NASCAR Legends by Robert Edelstein

Author:Robert Edelstein [EDELSTEIN, ROBERT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781468300871
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Published: 2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

In 2004, Dale Earnhardt Jr. was on top of the world; he earned a career-best six series wins, including the Daytona 500 and the night race at Bristol.

Chapter Eight

Father’s Day

June 15, 2008

“[My dad] lost his dad when he was twenty-two or so, and he adapted to being his own man and he went out and did things for himself. It took him quite a while really to get going, but he did. That’s been a thing to me to say, it’s okay, you’re gonna be fine.”

—DALE EARNHARDT JR.

DALE EARNHARDT JR. PULLED OFF HIS HELMET AND HUNG HIS HEAD loosely down, carrying, it seemed, a large weight on his shoulders, and he painfully tried to take deep gulps of breath that weren’t entirely there. Everything moved slowly, as if he were in some dream, though nothing blocked out the pain. Coming upon his car, you’d think he had been fitfully dozing.

After contact with Kevin Harvick, coming off the turn on a brilliantly sunny late-April day at Fontana’s California Speedway, Junior had smacked the wall with a severe diagonal, backward impact on the driver’s side. Even though he was wearing a HANS device, the wreck sent the force of a pile driver against his chest and his head. Safety workers got there quickly, and Junior snapped up his head and rubbed his face exhaustedly. They reached in and pulled him out, and as he stood on solid ground, he grimaced and bent at the waist. But the safety workers pulled him toward the ambulance, and he almost trotted, trying to get away from them. After he bent over again, they pushed him through the open ambulance door.

“That doesn’t look too good,” said a worried Darrell Waltrip, eyeing the wreck from the Fox booth.

It wasn’t. NASCAR was two months into the 2002 season. Everything seemed cleared for a good, solid championship run, but the vicious hit at Fontana had given Junior a concussion. For a couple of weeks, the symptoms were unstoppable. “You just felt like the room was spinning, like you couldn’t keep your eyes focused because everything was moving,” he said. “Your equilibrium was a bit off so when you lay down, you’d get lightheaded when you sat back up.”

The problems, he said, never occurred in the car, so he got back in it; but he lost some of his ferocity, and it showed. The season to that point had been going very well. He arrived at Fontana in fifth place in the standings, but his average finish for the four weeks that followed was thirty-fourth, and it effectively ended his chance to be a late-season threat.

“I’m sure I couldn’t drive as hard and as fast as I wanted to,” he said afterward. “But even at 80 percent I still felt like I was as good as half the field.”

Being better than half the field wasn’t going to win him championships, and he knew that. Driving hurt had been a function of Junior seeing the need—both for Dale Earnhardt, Inc. and in himself—to take more things on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.