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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: 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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