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It truly has been a long time since I’ve written about NASCAR. I’m a Twitter follower of many NASCAR fans, drivers, crew and media persona. Yesterday the Twitter activity increased five fold. Today, Saturday, February 18, 2012, Twitter activity is over the top. Bud Shootout and eleventh anniversary of Dale Earnhardt’s passing are the topics.

We (NASCAR fans) have had a long off season with only driver and team switch news. I had a hard time keeping up with the all the changes. But now that the season is starting I know I’ll be well informed.

One thing is unsure: Spider Man (Trevor Bayne), last years Daytona 500 Champion, may not race in the big one this year. He has no guaranteed spot. He’ll have to qualify or race himself into a starting position during the week.

And why hasn’t Jimmie Johnson been out there practicing? Chadsey.. You got some ‘splaining to do.

This brief article Is not an endorsement of any presidential candidate.

Keep up with all your racing news at Awesome Race Fans

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Filed under: Dale Earnhardt Jr., Daytona Int'l Speedway, Richard Childress Racing, NASCAR

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- The white No. 3 decals are no bigger than a fist and sit just above and behind the driver's side window of all the Richard Childress Racing team's Chevrolets. Crew members wore black baseball caps with the same No. 3 logo and driver Tony Stewart strolled through the Daytona International Speedway garage Friday afternoon clutching one of the prized caps himself.

Friday marked exactly 10 years since the driver of the Richard Childress Racing No. 3, seven-time NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt, was killed in Turn 4 of this track after crashing on the last lap of the Daytona 500. The speedway will remember the NASCAR icon with a moment of silence and fans will hold up three fingers on the third lap of Sunday's Daytona 500.

But for such an overwhelming event, it has been a subdued, subtle and suiting anniversary.

For the past week, Earnhardt's competitors, teammates and friends have shared emotional stories about that fateful Sunday afternoon. But the one person you won't see participate in any contrived memorial this weekend is Earnhardt's son, Dale Jr. No hat, no decal. None necessary.

"I'd personally rather just watch it and stand on the sidelines,'' Earnhardt said of the various tributes and memorials planned for the weekend.

"It's more fun for me hearing how other people reflect, hearing other people's stories. I know how I feel in my heart and I don't feel a real need to discuss that a lot.

"I want to do what's right and honor him, but I don't need to do it in front of a bunch of people. I feel like he carries his own weight and he doesn't need me being a part of the celebration or whatever you want to call it. I don't want to take away from it in any way.''

 

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Filed under: Dale Earnhardt Jr., Chevrolet, Daytona Int'l Speedway, Sprint Cup, Hendrick Motorsports

NASCAR is asking 200,000 fans to honor Dale Earnhardt this coming Sunday. On the third lap, everyone at the Daytona 500 will be asked to extend three fingers.

The announcer might as well say, "Everyone who thinks Dale's son will win, please raise your hand."

The smart money is on Junior. So is the dumb money, the Confederate money and every other bit of currency. Ten years after Dale Sr. died at the track, who doesn't think the Earnhardt stars are aligning?

"I don't really get into that hypothetical, fairy-tale ending stuff," Junior said.

He would like to earn his way into victory lane. Others suspect Earnhardt will do it the old-fashioned way - by relying on the script writers NASCAR hired from Disney.

I normally dismiss conspiracy theorists as having moon rocks for brains, but this isn't Dealey Plaza or Area 51. This is Daytona International, where a second gunman always seems ready to shoot out the tires of Earnhardt's competition.

 

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Filed under: Daytona Int'l Speedway, NASCAR Crashes, Sprint Cup, FanHouse Exclusive, NASCAR

To live in Kannapolis, N.C., during the 20th century was to live in a company town, and if folks there didn't exactly sell their soul to the company store, everyone lived by the pulse of the massive Cannon Mills, provider of fluffy cotton towels and washcloths to a increasingly cleanliness-conscious nation.

"They had three shifts there -- first, second and third," recalled Martha Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt's mother. "When it came time for a shift change at Cannon Mills, a mile or so away, "they had a horn that blew," she said in a 2007 interview with this writer for Racing Milestones magazine. "You could hear it."

Ralph Earnhardt, her husband, started his adult life in the mills, but didn't stick around. He was too independent-minded for that. "He definitely didn't like being shut up in there," she said.

"When he and I got married, he was working on the third shift in the mill. He worked in the weave room. That was in '47. I was 17 when we got married and he was 19. He left the mill not too long after we got married and went to work for a gentleman down here on (U.S.) 29 in a garage. That's where he learned about building motors and all that.

"But then some of the local guys that raced around here came down, and Ralph worked on their cars. That's how he got into racing. He didn't like the mill anyway. It was a place to get out of."

 

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Filed under: FanHouse Exclusive, NASCAR

Once there was a time when the great Dale Earnhardt was a crew chief.

As you might expect, it was before he could legally drive.

From the age of 13 until well after he got behind the wheel of a race car, Earnhardt was the crew chief for Gray London, a Kannapolis sandwich maker who took up racing in the 1960s to escape the stress of producing 60,000 sandwiches a day at his Dainty Maid Foods plant in Kannapolis. The teen-aged Earnhardt also worked at London's Sunoco gas station in Kannapolis.

One night early in his driving career, London's yellow 1957 Chevy was fishtailing every time he came off the second turn on the dirt track at Concord (N.C.) Speedway.

"I came back into the pits and Dale was jumping up and down, raising Cain."

"Quit that!" the 13-year-old crew chief hollered at London.

"Quit what?"

 

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Filed under: Dale Earnhardt Jr., Daytona Int'l Speedway, FanHouse Exclusive, NASCAR

I stopped in a line of traffic, the nose of my car just short of the rail tracks that run in front of Richard Childress's shop complex in Welcome, N.C. The line of cars began to build behind me.

I heard a loud train horn.

I didn't exactly jump, but I looked quickly left and right, up and down the tracks, just to be sure. Then I looked behind me, and yes, there was Earnhardt, behind the wheel of a black Chevrolet dually pick-up. He and a colleague in the cab were doubled over laughing.

Earnhardt and I finally parked simultaneously, and he waited for me on the sidewalk in front of the shop. "You must have jumped half a foot," he said, still chuckling.

"Did not."

He grinned like a cat. "I rigged that horn on the truck for times like that. Some people, we really get 'em."

 

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Filed under: Daytona Int'l Speedway, Richard Childress Racing, Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing, NASCAR

The Richard Childress Racing teams and Earnhardt-Childress Racing Engines will pay tribute to the late seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt throughout Daytona Speedweeks.

All of the Richard Childress Racing cars, transporters and pit boxes will have No. 3 decals. Team members will wear a special RCR No. 3 hat on February 18, which marks 10 years since Earnhardt -- driver of the No. 3 Goodwrench Chevy -- was killed on the last lap of the Daytona 500.

Earnhardt-Childress Racing Engines employees will wear a special ECR No. 3 hat for the duration of NASCAR Speedweeks, which begins with Saturday night's Budweiser Shootout 75-lap exhibition race and concludes with the Feb. 20 season-opening Daytona 500.

Earnhardt-Childress Racing Engines is a joint venture launched in 2007 by Richard Childress Racing and Dale Earnhardt Inc., the race team started by Earnhardt and his wife, Teresa, in 1980.

"All of us at RCR and ECR are honored to pay tribute to Dale on this 10th anniversary," said Richard Childress, president and CEO of Richard Childress Racing and Earnhardt-Childress Racing Engines. "His legacy is still felt every day at RCR, ECR and throughout the world. We hope all of Dale's fans appreciate this salute to their hero and ours."

A tribute No. 3 decal has been on the No.. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet driven by Kevin Harvick ever since Earnhardt's tragic death. The team changed the car number from 3 to 29 out of respect for the legend and it has never been on a car in the Cup series since.

 

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Filed under: Daytona Int'l Speedway, NASCAR Crashes, NASCAR

It was the end of the 1995 Winston Cup season, and Jeff Gordon -- "Wonder Boy" -- was the new NASCAR champion, set to be formally crowned at the annual banquet at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

High up in his lavish suite on the 36th floor, a day before the banquet, the runner-up, Dale Earnhardt, sat down with me and five other motorsports writers for an interview. I was doing a profile of him for Car and Driver, ready to ask him broad, overarching questions about his career, his life and his place in the sport. (Earnhardt and his wife, Teresa, are shown above at his seventh championship banquet in 1994).

It was a time of rapid expansion in a booming sport, with even bigger changes looming. NASCAR was talking about racing in Japan. Bruton Smith, on the fast track to becoming a billionaire, had gone public with Speedway Motorsports, Inc., in February 1995 and would open Texas Motor Speedway in 1997 and Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 1998.

Earnhardt was 44, having completed his 17th full season in the NASCAR Winston Cup series. Less than two weeks earlier, the two-time defending Cup champion (only his 1992 hiccup interrupted what could have been Earnhardt's own five-in-a-row string) had faced an all-but-insurmountable, 147-point deficit to Gordon going into the final race at Atlanta.

Gordon did his best to choke, stumbling to a 32nd-place finish, 14 laps down, but had such a large points lead it was all over on lap 61, when the 24-year-old rising star led a lap to clinch the title. Earnhardt, meanwhile, drove like a man possessed, and 19 laps later, made one of the classic moves of his career, passing four cars in one fell swoop in turns three and four to blast from fourth place to the lead.

Earnhardt won that race in a runaway -- his fifth victory of the year -- and even though he didn't win the title, it was a vintage Earnhardt year. He won the second Brickyard 400 in August and then at Bristol drove like a wild man, barging past anyone and everyone in his way until he got to leader Terry Labonte at the finish and wrecked him, too, though Labonte won it while crashing.

Earnhardt finished the season with 10 straight top-10s -- eight of those top fives, including two victories -- but couldn't catch Gordon. The Intimidator was done in by his two DNFs, both at Michigan, including a crash in June that injured his neck and shoulders and left him sore right up to the point of this interview on Nov. 30, 1995. But he was a happy man that day, secure in his life and his sport and still king of his domain, even as the upstart kid was challenging his supremacy.

 

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Filed under: Dale Earnhardt Jr., Daytona Int'l Speedway, NASCAR Crashes, FanHouse Exclusive, NASCAR

"So, you got any advice for me here coming up?'' Dale Earnhardt radioed to Andy Pilgrim while slowly driving caution laps around Daytona International Speedway, preparing for the final race restart with 21 laps to go in the 2001 Daytona 500.

Only two weeks earlier, the NASCAR icon had co-driven to a runner-up GT Class finish in the historic Rolex 24 at Daytona with the sports car champ Pilgrim (second from left above), who was now sitting with his girlfriend and Earnhardt's wife, Teresa, hooked up to the race team's radio in the couple's private motorcoach in the speedway's infield. A pair of motorcycle policemen had just arrived outside and were waiting to escort them all from the track after the race.

"When he said that to me, I just started laughing and thinking to myself, 'Dale Earnhardt, the seven-time NASCAR champion, is asking me, a road racer, what to do in the Daytona 500,' '' Pilgrim recalled. "I told him, 'No, man, I haven't got any advice for you, just keep doing what you're doing.' '''

"Okay, just wondering,'' Earnhardt good-naturedly replied, his words getting cut off by his spotter, who was alerting him the race was going green on the next lap.

"I told him, 'Cheers, talk to you later,' '' Pilgrim said. "And there was no more radio communication other than him cheering on and yelling for Michael (Waltrip) and (Dale Earnhardt) Junior.

"Then, 10 minutes later, he was gone.

 

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Filed under: Tony Stewart, Daytona Int'l Speedway, NASCAR Crashes, FanHouse Exclusive, NASCAR

More often than you'd guess, Tony Stewart calls up the YouTube video of his wild, death-defying crash in the closing laps of the 2001 Daytona 500. But not for reasons you might think.

In the short video clip, he watches his orange No. 20 get hit from behind on the massive Daytona International Speedway backstretch, turning it directly toward 200-mph oncoming traffic. As the rear of Stewart's Chevrolet catches air and starts to launch vertically, cars take evasive action.

That's where Stewart pauses the video. He even has a still photograph of this very moment (right).

Just as Stewart's car lifts off the ground -- seconds before he endures violent barrel rolls and smashes into a half-dozen cars -- the black No. 3 Chevrolet escapes through the smoke and frenzy unscathed. Its driver, Dale Earnhardt, heads to the front of the field to contend for the win. As usual.

"That's the part that bothers me the most,'' Stewart explained in an exclusive interview with AOL FanHouse, speaking in depth about that fateful Feb. 18, 2001 afternoon when NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt was killed on the final lap of the Daytona 500.

"It's like, if I could have just nicked him on the way by, would it have changed things just enough to keep his accident later from happening? There's no way anyone would ever wreck and think about hitting someone else believing it would do any good. I was along for the ride.

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