A Look Into The Early Days of Dale Earnhardt's Racing Career

[Music] on saturday night we'd run a bracelet concord and we'd all go to mother's i mean me and after the race our wives after after the race is over we go to martha's anything you can make a sandwich out of she had on on the kitchen table in there and of course we sit down there and we we we run the race if we did something wrong ralph would tell us about it you know so until the wait until we hours of the morning yeah i don't know how you stay as long as you wanted to yeah i love mother jesus so ralph had go ahead mike well you i think you were starting to say earlier that you and dale were struggling after ralph's earnhardt ralph's heart attack first heart attack a little bit well here's what happened we were running firestone uh rain tires on dirt and they you know they cost a lot more money than a recap tower at tow city up here so everybody complained you know and they took a boat on it and we had to go back to the recap tire we got off we started messing with the car and trying different things and ralph got on us one night he's talking about he said you boys go back to where that car was set up from beginning and learn how to drive it and we got it back to win it again yeah but uh and see our deal was i didn't have no money so what the race car won paid for the next paid for the stage i and and your daddy um he didn't have the money well he he made his money driving the race car he went he got 40 percent yeah but he still was broke um they always all broken up so broke they didn't know they were broke i guess yeah hey tommy why are you looking for that i mean i'm curious because dale just painted two pictures that i think is true you got people that think that dale hung the moon and you got the others that think of dale and like oh no he had flaws which is it for you when you think back on dale earnhardt do you think hung the moondale or do you think you know raise haledale had problems got through them i i oh mama signed it he didn't uh i don't know i don't call it have any flaws or anything to me he was just a great guy i mean they call it intimidator that man had a big heart big heart and i took you know i re i left daddy's garage and i took a job teaching auto mechanics at northwest high school and um dale let me bring the kids up to dei and um so he's showing them around the shop they had uh one of the trucks it was just starting the truck series had it covered up here in the shop is already painting everything and he told the guy was working there he said uncover the car let this key to see it and that's when they got napa auto parts to sponsor oh wow and the kids are the first ones to see it but here's how smart the kids were well a lot of times they wasn't too smart but anyway they all had a sundrop box there and where you put your money and get a drink you know machine yeah and i noticed that all the kids were going over and they all had it i guess what it cost it was like a quarter or something sure for a cannon the kids were getting those sun drop cans and they were drying them up and and getting dale to sign them for souvenir that's pretty cool right i mean they thought of that but he and and two what dale did he said tommy he said well first of all he said tommy i would love dale jr to take your course at school and i said well figure out a way to get him to northwest and i'll get him in there he believed that you could be a better race car driver the more you knew about the car yeah fixing a car or building a car or whatever but he every year he would take one of my students he said i'm not going to interview him you pick him bring him up here well i took one kid up for a nice kid and he'd come in one day to school and he said mr russell when i was leaving yesterday they'll run in the back of me and i said would he hurt your car or anything i know he didn't hurt the car anything i said he's just telling you hello if he's mad at you he'll turn you around the street so don't worry about it and the kid they always took a break for lunch and they played cards there at dui well the kids sat down played with him he won the money and this is what dale couldn't figure he said tommy give all the money back to him and i said that ain't right you know but that's just that kid was that way and they had him back there dis mountain tires off wheels and the kid was messing around and he hit it with a hammer and of course he'd come back and hit him and knocked him out for a little bit but every year they'll let me put another kid in there one kid i took up there and this kid's daddy had something to do with building frames or something in nascar but i can't remember his name i took the kid up there and they were talking to him they said now sometimes we may have you drive the truck to go pick up parts or something like that and the kids said i ain't got no license i said what do you mean you ain't got no license i see you drive to school every morning he said well i slip out after mom and dad go to work and he didn't get the job but i kept somebody up here the whole time you know so um getting back to to ralph in 1973 what did you notice in dad uh when ralph was going through this issue these health problems and eventually when ralph passed away you're like what did you what daddy was having a hard time with him what well tell me about that well i mean when you're like ralph was his idol and uh taught him everything he knew and then all of a sudden that man's gone or sick hurting it's hard on you i don't care how old you are or whatever you know i'm sure your dad passed it hurts you bad too and that's the way dale was you know it hurt us all because he was such a good guy friend to us would y'all talk about it or is it something you were just noticing well we talked about it a little bit i got to go to the we went me and my wife went up d.i and they let us go on the uh bus to charlotte to the the funeral you know that funeral there so but uh i don't know it was a hard time for you yeah uh for dale when ralph passed away so four days before ralph passed away dad won a semi-mod race in your car probably um two days after ralph passed dad raised that falcon in uh in a sports race to falcon in the sportsman division at metrolina okay let me tell you about that we had made up our minds for the next year we were gonna move up okay we'd already bought a camaro body that's what ralph was running at the time of camaro and we were gonna uh build a sports sportsman car v8 engine and all that so i told dale i said what i'd like to do we're going to build a new car but we don't have time to build two new cars i always like to have two cars but i said i want to take this semi-modified car and run the six-cylinder engine but they had a 300 a lot of people couldn't keep them together and it was illegal to run them in our division we had never tried that so daddy built one 300 and we went to metrolina to run against the late model sportsman see what we could do with them god dale was running up there with them and it blew all the pieces it it blew up and and then you know we never did build a sportsman car together so i guess i'm wondering the i'm wondering like how that what was the conversations like that you know dad ralph passes away and and the you know dad's probably that's whole world's turned upside down but then you know y'all you y'all probably get to cut talking a little bit and but did y'all did that did you did you ever say to dad like uh she would not you know she would take a couple weeks off here or well we talked about it and he said he didn't think he didn't want us to do that yeah um yeah i mean we'd we could quit for the rest of the season if we if he wanted to but he didn't he thought you know his dad would want him to continue on you know so what happened to all the stuff that was in ralph's shop when ralph passed away literally ralph's not there anymore he's gone everything in a shop out there is just as he left it just the last time he walked out of the door yeah right and dad did dad just go right in there and just start start going to work and start did what happened to ralph's cars what did dad do with them where did they go did dad race them well here's what we had both of us had talked about and ralph told us he said boys the only way y'all gonna do anything and make him money and and get a future in this sport you need to start running asphalt really yeah so that's funny you say that because dad i thought dad mentioned that ralph wasn't a big fan of dad running asphalt he thought he wanted dad to run dirt but maybe but i've heard this a couple times now in the last couple of years since we're doing lost speedways and talking to all these guys that ralph actually steered dad to asphalt or said if you know you're really gonna get anywhere you're going to go further that's the only way to do it well our goal was winston cup racing really even then well george mantooth see george mantooth he was a race car driver years ago uh he drove from a daddy some they won some races together but back in when they were racing brutal smith was promoting a lot of races around here on dirt yeah and they got to know him there and i know we'd go to bruno smith's out there on south union street and pick up a check for the weekend racing so george somehow another got me an appointment with bruton smith over at his one of his dealerships in charlotte so i went over there i i was a little bit intimidated you know i went over there and i told him about what dale and i had been doing he said yeah i've i've seen the papers you know y'all doing good i said well we would like to go sports from racing and run for the championship and he thought about a little bit he said i'll tell you what tommy he said i can't i don't want to deal with the sportsman division he said if you and dale want to run winston cup i could help you and i said i just can't do it right now i don't have the facilities to do it you know you if you're going to do that you got to have a bigger shop blah blah blah and all this kind of stuff so we just left it at that yeah but um yeah ralph i i i'm thinking he was encouraging us to go to asphalt and about that time uh ned jarrett took over metrolina and painted it that kind of you know messed us up a little bit i started um when dale decided that he needed to go and run his daddy's cars so when ralph passed away dad just a dad just assumed all that property yeah well he he he told me he said i want to try to win some money to help my mother out too yeah so um he called me one day he said tommy get your butt up here i said what for i said i got something to show you i said what is it i ain't telling you get your butt up here so i took off off to kannapolis and i walked in the door and i thought my god it's going to finally happen there set harry gantz 64 surveil and what had happened is danny made food i don't know if you've ever they sponsored us and sponsored dale he was dale's sponsor so when he left i didn't have it anymore that's that's just the way it's supposed to be and so he did had that car they they bought that car and they formed a corporation it was randy danny dale and grade london yep okay earnhardt racing yep that's that that was the deal so he had his option he could run the dirt car that ralph had or he could run the asphalt car so dad sold ralph's dirt stuff no he still runs some he so he has his he has rascal camaro and he's got this little asphalt car so he's doing a little bit of both his rounds he got it in it one night at concord he he went to hickory to run it rained a race out he came back to the garage unloaded that car put the dirt car on there and come to dirt well that's we were both running sports from the end and a guy named david perry was driving for it he was out of south carolina and and dale got into us and wrecked us and so i i didn't i didn't get mad a little bit of mad but i told dale after ray whis we pulled out there in the infield there both cars on the trailer i said dale we cannot do this we cannot wreck each other we cannot come pay you back because we need to finish races we both need to make money you know if you're dead last you don't get no money because if you're wrecked i said it's all right if you come up behind us and bump us and move us over and pass us but we're not going to start just wrecking each other he said i agree with you and i said guess what oh you helped me fix this car next week and he did yeah he did but i don't know we remain friends forever you know i mean um this is this is kind of a funny story too there's a couple of them i want to tell you but these guys that come with me today i call them my bodyguards but um they were over they come in my daily shop one saturday morning and i'd run my the car down in monroe at that dirt track i hadn't gone to asphalt yet i'm working on about going there yet and uh they said did you hear what happened to dale last night in metro line i said no did he get hurt and he said no he blew his engine and he said there's a national championship race at hickory tonight and he ain't gonna have no engine i said he'll be down here a little bit don't worry about it so sure enough here he comes pulling down his truck and anything we and him wanted to do we'd like to do it nobody around and we're going to talk so he said tommy how about taking a ride with me i said okay he said you hear what happened last night i said yeah he said could i borrow smokey i said yeah yeah what's that i had two engines the good engine was in the race car but we had a backup engine we call it you know it was daddy put it together it's a good engine but reading would call it smoking once in a while when you left the gas it smoked a little bit not bad so i said back in the truck let's load the thing up so load it up he goes to hickory i go up there i want to see my motor run he sits on the pole he leaves the most laps until right there at the very end and glenn jerry got by him and won the race and they'll run second well he come down in the pitch you know and i walked up the window and i said well you had a good night you sit on a pole you come in second you won yourself some money he said god damn it tommy if your damn motor had any power to won the race yeah a lot of people got mad i just busted out laughing i knew he's going to say it yeah he gave me that look you've seen that look he had and uh so you know we just laughed about it went on i don't know how long he i don't know if i ever got the motor back i probably did but we just even after he left me i mean i understood why he lived we just stay best friends all right guys i know a little bit about cars so believe me when i tell you that tire pros they're the real deal they've got great people great service and they can take care of all your automotive maintenance needs plus there are spots for this show so you know they got great taste in podcasts so check out tire pros 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Channel: Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s Dirty Mo Media

Views: 70,434

Rating: 4.9511924 out of 5

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Id: RCJAeMSmtSY

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021