Junior’s fast track
Retiring driver kick-started many careers
Retiring driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. has given many rising drivers and others the chance to make it in the racing industry,
Dale Earnhardt Jr. remembers the important details. Martin Truex Jr. recalls every bit, as if it had been the crossroads moment of his career. Because it was.
In 2003 at Richmond International Raceway, Truex, then an aspiring 23-year-old NASCAR driver making his way through the sport’s developmental Busch North rung for his father’s team, was preparing to test for a race in the second-tier Xfinity Series. Truex had previously met with Dale Earnhardt Inc. executive Richie Gilmore about a possible opportunity in a spinoff team known as Chance 2. The team, a training ground for the late Dale Earnhardt’s children, was also testing for a start at Richmond that day, with Earnhardt Jr. at the wheel. All the players were together along pit road.
“Richie brought me over,” Truex, now a series veteran and title contender at Furniture Row Racing, told USA TODAY Sports. “He’s like, ‘ Hey, come meet Dale Jr.’ I was nervous. I was like, ‘Oh, God.’ We talked for just a few minutes, and he’s like, ‘ How’s it going? Nice to meet you. How’s your car?’ And I was like, ‘ Man, it’s terrible. It won’t turn at all. It’s awful.’ He was like, ‘Why don’t you take mine out?’
“I was like, ‘Yeah, sweet, I’d love to.’ Holy crap. I just met this guy. He has no idea who I am other than watching me race a few times, if that. That’s just the cool kind of guy he was.”
Truex never got to drive the No. 81 Chevrolet that day because the misting rain that created the opportunity for their initial meeting eventually washed out the test, but he went on to become a roommate and a tenant of Earnhardt, then an employee, who won two Xfinity titles with DEI.
Truex’s experience is not unique.
Earnhardt hasn’t so much displayed a willingness to help friends and associates find work in the sport they love the last two decades as much as a fervent desire.
Part of the reason, he said, as he prepares to end his racing career after this season, is “the best thing about this job is working with your friends.”
Part of it seems to be a desire to see those who want it or love it as much as him find their path. He has turned friends, acquaintances and video game competitors into drivers getting a chance at a higher level, spotters and media relations employees.
“Another part of it is your own ego,” Earnhardt said. “You kind of want to leave a mark on the sport. You want to leave some evidence behind that you were a part of it and you were there and you did some things to help it move along.” And he does it stealthily. “He’s kind of sneaky about it,” Truex said. “He doesn’t want credit. He doesn’t want people to go crazy about things he’s doing, especially back then. I think he just wanted to see people succeed because he knows how fortunate he was, and he takes that thinking back, ‘Well, I was racing Late Models, and my dad gave me this opportunity.’ ”
Team Penske’s Brad Keselowski has accomplished something in his 10-year Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series career that Earnhardt has not — winning a Cup championship in 2012. He readily acknowledges that Earnhardt “was a central figure in making it happen, so I am thankful and grateful.”
Keselowski’s major break into a touring national series came when Earnhardt was impressed with his run in a 2007 truck series race. Earnhardt signed Keselowski to his JR Motorsports team for a partial Xfinity campaign that year and then full time for 2008, driving a Chevrolet that at the time was backed by a Navy sponsorship.
In the numerous off-track junkets required of a driver, such as flying to aircraft carriers off the coast of Jacksonville to interact with sailors and officers, Keselowski learned valuable skills at the side of his benefactor.
“It’s one of those things I think about from time to time, because we’d all like to think that no matter what we do, we would have made it either way,” Keselowski said. “But, honestly, I don’t know. For me, I don’t know how to evaluate. Either it was everything or nothing, and I don’t know which one it was, and I’m glad I don’t have to find out the opposite way of the way it went. And I’m thankful and grateful for the endorsement and support that he gave me.”
Not all of Earnhardt’s influence centers on helping fellow drivers realize their ambitions. And not all of his connections have been made at racetracks. An online video game league he created became a clearinghouse for future members of the NASCAR community.
“It was the place to be,” said Earnhardt’s road manager, Tyler Overstreet, who was a participant.
A UNC-Charlotte student seeking summer internships for 2009, Overstreet parlayed the Earnhardt email address he’d scored from their time in a Mad
den football league into the cold pitch of a lifetime.
His query to Earnhardt was forwarded to Earnhardt’s sister and JRM co-owner and vice president, Kelley Earnhardt Miller, and a summer job was his. He assumed his current role as Earnhardt’s road manager in 2014.
Overstreet estimated that upwards of a dozen in the racing league — including drivers Keselowski, Truex and Denny Hamlin — are involved in the sport in some way with about six, he said, employees at JRM.
Among them are Lee Langley, a former staff sergeant in the 101st Airborne whom Earnhardt would send care packages and sunglasses to while he was deployed in Afghanistan.
Severely wounded by an improvised explosive device, Langley spent months recovering at Walter Reed National Medical Center, with Earnhardt a common visitor. The Purple Heart re- cipient is now the parts department manager at JRM.
T.J. Majors, then a driver, met Earnhardt in an online simulation game in 1997, raced Late Models and street stocks for JRM and became his spotter when he joined Hendrick Motorsports in 2008. Josh Berry validated Earnhardt’s faith dating to 2010 by becoming a Late Model champion. Earnhardt is dogged in attempting to find sponsorship for Xfinity starts for him.
The Junior stamp of approval carries great weight.
“I think, specifically for Josh Berry, otherwise he’d be a Late Model racer running around the Southeast,” Overstreet said. “But he’s Dale Jr.’s guy, he’s the guy Dale Jr. picked, so people are like, ‘Well, there must be some reason why.’
“Brad was in that same Madden league back then. And I guess he ran good in that truck race and Dale put him in the car for a handful of races, and it turned it into what it is today.”
Many in the garage share the same story.