He was the menacing dark force, the guy who was going to push to the maximum at every turn, in every situation. It was an image Earnhardt cultivated superbly with his smirking grin and trim moustache. And of course he could back it up implacably on the race track. He was the man so many NASCAR fans loved because he was fast, tough, supremely confident and a brilliant racer. When he first started winning races and championships he was known as ‘Ironhead’, a nickname that evolved into ‘The Intimidator’, and 10 years after his death pick-up trucks in every corner of the United States proudly still carry their man’s No3 emblem as a badge of honour.
Earnhardt was the son of Ralph Earnhardt, a renowned short-track driver from North Carolina who won a NASCAR Late Model Sportsman championship but never made it to the sport’s first division. Ralph Earnhardt was one of eight children of a cotton mill worker from Kannapolis, North Carolina. He started his working life in the mills before becoming a mechanic and race driver, earning the nickname ‘Ironheart’. But it was a tough life, and Ralph died of a heart attack in 1973 when he was only 45. Many years later after winning his fourth NASCAR Winston Cup in 1990 Earnhardt eulogised his father. “My dad has always had a place in my heart through all my racing years,” he told the audience at NASCAR’s awards banquet. “I grew up idolising him. I stood up on the back of a truck and every turn he took, I took. And it burned right into me what I wanted to do. I never dreamed I would be a four-time champion of NASCAR. I’ve had help from people who were friends of my daddy and people he raced against. He is still in my heart. I miss him dearly.”
Like his father, Dale started racing with very little money on Carolina short tracks after dropping out of ninth grade. He married his first wife and had a son, Kerry, but divorce soon followed and Earnhardt left his baby boy with his ex-wife and her new husband. A few years later he married his second wife, Brenda, and fathered two more children, a daughter, Kelly, and son Dale Jr. But his second marriage also ended in divorce because his entire focus was on racing rather than raising a family. Long-time NASCAR writer Ed Hinton knew Earnhardt well and writes about those days in his excellent book, Daytona, From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black.
“I was borrowing $500 at a time on 90-day notes from the bank just to race,” Earnhardt told Hinton. “Maybe I should’ve gotten a regular job. It might have saved a family. Racing cost me my second marriage, because of the things I took away from my family. For our family cars, we drove old junk Chevelles — whatever you could buy for $200. We didn’t have money to buy groceries. We probably should have been on welfare.”
Earnhardt would let little deter him from writing a his own motor sport legacy
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Still, Earnhardt was able to make his Winston Cup debut driving a backfield car in 1975 when he was 24 years old. He ran four Cup races over the next few years and got his first ride in a good car for the World 600 at Charlotte in ’78, only to crash with four laps to go. His big break came at the end of that year when he was hired to drive one of Rod Osterlund’s Chevrolets in the season-closer at Atlanta beside regular team driver, the veteran Dave Marcis. In the race Marcis and Earnhardt banged fenders at least once and at the end of the day Marcis quit the team in disgust. By implacably ‘using the fender’, Earnhardt had driven Marcis out and earned himself his first full-time ride for 1979. With Osterlund’s car he scored his first victory that year at Bristol, Tennessee — a classic half-mile bullring — finished seventh in the championship and was named NASCAR’s rookie of the year.
The next year Earnhardt well and truly arrived, winning five races and taking the first of his seven titles. Then in the middle of 1981 Osterlund sold his team to JD Stacey. But Stacey and Earnhardt did not get along and Dale was soon looking to drive elsewhere. By this stage he had personal sponsorship from Wrangler Jeans and a deal was soon made for Dale to join Richard Childress’s little team for the second half of the year. Childress was a struggling owner/driver who was delighted to stumble on a quick driver with a sponsor. Childress quit driving to put Earnhardt in his Chevrolet, but Dale was so hard on equipment that Childress discovered at the end of the season that he was $75,000 short of balancing his books. So Childress sat down with Earnhardt and told him he needed a couple of years to build up his team to be able to effectively run a driver like Dale. Childress decided to run Ricky Rudd in 1982 and ’83, while Earnhardt took his Wrangler backing to veteran Bud Moore’s Ford team. In two seasons with Moore’s cars he won three races but there were plenty of blown engines and crashes, and at the end of ’83 Moore was happy to send Earnhardt packing.
Dale rejoined Childress for 1984 and the pair remained together for the next 17 years, creating the most successful combination in modern NASCAR history prior to the emergence of Rick Hendrick‘s four-car superteam led by Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson. With Kirk Shelmerdine working as crew chief, the Earnhardt-Childress combination won back-to-back titles in 1986 and ’87, and at the end of that year GM Goodwrench replaced Wrangler as the team’s sponsor. GM Goodwrench is General Motors’ parts and service division and employs a huge number of auto mechanics across the United States — a core audience for NASCAR, of course. And it happened that GM Goodwrench’s colours are black trimmed with silver and white, thus creating the image of Earnhardt as ‘The Man in Black’ — NASCAR’s own Johnny Cash. As his career took off Earnhardt got married for a third time to Teresa Houston, the niece of NASCAR racer Tommy Houston. Teresa, a college graduate, took over as his negotiator and manager.
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Dale and Teresa were business partners as well as husband and wife, and in 1998 they launched Dale Earnhardt Inc, a race team that would field winning cars for Dale Jr and Michael Waltrip among others. Meanwhile the black No3 Chevrolet dominated through the early ’90s as Earnhardt won 29 races between 1990-95, and took the championship in 1990-91 and ’93-94. The last title was Earnhardt’s seventh, equalling the record number won by Richard Petty and placing him at the pinnacle of stock car racing’s pantheon. By this time he’d acquired a fleet of aircraft including three King Airs, a helicopter and a Lear jet. He had also bought a 70ft powerboat called ‘Sunday Money’. But times were changing in NASCAR. In 1995 Earnhardt was beaten to the championship by a young upstart named Jeff Gordon, a Californian who’d come up through midget and sprint car racing. Fresh-faced with a wispy moustache, Gordon in many ways was Earnhardt’s antithesis and represented the start of a new wave of more urbane NASCAR stars from outside America’s Southern states.