New priorities guide Dale Jr.
Glad to return after concussions, but family will determine future
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The world is no longer a blur to Dale Earnhardt Jr. despite the demands of a job that call for driving nearly 200 mph occasionally.
There were times over the last year he saw only darkness, a wobbly shadow of the man he once was, of everything that defined his existence. All he had to do was look at the family pictures. The Earnhardts race for a living … health and happiness and death be damned.
Racing killed his daddy, bringing with it an emotional tsunami. Junior, then 26, processed the pain with a trifecta of beer, booze and babes. Come on down to “Club E,” as he called the playpen in his house, and have a few cold ones.
Life was good, even though it wasn’t.
The partying of yesteryear had nothing to do with his latest hazy situation. Multiple concussions threatened to cut short his NASCAR career and take out the most popular driver in the sport, a heavy burden to carry when you’re just trying to walk and see straight.
He once traveled from Charlotte to Raleigh with his then-fiancee, Amy Reimann, to pick out food for their New Year’s Eve wedding and had to put his head between his legs. The road signs and everything else kept jumping in his head, making him dizzy.
“I was scared to death that I was going to be stuck with that all my life,” he said.
He would stumble during his physical rehab work with Amy.
“I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other without falling over,” he said, “like a drunk-driving test.”
He would mosey back to the track when he started to feel better and would occasionally run into Richard Petty in the garage area. Instead of the usual handshake and hello, Petty would put his arm around him and say: “Are you taking care of yourself? Don’t do anything you don’t need to be doing.”
Fear and doubt are words that put a driver in no-man’s land. Leaving it all? He paused often, contemplating “what that side of life would be like.”
It all became overwhelming at times, and Earnhardt started handicapping the odds of a comeback in his head after missing the last 18 races of the season because of concussion-related symptoms.
He once thought there was a 90 percent chance that he would never come back, then 50, and then lower.
He has stopped counting now as he prepares for Sunday’s Daytona 500, a race he has twice won as part of his 26 career Cup victories.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. is very much back and in the front row alongside Hendrick Motorsports teammate Chase Elliott. Junior got there on qualifying speed, and he had speed again in Thursday’s second qualifying Can-Am Duel, leading 53 of 60 laps. But he got lost in the bumpdraft shuffle with two laps to go and finished sixth.
Now you see him, now you don’t.
That captures the gist of Junior’s 2017 Monster Energy Cup Series season. He’s here in the moment, but don’t assume anything for the future. He is giving himself a handful of races to sort things out, physically, and gather his thoughts on moving forward.
He has not re-upped his expiring contract with Hendrick, something that would be no issue if the uncertainty of the concussion problem weren’t a factor. It is. A very big one. But uncertainty should not be confused with an absence of clarity. Earnhardt isn’t going to try to ride this thing out if he gets hurt again. He’ll likely be gone, too, if he wins his first Cup title: a walk-off championship and see ya.
“To come back this year, win a championship, it would be hard not to hang it up,” he said during NASCAR media day at Daytona International Speedway.
The 26-year-old kid has become a 42-year-old man. His net worth is reportedly $300 million, but the pile of money pales in comparison to something that is priceless:
His marriage to Amy. She’s the one. They want a family, happiness and health till death do they part. Earnhardt has no intention of letting ego, pride and recklessness spoil the happy ending.
His family comes first, even if it crushes everyone else. NASCAR Nation is deeply devoted to Earnhardt, voting him the sport’s most popular driver 14 consecutive seasons.
Earnhardt moves the needle big-time in crossgenerational ways. It leads to other pressures, these from the inner circle that includes his boss, Rick Hendrick.
“I think he’s got a lot of racing left in him,” Hendrick said. “If he wins a championship, I’ll try to talk him into doing it again. I’m a good salesman. Jeff Gordon told me he was retiring two or three times, and I talked him into staying. I’m a car salesman.”
But the squeeze of selfpreservation is tighter. Earnhardt knows that the frightful moments of bouncing around in a stock car are everlasting. He’s already donating his brain to science, a powerful decision that will be part of his legacy.
The summer of 2016 was not the first time things got bumpy in his career. He counts four concussions during his racing career dating to 1998, which likely includes some incidents in which he managed to avoid a diagnosis.
He has done the math, and he understands the ramifications.
“I’m not going to race other than for any other reason that I want to be out there,” he said. “I don’t think it’s very smart to do it for any other reason.
“There are motivations to race: fans and camaraderie and all the great things you get to experience. But if I’m going to come back, I’m going to be racing because I want to be out there.”