Racing to the Finish Page 16

  In the middle of all that, Amy and I announced to the world that we were expecting a baby girl. I’m telling you, it was a good fall.

  All year long I think I’d kind of been counting down to the end, more or less wanting to get to the finish line and Homestead-Miami Speedway and call it a career. But that changed by the time we hit that stretch in October and November. All of a sudden, I realized that end was coming soon and I found myself panicking just a little bit, wanting to slow things down. It wasn’t even about the races themselves—it was about enjoying the stuff around the races, like practice sessions and team debrief meetings, even sponsor meet-and-greets and going out to dinner in all of the host towns and cities.

  My whole life I’d kind of taken those things for granted. A lot of the stuff that, honestly, I hated a lot of times. There was a time in my career—a lot of the time—that I would blow in right before practice started, run my laps, and then blow out of there to whatever the next thing was on the schedule. Now I caught myself hanging around maybe too much, showing up early and staying later, just trying to soak up every minute I could with my guys, knowing that my time was limited. Our cars were certainly better than they had been the first half of the season, but I think a big reason we had better results was also due to me and my new approach. There was an added intensity to every lap knowing that they were probably my last at every racetrack.

  CHAPTER 10

  SEND HER AROUND ONE MORE TIME

  Sunday, November 19, 2017

  Homestead-Miami Speedway

  I wanted everything during the season finale at Homestead to move in slow motion. Except, of course, my racecar. The week leading into my last race was a blur. We did a lot of media, but I was really conscious of trying not to take away much attention from the four guys who would be racing for the Cup Series championship, especially my bud Martin Truex Jr. I made no apologies about rooting for Martin. As I told you earlier, I’d played a big part in helping get him to the top level of NASCAR and I was very proud of that. I’m proud to say that I’d also had a hand in helping another one of the four finalists, Brad Keselowski, but Brad had already won a championship. If Martin could pull it off, it would be his first, and he’d been the best car all season long.

  When I was asked to come up with a list of people who I wanted to fly in on race morning, I guess people expected me to give them a longer list, because everyone seemed a little shocked when I listed only six names. Yep, just six. On Sunday morning we flew in my mother, Brenda; her husband, Willie; my brother, Kerry, and his wife, Rene; and my bud Sonny Lunsford and his wife, my cousin Stacy. Sonny is my property manager. If you ever see anything cool that I’m driving or sitting on or partying in, Sonny probably built it.

  During the race weekend I was asked why I was bringing in so few people, and I explained that they were my family, but I really have two families. They were my family from home. My other family was already at the racetrack. Kelley, L.W., and Mike Davis were already at the track, as were a ton of JR Motorsports employees. There were more than usual at this Homestead race because we had three cars in the final four competing for the Xfinity Series championship on Saturday. Pretty good, right? Among them was Elliott Sadler, one of my very best friends in racing. Amy, Rick—of course they were all already there too. You add all of them up with my No. 88 crew, and there’s my family.

  In fact, you can expand that out even further. Way further. After two decades of driving and two decades before that chasing my dad around racetracks, it’s nearly impossible to find a race team anywhere in the NASCAR garage that doesn’t have at least one or two guys working there who have worked with me or for me somewhere along the way. That weekend I tried to visit with every single one of them, even if it was just to give a handshake and a quick thank-you.

  One of my favorite moments of the weekend came the Friday night before the race. Our sponsor, Axalta, had been very cool to let us run a red-and-black paint scheme that paid tribute to my very first full-time Cup Series ride in 2000. Meanwhile, Matt Kenseth was running his final race for Joe Gibbs Racing, and his sponsors let him run a black-and-gold paint job that looked like his car from his rookie year, also 2000. We came up together, battling for Busch Series titles back in the day and for Cup Series races and titles over the years. We’ve always had a bond, and while everyone was making a big deal out of my last Cup race, I didn’t think they were making a big enough deal out of what, at the time, felt like it might be Matt’s final race too.

  We had arranged for a photo shoot with my car and everyone who had ever been with one of my teams, and we were going to shoot it that Friday night in the garage. I talked Matt into doing it too. So, there we were standing side by side, in front of our old-school racecars, while everyone who had worked on our teams lined up behind us.

  At one point, when they were trying to get Matt’s folks wrangled into position for their team photo, I slipped into the crowd of fans who had gathered around to watch. It was dark, and that made it easy to slide in there without being noticed, at least for a few minutes. I just stood there and smiled and took it all in. I’m a Matt Kenseth fan. Always will be.

  On Sunday morning, race morning, I woke up a little bummed. I didn’t expect that. I was so confident in my decision to be done at the end of 2017 that I guess I thought I would be like, Well, this is it! But instead, there was a part of me that was wishing we still had a couple of more races to go. That surprised me. I was worried that my team might not have felt included enough in all of the pomp and circumstance of the final ride stuff. And how much of that was there going to be? I was still really conscious of not stealing too much thunder from the guys who were there to win a championship.

  The drivers’ meeting later that morning was packed. I mean, packed. A lot of racetracks will now have some kind of red carpet set up outside the tent or building where that meeting takes place and there will be fans lined up, but this morning there were hundreds out there, and it seemed like most of them were dressed in Earnhardt stuff. I worked the railing and tried to sign as many autographs as I could before I ducked into the meeting. By the time I got in there, there weren’t many places to sit, so I ended up kind of in the back. That ended up being the perfect spot. I was recognized during the meeting and received a standing ovation, which meant an awful lot to me. Then, as the meeting wrapped up and everyone started to leave, where I’d ended up put me in the perfect position to stand by the door and shake hands with nearly all of the drivers, crew chiefs, team owners, and NASCAR staffers as they left to get ready for the race. That meant even more.

  Immediately prior to every race are driver introductions. That’s when the entire starting field is announced individually and you walk across a stage in front of the main grandstand, either to cheers or boos. My daddy used to hear a lot of both. I’ve always heard mostly cheers.

  But I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I never could stand driver intros. It wasn’t because I didn’t appreciate the applause. I always loved that. Just, the whole process of standing around a half-hour before the race, then being up on what felt like a fashion runway waving when you just wanted to get to your racecar and get on with it—all of that used to drive me a little crazy.

  For my last race, I positioned myself in this kind of hidden spot behind the wall near where everyone would go through a big doorway onto the stage as their name was called. I kept to myself and watched every driver walk by, just to take it all in, because I knew I was never going to do this again. And the whole time I was thinking, Why in the world did I let this bother me so much before? This is awesome!

  There was always a long list of stuff I had to do as part of my job that I acted like was such a pain in the butt . . . why did I let myself think like that? I’ll be honest, just like at your office or your church or wherever, there were certain guys that I was like, Aw man, don’t let this guy walk up and start making small talk with me. Now I wanted everyone to interact with me.

  My favorite moment was pr
obably with Landon Cassill. He said he wanted to take a selfie, and that was cool with me. Part of my prerace routine was to poke a little hole in my water bottle so that when we were standing around so long in the sun I could squeeze it and squirt a little cool water onto my hot, heavy firesuit and cool it down. I waited until just the right moment, and when Landon started to snap the pic I blasted him in the face with a shot of that water.

  Those are the moments I knew I was going to miss.

  We had qualified twenty-fourth, but that’s not where they had us lined up on pit road before the race. They had my car parked at the rear of the field, all the way down in Turn 4. There were so many photographers down there that the racetrack set up some risers to keep them from having to push and shove to get their shots. I posed for some photos with Amy, my family, and the team. We all held it together just fine.

  Then Rick and Linda Hendrick showed up. Once I saw him, I lost it. We all started crying. All of us. I joke with him now that I always have it under control until I talk to him. I don’t know what it is about Rick that makes you cry. In this whole book I’ve told you about only three times that I cried, and Rick was there for two of them. He’s this amazing human being, this shark of a businessman, and when you work for him you are part of this really huge machine. But then, when you see him break down it breaks you down. You realize that you aren’t just some piece of a machine. Those emotions are real. When a man cries, especially a man like Rick, it’s hard not to cry with him.

  He reminded me of our deal we’d made earlier in the week. If I brought my racecar home in one piece, then I got to keep the car as my souvenir, and he got to keep my helmet. That really was the goal that night. Nothing complicated or dramatic. Just finish the race running and in one piece.

  Once everybody started crying, we kind of ran Rick out of there. As he slipped back under the rope to leave, he apologized. “I shouldn’t have come down here. I spun out everyone’s emotions.”

  Getting strapped into the car, however, wasn’t that emotional. We kind of hustled through it because it was so dang hot. I wanted to get into the cockpit and get my cool suit hooked up and get my fans blowing. I also wanted my team in their thick firesuits and poor Amy, who was now almost halfway into her pregnancy, to get out of the blazing sun.

  The one thing that I selfishly wanted to happen before the race was that I wanted all the guys on pit road, from every team, to shake my hand. When my father finally won the Daytona 500 in 1998 after twenty years of near-misses, everyone from every team ran out on pit road and lined up to shake his hand as he drove down pit road on his way to Victory Lane. That’s one of the most iconic images in NASCAR history. I wanted to experience that for myself. Only, that day at Daytona they had all decided to do that for Dad. Today, I was deciding they would do it for me.

  After “Drivers, start your engines” and the clearing out of all the non-crew members, I drove slowly down pit road as the teams were all getting their pit boxes ready for the race and stopped. I held my hand out the window and yelled to the first team, “Hey! Y’all are going to have to come out here and shake my hand!” At first, I think they were like, “Do what now?” but then they caught on and all the teams starting lining up. I saw so many faces of so many friends that I had made over the years. As my Chevy crawled along there, my whole NASCAR life was literally flashing before my eyes.

  When all those teams shook my father’s hand in 1998, that was them showing him their respect. Nearly two decades later, this was me showing them my respect.

  I had fun in the race. We had the car running pretty well and spent most of the night running fourteenth, fifteenth, something like that. Coming down the checkered flag, I got into the fence a little, and it caused a tire to start going down. I hate that. It cost us about ten spots, and we finished twenty-fifth. But the goal of the night had been met. We’d finished the race running and in one piece. During the cool-down lap, I drove up ahead and found Martin Truex Jr., who had both won the race and the championship, and I put the nose of my car into the door of his. That was a love tap, a racer’s way of saying congratulations, a high five with a racecar. Almost exactly one year earlier, he was running through my exercises with me at a hunting camp. Now we were celebrating the biggest night of his life and a milestone night in mine.

  Now, normally if you’ve finished twenty-fifth after the race, you drive your car back into the garage and leave. But this was no normal twenty-fifth-place run. I drove into the middle of pit road and parked it right there. Amy, my mom, and Rick were waiting on me. I handed Rick my helmet and, yes, we were both crying again. I asked Amy what she was thinking when the race was over, and she said that she was sad for me because she knew I was done doing what I had always wanted to do, drive racecars, but she was also relieved because the final season had ended clean. I was okay. That’s all she wanted, for me to be okay.

  While we were talking and hugging, the strangest thing happened. A perimeter formed around us. I had expected—in fact, I was counting on—my whole crew to come out there and circle the car. What I hadn’t seen coming was the crowd that formed around them. Race fans came pouring over the wall and onto pit road, and they surrounded the crew after the crew had surrounded me. At first it was just a few, then it turned into a few hundred. That made it difficult for one last member of the No. 88 team to implement a plan that he and I had come up with.

  Andy “Squigz” Quillan was our team hauler driver, and I’d asked him to do me a favor. Back when I was first coming along in the Busch Series and later when I drove the Budweiser car, it was customary after a race win that they would give us a few cold ones to sip on while we celebrated the victory and packed up the truck to go home. I always loved that, just hanging with the guys after a race. I missed it. After we won the 2014 Daytona 500, kind of the capper for my comeback from the 2012 concussions, I surprised my team by having a stocked cooler delivered to Victory Lane.

  Throughout the weeks leading up to the final Homestead race, I told the guys that we had to finish all the laps and be running at the checkered flag, because we had to have a beer together when it was over. It would be the perfect way to end our journey together. We put Quillan in charge of making that happen.

  So, here was poor Squigz, trying to navigate this growing crowd with a hand truck carrying two giant coolers. Somehow, he made it right on time. Someone slung one of those coolers up onto the rear decklid of the car and distributed its contents to the team. Right there, live on NBC Sports, we toasted to the night and to my driving career. Squigz toasted with a Diet Mountain Dew. “Hey, I gotta drive the truck back to North Carolina tonight!”

  It was kind of a surreal scene, really. Martin’s championship celebration was happening just a few hundred yards away on a big stage, with fireworks and champagne and all of that. Meanwhile, there we were with the No. 88 car, sipping and laughing and taking our time. To be honest, even if we’d wanted to leave we couldn’t have. The crowd of fans around us had grown to what had to be a thousand people, everybody holding up their phones and snapping pics. Every now and then one of us would hold up a can as a salute and the gathered crowd would cheer, but for the most part it was actually pretty quiet. We were just chilling out, me and my team, one last time.

  Amy, Mike, and my inner circle of family and friends had stepped outside that circle, standing off to one side. Amy says that she was just watching and taking it all in. She hoped that I would take my time, as much time as I needed, and not hustle out of there too fast because I was worried about her or anyone else having to stand around waiting on me.

  We were out there nearly an hour. I’ve heard retired athletes from other sports talk about life after baseball or football, and when they are asked what they miss the most they never talk about hitting home runs or scoring touchdowns. They talk about being with the guys. Not during a game but the other times, riding on the team bus or hanging out in the locker room. After being stuck on the sidelines for so long, and now with my guys and wishing this m
oment would never end, I understood what those other athletes were saying.

  The fans were still there too. They didn’t want it to end, either. But eventually someone braved the crowd and came in there and got me. There was a golf cart waiting to drive me back to the motorcoach lot, and Amy was already on it. I sat down next to her, fans reaching out to slap me on the shoulder and tell me goodbye. She took my hand and looked me in the eye.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I’m great.”

  I was great. Even with all those people crowded around me and the lights and the attention, there had been no symptom triggers like there surely would have been just one year earlier. Even leaving my final Cup Series racecar behind me, I wasn’t sad. I had paid tribute to my crew and my fans. Now I was with the woman who loved me, pregnant with our daughter, and we were on the way to see my family, who were waiting for me at the bus.

  Man, I was better than great. I was happy. I had crossed the finish line. As that golf cart pulled away and down pit road, I was headed into my future.

  DON’T BE A HAMMERHEAD

  The 2018 Daytona 500 was the first Great American Race without a Dale Earnhardt in the field since 1979, when my dad made his debut. It was also my first race back at the track as a retiree. So I was a little worried about how I might feel when I was hanging out without a car to drive. Then, the day before the race, I was moving through the garage and signing autographs when three men stopped me, a dad and his two sons from Maine. I was just going to sign their stuff and keep moving, but one of the boys spoke up. “Hey, man, you need to know something about my brother. You helped him.”