Doug Richert fired up a cigarette in the infield at Bristol Motor Speedway, unaware it would be one of his last smokes. Ever.
Later that afternoon—April 1, 1979 (yes, April Fools’ Day), Richert stood in victory lane at Bristol with his fellow crewmen and the driver who had carried them there. Dale Earnhardt had won the Southeastern 500, scoring his first NASCAR Cup victory.
It was no joke, no April Fools’ trick. And there stood Richert, 18 years old and still basically a kid in this big new world of NASCAR, with his cigarette pack torn to pieces.
“In 1979 we won that first race at Bristol, and it was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” Richert remembered. “I quit smoking in victory lane. I told the guys in the shop that when we won for the first time, I’d quit. I tore them up in victory lane at Bristol. Haven’t touched one since.”
It was cold turkey for Richert but a hot moment for the 27-year-old Earnhardt, who used Bristol as his platform for turning raw talent into real success. A Carolinas short-track star who had muscled his way into NASCAR’s top series, Earnhardt on that Sunday began the journey that would carry him to heights unknown by previous drivers and to riches far beyond the normal reach of a North Carolina mill-hill kid.
Earnhardt won the Cup Rookie of the Year award that season, grabbed the series championship from older and smarter drivers the next year and was on his way to seven championships and a type of fan worship that only Richard Petty had experienced.
He became a legend.
Petty won his seventh— and final—championship in 1979. Earnhardt’s title the next year was the first of his seven. The Earnhardt era had barely begun. He improved quickly, evolving from the fender banging of Late Model Stock racing to the much longer and more complicated racing demanded by Cup events. He kept his super-aggressive driving form but factored in the new dynamics needed to score at stock car racing’s highest level.
“It’s like he’d been there forever,” said Richert, who was promoted from mechanic to crew chief for the 1980 season after veteran crew chief Jake Elder left the Rod Osterlund-owned team. “It was really kind of amazing how well it flowed along and how competitive he was.” It was Elder, by the way, who famously offered Earnhardt some overly colorful advice in Bristol’s victory lane: “Stick with me, boy, and we’ll have diamonds big as horse turds.”
Elder, who had a reputation for jumping suddenly from one team to another, was with Earnhardt long enough to pass along some of the encyclopedic knowledge he had gained from years in the sport. “I remember Jake talking to him about running off the top of the corner and don’t overdrive and things like that,” Richert said. “I remember Dale complaining somewhere about how the car was pushing out of turn four. Jake got on the radio and said, ‘Dale, I can do a lot of things, but I can’t stop the wind from blowing.’ ”
Earnhardt led 163 of the 500 laps in the Bristol win and held off veteran Bobby Allison by three seconds at the checkered. “This is a bigger thrill than my first-ever racing victory,” he said in the middle of a wild Bristol celebration. “This was a win in the big leagues, against the top-caliber drivers. It wasn’t some dirt track back at home.”
Earnhardt didn’t win again in the 1979 season, but he performed well enough to bring in enough cash to buy a house on Lake Norman near Charlotte. He was on his way.
“I think about how fast things have changed, and it scares me a little,” he said later that season. “But I will take it. I am always in a hurry. There is always something else to do. That hasn’t changed. I don’t want to go back to where I was, but I don’t ever want to forget where I came from, either.”
And he didn’t. Until his final race, when he was killed in a last-lap crash in the 2001 Daytona 500, Earnhardt retained a strong connection to a rabid fan base. He had fought his way from the Kannapolis, N.C. mill village and from dead-end jobs to become one of the most successful—and richest—race car drivers in the world. Blue-collar fans, traditionally the heart of NASCAR, loved him for his past and the fact that he didn’t shed his Carolina roots. He was one of them. Just much wealthier.
Earnhardt had been bitten by the racing bug on that very mill hill. His father, Ralph, was a short-track racing star, and Dale idolized him. The two worked on Ralph’s cars in the small garage behind the modest Earnhardt home. Although Dale missed many of his father’s races, he could walk into the garage early the next morning and figure out how Ralph had done based on the amount of dirt and mud on the car. If the front end of the car was relatively clean, that meant his father had led most of the night and probably had won.
Ralph died of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of 45. His son was left to race alone.
“Dale was really a self-made guy,” said NASCAR historian Buz McKim. “He started out with nothing. Ralph had nothing to pass on to him. Dale made it on his own with little education but a lot of determination and talent. He’ll be the guy looked on forever as the working man’s man.”
Some say Earnhardt is the best NASCAR driver of all time. He joined Richard Petty, Junior Johnson, Bill France Sr. and Bill France Jr. in the first NASCAR Hall of Fame class.
After winning a seventh championship to tie Petty in titles, Earnhardt offered this analysis of his standing: “I’ll never be King Richard, not even King Dale. There’s only one king in NASCAR, and that’s Richard Petty.”
But Dale Earnhardt carved his own trail to greatness, and much of racing fandom was along for the ride.
“To me, he was iconic, before his time,” said long-time NASCAR promoter Ken Clapp. “He stayed that way ’til the day he died. He was our Babe Ruth.”
But Wait…. There’s More
• Dale Earnhardt’s last win came in spectacular fashion. He raced from 18th place to first in the closing laps at Talladega Superspeedway Oct. 15, 2000.
• One of Earnhardt’s most remarkable achievements occurred at the Watkins Glen, N.Y. road course in August 1996. Although he had suffered a broken sternum and collarbone in a crash two weeks earlier, he set a track qualifying record at the Glen and led 51 of the first 54 laps on the twisty course.
• Earnhardt won 34 times at Daytona International Speedway, the track where he ultimately lost his life, but he struggled to win the Daytona 500. He finally scored in NASCAR’s biggest event in his 20th attempt.
• Earnhardt owned a Chevrolet dealership in Newton, N.C. He got a new pickup truck from the dealership a couple of times a year, and there was a waiting list of people ready to buy the trucks he had driven.