Racing to the Finish Page 14

  When we were done, Dr. Petty let us know that he and Micky were in agreement that I was cleared and that Rick and NASCAR had already been informed. We had a little celebration among me and the team. Man, it felt so great to be with those guys again. I had been with Hendrick Motorsports for nine years now, and some of these guys, like Adam and Travis Mack, had either been with me on this car for years or had worked alongside with other Hendrick teams or even for me at JR Motorsports. A lot of these guys had stuck by me during my long losing streaks, stood in Victory Lane with me after my biggest wins, and now, here they all were, on a cold day at Darlington, having waited out my recovery, working their butts off to have that racecar ready for my return.

  We were also happy to be back together. It was a genuine moment and we recognized that, so we took a team picture and we made sure Bowman was in there with us. He’d driven in ten of the sixteen races I’d missed, and he was now a part of the team too. One day soon, it would be his team and this would be his car. When exactly that would happen was a decision for another day. But first I had a decision to make about 2017, and I wanted the team to make it with me.

  I asked them to meet with me in the narrow hallway of the hauler, the team’s transporter truck. That’s how we do it when we hold team meetings during race weekends. I told the guys that I would be back in the car for the Daytona 500, now eighty-one days away. But before the Great American Race, we were supposed to run in the Daytona Clash. It’s an all-star race and had been part of Daytona Speedweeks since 1979, when it was called the Busch Clash. Back then, the only guys who made that race were the guys who had won the number-one starting spot during qualifying at a race the previous year. I think it should still be that way and only that way. I reminded the team that Alex Bowman was the guy who’d won our only pole position in 2016, not me. I told them that if they wanted me to be behind the wheel for the Clash, I would do it. It was up to them. But my vote was to put Alex in the car. I also reminded them that we might be taking a risk having me out there because I wouldn’t have had much time in the car at all before the Clash, and it might not be such a good idea to have me out there racing cold turkey in the draft at Daytona. What if I wrecked in a nothing exhibition race and it got my head cloudy again and I had to miss the biggest race in the stock car racing world? I promised them I’d be plenty ready for the 500 a week later, but the Clash might be too soon.

  Every member of the crew took a turn sharing their thoughts on the matter. As they talked, I could tell they really liked Bowman. That made me feel good. In the end, they agreed to have him run the Clash and let me concentrate on the Daytona 500. I knew they would agree with me, and I’m glad they did. Alex deserved that.

  The press release went out the next day, but I’m pretty sure the word was already out because my phone was blowing up with texts from people in the sport congratulating me. On Friday we had a conference call with the national media. A lot of the questions were about the Darlington test and how that process worked. But there were also questions about the plan past 2017. The reporters knew that I had one year remaining on my contract with Hendrick Motorsports and wanted to know what my plans might be. They also wanted to know where my head was. How was I going to feel when I got out there in the racecar in traffic at 200 mph with money and trophies on the line?

  I gave them some really great answers to those questions. The truth was, I didn’t really know.

  I do know that winter produced some of the happiest days of my life. I was going back into the race shop on a regular basis for more simulator time with Greg. I was visiting with my teams and my sponsors and talking with them to reassure them that I was indeed okay. But deep down I knew that our little media Q&A after the Darlington test and my visits with my team and my sponsors, those were just dress rehearsals, a small taste of the questions I would have to answer when the season started.

  On New Year’s Eve at the Childress Vineyards in Lexington, North Carolina, I married Amy Reimann, and she became Amy Earnhardt. Finally. The ceremony was perfect. It looked like something you might see in the movies. It was so amazing to have all of our closest friends and family there that night, all in the same place. There were plenty of faces there who are plenty famous to NASCAR fans. There were also a lot of folks there that race fans wouldn’t recognize, famous only to us.

  After the ceremony, we danced and partied into the early morning. As midnight approached, everyone counted off the seconds that thankfully put 2016 into the rearview mirror forever. The new year was going to bring a new start and new season behind the wheel.

  But I knew that 2017 was going to bring some big questions with it too.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE RETURN . . . AND THAT OTHER R-WORD

  2017

  As you know now, I had dealt with the occasional r-word thoughts a decade earlier, though those went away pretty quickly. In the middle of 2016 I’d had that testy conversation with Rick when our talk about a three-year contract extension turned into my tantrum. Prior to that I had kicked around all sorts of various exit scenarios, everything from signing that new deal with Rick through 2020 to talking with Jimmie Johnson about splitting a final year or two with me, giving us both a wind-it-down farewell plan.

  I won’t even try to recall the number of times I had conversations with Micky about retirement during my recovery. I would try to get him to tell me that I needed to stop, but he never did. Instead, he would say, “Do you still have the passion to race? Do you still want to be out there?” He was always aware of the pressure I felt, not wanting to let people down, and he would remind me that it was up to me and no one else. He’d say, “You have to do this because you want to do this. You can’t go out there on the racetrack if you don’t really want to be there, or you’re worried about being there.”

  Of course, I wanted to be there. I just didn’t know for how long. I had been so fully focused on getting well, coming back, and keeping my anxiety levels from getting in the way of those goals, I hadn’t allowed myself to spend a lot of time thinking much further down the road than where I was right at that moment.

  What I did know was that the condition of my brain was always going to be on my mind. Always. I was still reading everything I could find on concussions, especially how they affected former athletes over the long term. I would read news stories about people like BMX biker Dave Mirra committing suicide, or San Francisco 49er Chris Borland quitting football at the age of twenty-five because he was worried about long-term head injuries, or NFL-player-turned-convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez being diagnosed with CTE after his death. At the start of the 2016 NASCAR season, at the same time I was racing and keeping my secret notes, movie theaters were showing Concussion starring Will Smith, the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu and his discovery of CTE in Pittsburgh. Now, as we approached the start of the 2017 season, word got back to me that Omalu himself was saying that I shouldn’t try to race again.

  So I would read and see and hear all of this stuff. When my nonstop mind tried to process it all, I couldn’t help but think, Man, if I hit anything hard again, is this going to be me? One of these guys who acts normal one day and the next day he wakes up a different person, suddenly hurting other people or himself?

  When I would call Micky—and I still called him a lot—I would express these concerns. He told me that he understood why I would worry like I did, but he also assured me that even if I was in a crash that hurt me again, he had no doubts whatsoever that he could get me back to 100 percent. As much as I love and respect Micky, I’ve never been able to fully believe that. Not the physical part. I know he has the tools, science, and staff to make me better again if they had to do it. They’ve proven that twice already.

  But when he said that to me, I didn’t believe I could ever be back to 100 percent mentally. I’m not talking about brain damage. I’m talking about state of mind. There are scars there that I know will likely be with me forever.

  As I’d expected, as Daytona approached I was asked a lot of questi
ons about the two r-words, my return and my retirement. Every January we have NASCAR preseason media days in Charlotte and every February we have another media day at Daytona. In between, there are a ton of other obligations, from photo shoots with sponsors to sit-down on-camera interviews with the TV networks.

  They all asked how I felt, if I was nervous about coming back, and if I was retiring sooner than later. Those questions only picked up steam after one of my longtime racing opponents, Carl Edwards, shocked the racing world and announced his retirement in early January. Carl is five years younger than me, and the previous season he’d won three races and was one of the four championship finalists. When asked why he was walking away in his prime, he mentioned me and my 2016 concussions. “I don’t like how it feels to take the hits that we take, and I’m a sharp guy, and I want to be a sharp guy in thirty years. So those risks are something that I want to minimize . . . I think everyone in the sport paid attention to what happened with him.”

  “Him” is me.

  I do want to clear up something about the weeks leading into the 2017 season. The NASCAR world is always full of rumors, and there were a lot of stories making the rounds that I had family and friends begging me not to get back into a racecar. That’s not true. At all. I did have people tell me that if I chose not to come back, that was okay, and that they wouldn’t talk me out of it if I did walk away. But no one ever said, “This is stupid, man. Don’t do this.” They all supported my decision, whichever way that went.

  That includes Amy. She did several of those pre-Daytona media interviews with me, including a big one with my old teammate Jeff Gordon, who now works as a commentator for Fox Sports. She put on a brave face and explained to Jeff that no one in their right mind would ever come between a driver and his racecar. She meant it. She would never do that. The truth is, despite what some people might want to believe, without her and her hard work I would have never made it back behind the wheel.

  But the other truth was that she was terrified. That’s the word she uses now. That’s the word she used when we asked her to describe her feelings headed into the 2017 season. I don’t blame her one bit. Think about what I told you about where my head was, always wondering if I was one hit away from being hurt again, maybe even worse than before. Now think about how she felt. She still gets upset when she talks about it, even now, long after it happened. But you wouldn’t expect that if you had seen her at Daytona that February. She was by my side, looking strong as a rock.

  The most incredible lesson I have learned from Amy is what it feels like to be really, truly loved. More than that, what it feels like to be truly taken care of. What my mother did for me, while dealing with everything she had to deal with personally, that’s true love. What my sister has done for me my whole life, that’s true love too. To this day, Kelley has taken care of me like no other big sister has ever looked out for her little brother. But if you’re fortunate enough to be married to the true love of your life like I am, then you know what I’m talking about when I’m describing what I have learned from Amy about love. If there’s one positive that I can say came out of my awful 2016 experience, it’s that it showed me Amy in a whole new light. We had already been together for years and had been engaged for a year before my big issues started. But if I hadn’t had to endure my problems that year, I don’t know if I would have ever fully appreciated how much she cares for me. My being out of the car forced us to do stuff together and have conversations that we probably wouldn’t have had time for when I was all the time running around doing racing stuff. I knew, without a doubt, that if my rehabilitation hadn’t worked and I had come away from it stumbling around and blurry-eyed for the rest of my life, she was going to stick with me, no matter what. That’s true love.

  When we got to Daytona International Speedway, Amy was right there by my side, just as she had been at every doctor’s appointment and every doctor-prescribed workout in our garage gym. She was scared, but she was there.

  Maybe I was a little scared too. But I was too excited to think about that.

  Sunday, February 26, 2017

  Daytona International Speedway

  I started my eighteenth Daytona on the front row. We thought we were going to win the pole position in our first race back—could you imagine that?—but my teammate Chase Elliott snatched it away from us on the last lap of the day.

  Race morning routines can be a huge pain, especially at the Daytona 500, by far NASCAR’s biggest race. There is always a long list of appearances we have to make on behalf of our sponsors and, as you can imagine, more people than usual wanted a piece of me on this day because it was my first race back. For once, none of that bothered me very much. My time out of the car taught me to appreciate the little things about living the racing life, the kind of stuff that I’d just kind of tolerated and endured before. Even the things I enjoyed, like talking with the crew, I’d started taking for granted after a couple of decades of racing.

  Standing on the starting grid at Daytona, I skipped right back into my prerace routine like I’d never left. Prerace shows are always awesome, with the fireworks, national anthem, and military fly-bys. At Daytona they take on a whole other level. I remember taking a moment to really pause and take it all in. I think I knew this might be my last one.

  Just past the halfway point of the race, I was in the lead. The crowd was rocking. Everyone was in the middle of their pit stops, so the field was kind of jumbled up, and there was a wad of cars in front of me running through Turns 3 and 4. Kyle Busch’s car let go when his right rear tire went flat, turning him sideways and collecting the two cars directly in front of me. I angled down the banking to try to avoid it, but the dang splitter started dragging the track, and I couldn’t get turned fast enough. The nose of Kyle’s car caught the right front corner of my Chevy. I hit him hard enough that my car hopped up on his right front tire, my nose got a couple of feet up into the air, smacked back down onto the asphalt and hung a right into the outside retaining wall. There it dot-dot-dotted a few times along the wall before I could gain control and steer it down pit road. We were done for the day, finishing thirty-seventh.

  What received the most attention wasn’t the wreck. It was what I did after the wreck. The race was red-flagged so that NASCAR and the safety crews could go out and properly clean up the mess from the six-car accident. When the red flag is displayed, everything is basically put on pause. The cars are parked, and the cars that need to be repaired can’t be touched by the crews until the red flag is lifted. While I was sitting there waiting for the red flag to end, I ran a little impromptu eye test inside my racecar.

  It’s the same test I’ve already described to you a couple of times. I extend my arm out, point a finger into the air, focus on the tip of my finger, and then bring it slowly toward my face to see if my eyes remain locked on that point all the way up to my face.

  People saw me doing that and they freaked out. It became a big deal. “Aw man, Dale is still messed up, isn’t he?!” I regret not waiting to do it until I was out of the car and in the truck changing clothes or on the plane headed home, but keep in mind this was the first break in action after the first real racing I had done in more than seven months. It was eating me alive to know if I was okay. I felt fine. But I wanted to know for sure that I was. Being given a moment like this one, a chance to run a little test right there in the middle of the comeback race—at the time it felt like a gift.

  By the way, my eyes worked great. That quick test only proved it. I had come back, run up front, wrecked, and walked away okay. That was as successful a day as one could possibly have while also finishing fourth from last.

  But I ended up having to explain to everyone what I had done. My team, the media, my fans, everyone. We did our Dale Jr. Download podcast the next day, and I explained it there just like I’ve explained it to you here. Also that I was mad at myself for drawing unnecessary attention to it.

  That day I realized two things. First, as irritating as it might have bee
n initially, the eye test reaction reminded me that I had an opportunity to use my experiences to educate people. Unless you’ve had a concussion and seen a specialist like Dr. Petty or Micky, how would you know what that eye test was or why I felt like I needed to do it? Now I had a chance to explain these things and maybe even convince someone who was suffering to go get some help. I’d known that before, but Daytona showed me the bigger reach I could have. You know, like writing a book about it!

  Second, I think I knew then what I had always known, but Daytona made it official. I didn’t have it in me to do what I needed to do to keep going over the long haul. I was thinking about my head. I was thinking about getting hurt. You can’t race that way. You just can’t. People have always said about racing, “Hey man, if you ever get scared, you gotta get out. If you’re out there distracted, you gotta get out.” I had both of those boxes checked. As February rolled into March and we posted a bunch of so-so finishes in races, I wasn’t shaking those feelings and those distractions. I started worrying that I was wasting Greg’s time and I was wasting the team’s time. I didn’t need to keep doing this.

  I was really conscious of wearing my team out with all of it. Greg would call and say we had a chance to go tire test somewhere and I was like, nope, I’m not doing that. Forget that. That just felt like another great opportunity to hit the wall. A racecar driver, to do his job and to do right by the team, has to be fearless. That’s where the speed is found and races are won. The great racing promoter Humpy Wheeler has always had a great line about my dad, that he “would drive his car where angels fear to tread and only the real racecar drivers can run.” I’d never had a problem taking my car there. Now, maybe I wasn’t so willing to hang out there all the time looking for that place.