nothing in my conversation with Dale that morning made me think he doubted we’d get the chance to execute his plan.
And who was I to doubt Dale Earnhardt?
I couldn’t wait for Sunday.
CHAPTER 20
RACE DAY
Race mornings are more relaxing than you might think, even the morning of the biggest race of the year.
Sure, there’s pressure. You always remember what you’re there for: to drive a car faster than a whole bunch of other guys who are really good at driving their cars fast.
Sounds very simple, right? Well, if you think that’s easy, you’ve never tried it on a Sunday afternoon in a NASCAR Cup Series race. These boys are good. There’s nothing easy about it.
All the NASCAR drivers are really talented. Everyone shows up with fast cars. To win, not only do you have to be fast, you also have to survive. One small mistake can mean instant disaster. And as you get yourself mentally and physically prepared, you have to have a checklist of a million little and not-so-little details.
1. Am I properly hydrated? Check.
2. Did I get plenty of sleep? Check.
3. Did I remember to go to the bathroom? Check.
4. How’s my mental health? Hmm, let me get back
to you on that one.
To be a serious NASCAR racer you need a combination of brains and balls, an ability to analyze a dangerous situation and conveniently overlook the danger part. You have to be slightly crazy to win at Daytona. But if you’re too crazy, you’ll crash, and you can’t win if you crash.
It was race morning at the Daytona 500. The usual race-day pressures were magnified because this was Daytona, and even more so for me personally. The 2001 Daytona was my first race driving for Dale Earnhardt, Inc.—DEI. The Man. Dale Earnhardt.
Everything else was the same as usual. At the drop of the green flag, we would be doing basically the same things: Pass cars. Miss wrecks. And try to win. These were my goals, goals I’d had in every race for the last fifteen years. But in 462 starts, the winning part had eluded me.
This race day, February 18, 2001, began for me like most race mornings did: with my wife and daughter in our motor home at the track, in this case the legendary Daytona International Speedway—and some nice, relaxing family time. That’s how we do it in NASCAR. Prepare like crazy, race like hell. But before and after, spend some quality time with the family.
The three of us—Buffy, Macy, and I—were extremely comfortable in our motor home. It was pretty nice, a Newell with everything you could possibly need—a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, dishes, food, a TV, a computer, stuff to read, all your basic appliances, all within easy reach.
I loved the fact that everything was just right there. The bed was certainly comfortable. I got a good night’s sleep. That’s always crucial. You don’t want to be sleep-deprived at 190 miles an hour. You need every possible ounce of energy.
Early that morning, Buffy was up making breakfast for Macy. I was still lying in bed, half asleep. That wasn’t unusual—for me or for Buffy. What happened next wasn’t unusual either. While I lay in bed, Macy came running into the room and started jumping on my head. She landed right on me and said, “Let’s wassle, Dad!”
I loved it. She was three, so cute and full of herself. She didn’t care if this was race day at Daytona. She just wanted to play. She thought it was pretty funny to sneak up on her daddy while he was still half asleep and start jumping up and down on his head.
Although I knew it was coming, I always acted surprised.
“Macy!” I said. “Where did you come from?”
“It’s time, Daddy,” she said, giggling and looking totally proud of herself. “Mom said you need to get up.”
I grabbed her and said: “Mom said? Or Macy said?”—as I got her in position to become a victim of the great wassler himself, the Tickle Monster.
“Mom said!” I tickled her legs and asked her again: “Who said?”
This time I got the correct answer. “Macy said,” she answered as she laughed wildly.
That had become a morning ritual of ours. Although I didn’t really like getting up, t
hat was the best way of doing so: my beautiful little girl in my arms and the smell of breakfast cooking in the kitchen about four feet away.
That’s how it went on this particular race morning, the equivalent of waking up anywhere on the NASCAR circuit with my family. This morning, we just happened to be in the motor home in the infield at Daytona on the biggest day of the year. We were camped out in a long line of other motor homes with race-car drivers and their families. Plus a couple hundred thousand people wandering around, ready for the Daytona experience. But as the day began, I wasn’t a race-car driver. I was just Daddy. And being Daddy was the greatest feeling in the whole world.
My niece, Dana Carol, was our nanny. Her mom and dad are my sister Connie and her husband, David. Connie and David both worked for us back in North Carolina. Like Mom, they were also our neighbors. Dana’s job was to help with Macy and make sure she was ready for the day. She arrived just as the wasslin’ match was breaking up. I pulled myself out of bed, got showered, and came out to the living room. The crowd in the bus continued to grow. Daughter Caitlin and her little sister were now there.
As I made it to the living room and looked out to see the activity that was building at the track, I really began to think about the racing part of my day. I thought about how special Daytona was to me, how well I had always performed there. But at Daytona, you’re never really certain how well your day will go. Still, I was certain this day had the potential of being very, very special.
I knew the NAPA car, Dale’s car, the car I’d be driving, could win the Daytona 500.
I knew it. And the time to do it was coming.
But I needed to remain calm and put any negative thoughts out of my head. Forget Thursday.
“Don’t worry about your record,” I told myself. “This is race one driving for Dale, not race 463 in an extension of a record of disappointment.”
I was having many conversations with myself: “You can win it. . . . Be calm. . . . Stay focused.” I wasn’t much into being sociable. I was just sort of zoning out. I was semi-engaged, I guess.
In the Blink of an Eye Page 12
