Racing to the Finish Read online

  He was right. My head was raging. I was starting to feel worse, like everything was moving away from me, kind of like that time I was working under my car in 1998 and it felt like it had suddenly moved across the room. Only this was worse. I was there with them in that restaurant, but really, I wasn’t. The best way I know to describe it is unplugged.

  I remember all of it, the whole day. I remember the moments before the Kansas crash, the crash itself, and everything about Steve and lunch. But all of that happened in a state of shellshock. Sure, I had been “woozy” that day at Daytona in ’98, and I’d had that mess in 2002. This feeling though, this was different.

  I use that word, shellshock, because I think about the depictions we’ve seen in war movies, when a soldier has an explosion happen right next to him and—boom—he’s just in a daze. That’s it. That’s the feeling. You see fine, but your eyes aren’t really focused on anything. You hear what’s going on just fine too. There’s no ringing in your ears or anything like that, but it’s like everyone and all activity around you is a thousand feet away. You know what’s happening, and you know that it’s right there in front of you, but it feels detached. It’s like you’re not actually there. It’s more like you’re watching a scene in a movie that you’re in. You know what the people you are with are talking about, but if they turned to you and said, “Hey, Dale, what do you think about that?” the only response your mind can come up with is going to be, “I don’t even understand what you’re talking about right now.” It’s like you understand the words of the language being spoken, but you don’t actually know what those words even mean.

  You might find that description confusing, even frustrating. Now imagine that feeling in your head. All the time. And it just won’t straighten out or quiet down. That’s where I was.

  While we were waiting on our food, I was watching everyone from the team, probably a dozen people having six different conversations, and I was overcome with a massive wave of nausea like I’d never had before. If I could have I would have laid down right in the middle of the floor of that restaurant. I couldn’t do that, so my next instinct was to just jump up and run out of there, but I didn’t want to freak everyone out, and I sure didn’t want to throw up all over everyone. So I tried to calmly excuse myself, like I was just walking outside to take a phone call. But I was freaking out. My pulse was racing, and I know I was as white as a sheet.

  I must have looked pretty bad because I remember the other people in the restaurant and the waiters and waitresses all looking at me like, “Hey, look, there’s Junior! Man, what’s up with him? He looks messed up.”

  I got outside and just as I did a limousine pulled up. It was Amy and Sawmill, coming to meet up with me to fly to the Redskins game. Thank God. I climbed into that limo and immediately laid down on the floor, flat on my back. The only thing that made me feel even the slightest bit better was to be horizontal.

  Amy was scared. I was scared. She saw the same glassed-over look in my eyes that Jason and Steve had seen. But when she asked me if I was okay, I just told her I’d be fine. We actually went back inside and ate. Then we went to the game. My feeling of being detached continued the whole time, even when I made a TV appearance later that night in the ESPN broadcast booth. I’m such a huge Redskins fan, and I’ve always prided myself on knowing everything there is to know about the team, but I was concentrating so hard just to make sure I made any sense during that interview that I probably made things worse in my head.

  I’d called the level of confusion I was experiencing after Kansas “woozy.” This was way more than woozy. But I still did what I’d always done—the same thing I’d done with Amy in the limo and to the whole world in 2002. I just pushed through it that night. I went home and went to bed, figuring that this time would be like those other times. I would sleep it off. And on Thursday morning, certainly by the time we hit the race weekend at Atlanta, I would feel fine.

  That’s how it worked, right? It always cleared up, eventually. Put a washcloth on it.

  The next morning, the fog was still there. The detachment was still there. I was nauseous all the time. I waited for it to go away, but when I woke up Friday it was still the same. That morning, as Steve was driving into the tunnel to enter Atlanta Motor Speedway with the team, I called him and told him that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to race that weekend. This was just a few hours before practice was scheduled to begin!

  Steve knew this decision was above his pay grade, so he called our boss, team owner Rick Hendrick, and they decided that if I wasn’t up to it, then we just wouldn’t race that weekend. No substitute driver. We were having a great season. We’d already won a race and were locked into the postseason, so we wouldn’t risk it if I didn’t want to.

  So what did I do? I showed up and raced. We were bad slow in practice and qualifying all weekend and started Sunday night’s 500-mile race thirty-fifth out of forty-three cars. But it’s a long race, and Steve got the car dialed in late. I made a run up into the top ten, and we finished seventh. Less than a week later, I won the pole position at Richmond and led 67 laps. Then we finished eighth at Chicagoland Speedway . . . thirteenth the next week . . . eleventh the next . . . We weren’t running as well as we had during the summer, but we were rolling along. Our postseason—the Chase—had started, and we were still among the top championship contenders, ranked seventh in the standings with seven races remaining.

  Throughout all of these races, though, I still felt sick, detached, and nauseous. A lot. It went on for a month after the Kansas crash, but again, I didn’t tell anyone. Once the initial glassy-eyed look went away, I could even downplay it to Amy. I had dull headaches, but the real frustration was I felt like my mind was lagging a little. I might have a hard time finding a word to describe something, or my eyes might track something, but my head felt like it was behind it, swishy, again like I’d had a few beers.

  What I did was make an adjustment like I would with a racecar that wasn’t handling quite right. I figured out how to live with it, how to fake my way through it, and how to work around it so that people around me couldn’t see how bad I really felt. Besides, we were running pretty well, and any time I was at the racetrack I was able to keep my mind off of my symptoms. At home, I might’ve spent my time thinking about how I felt, but I found that at the track, when I was focused on the car, all I thought about was racing. As a result my symptoms weren’t really an issue. By the time we got to Talladega, six weeks after my Kansas crash, honestly, I felt awesome. Just like those other times—in 1998 or 2002, you name it—the fog was lifting.

  Then it wasn’t.

  Sunday, October 7, 2012

  Talladega Superspeedway

  We were coming through the final two turns of the final lap of the day, and the field at Talladega was just a gigantic traffic jam. There were twenty-eight cars in the lead pack, including a wad of sixteen of us running in four rows, lined up four-wide. I had just moved up to sit right smack in the middle of the first row of that group, running tenth with the leaders in my sight, directly in front of me. I knew the chances of a Big One were high, as in, it was almost definitely going to happen. Maybe I could take advantage and pick up a bunch of spots in a hurry.

  Sure enough, it did. Tony Stewart was leading and defending his position, as he should have been with twenty-seven of us in his rearview mirror. Michael Waltrip snuck underneath Tony at the bottom of Turn 3, and they made contact. It started a chain reaction that would end up wrecking twenty-five cars. Twenty-five! That is as big of a Big One as you’ll ever see. Tony got sideways, fell out of the lead, and slid helplessly up into our pack. He was hit simultaneously by two oncoming cars and flipped into the air. The two cars that hit him were the ones I’d been running door-to-door with. He sailed by me as I started braking to keep from hitting anyone too hard as cars were out of control and all over the place right in front of me. As we all kept sliding and other cars kept smashing into each other, my Chevy actually sliced through a hole in
the middle of it all and, though I was pointed in the wrong direction—downward toward the infield—I was in the clear. For a second, anyway.

  When you’re in the Big One, you’re just like a boat stuck in a storm. You can react and steer and dig all you want, but really, you’re just praying for the best. You have little or no control. It’s just screeches and smoke and chaos. What you don’t want to hear is that crunch, that smack that tells you that you’ve been hit. It’s so incredibly jarring, not just physically, but mentally, even when you’ve braced yourself. So as I was sliding along there, falling out of the turn toward the infield, my mind was like, Oh, man . . . don’t hit anything . . . don’t hit anything . . . Then, when my car got out in the open and slowly headed down the banking toward the grass with all that happening behind me way up at the wall, it got kind of quiet around me. That was good. My thoughts turned a little more positive, into Okay, we’re good? Are we? Yeah, we’re good!

  The nose of my car had just touched the safety of the grass—and I was doored.

  Bobby Labonte had driven way down onto the apron at the bottom of the banking to avoid all the crashing. Problem was, Brad Keselowski had done the same. When Brad saw me coming down the track and moved to avoid me, he turned in front of Bobby, who bounced off Brad and directly into me. He hit my car just behind the driver’s side door area. It helicoptered me. I spun around twice, all the way off the turn and onto the frontstretch. There, just when I was starting to slow down, I was hit in the left rear quarter panel by another wrecked car—Tony Stewart, still helplessly wrecking along, half a mile away from where he’d first gotten airborne—and I was sent into one more 360-degree spin, this one nearly as jarring as the first.

  I had suffered another concussion. I knew it. I knew it instantly. And I was instantly scared to death. Were you kidding me? Two more concussions? In six weeks? That shellshock like I’d experienced at Kansas returned in a snap. At the same time, it felt different. This time, there would be no hiding anything from anyone because something had happened that took away my ability to do my usual “Naw, man, I’m cool” thing. Whatever had happened to me at Talladega had instantly taken away my ability to control my emotions. Now I was just angry. Angry all the time. I drove my wrecked car back to the garage, and ESPN had a TV camera there waiting on me, part of a big pack of reporters waiting to ask me about the crash. I started talking and my eyes got wide and my volume picked up and my face started turning red.

  “I can’t believe that everybody, that nobody’s sensible enough to realize how ridiculous that was . . . I mean, that was ridiculous! If this is what we do every week I won’t be doing it, I’ll just put it to you like that. If this is how we race every week I’ll find another job. It’s bloodthirsty. If that’s what people want, that’s ridiculous. I don’t even want to go to Daytona or Talladega next year. But I ain’t got much choice . . . If this is how we’re gonna race, and that’s how we’re gonna continue to race and nothing’s gonna change, I think NASCAR should build the cars. It’d save us a lot of money.”

  Bloodthirsty? NASCAR should build the cars? I don’t want to race at Daytona or Talladega? Does any of that sound like me? Not a chance. But something had been triggered. It had been broken. All of a sudden I had this anger, this rage inside of me that I couldn’t control. And there was nothing working properly inside my head that would have stopped me from just throwing that rage right out there for everyone to see and hear it.

  The aftershocks from Kansas had taken a while to set in. But here at Talladega, as I talked to the media, the inside of my head felt like there was a huge amount of physical pressure. It felt like my head was filling up with blood. I was so scared that I had given myself some sort of real physical injury, like I had bleeding on the brain. I remember riding out of the racetrack on a golf cart, headed to the air strip behind the track, and just trying so hard for the people with me to not see that I was totally flipping out. All I could think about was, Man, here we go again. It took a month for those feelings from Kansas to go away and now it was all back again? And it felt worse? So how long was it going to take for this to go away? I knew it already felt worse than Kansas, at least here in the first few minutes following the crash, so what did that mean? I’d had two concussions now, back to back, so was this going to be worse because of that? Had I just ripped the scab off my brain just as it was almost healed?

  That night at my house was my thirty-eighth birthday party. Honestly, I don’t remember a ton about it. I was too preoccupied, too worried. Brad Keselowski was there and had brought a bunch of fireworks. Like, big fireworks. He says he noticed that as they were setting them off, I was just sitting by the campfire, kind of staying off to myself. My not having much to say at Kansas six weeks earlier—he hadn’t thought much about that. But this struck him as odd.

  That night, I did something I should have done a lot earlier. I told Amy everything. I told her how awful I felt and how I had lost my emotional control. I told her that while she knew I’d been dinged up at Kansas and how badly I’d felt initially, she never really knew the full extent of how I was feeling because I didn’t let her know. She certainly didn’t know that the concussion symptoms had gone on for more than a month. No one had known but me. That had to change, and I was ending the silence right then and there before I let the secrecy go too far.

  It was such a relief to finally say those things out loud. But it was hard. What we agreed to do the next day was going to be even harder.

  Monday, October 8, 2012

  The next morning Amy and I drove over to the headquarters of my race team, JR Motorsports. You need to understand something about JRM. That place is way more than just your regular NASCAR race shop. It’s the headquarters of all my businesses, from Hammerhead Entertainment to the Dale Jr. Foundation. It’s also my extended family. We have nearly 150 employees, and several of those folks are members of my actual family.

  That starts with my sister, Kelley Earnhardt Miller. Her official title is co-owner/vice president/business manager. In other words, she’s the boss. Years ago, she took a pay cut to come run my businesses, but she did it because looking after her little brother has been her job ever since I arrived in this world two years after she did.

  Our childhood wasn’t easy. Our parents split up when we were kids. We went with our mother, Brenda, and we moved from house to house. After one of our homes burned up in a fire, we moved in with my dad and his wife, Teresa, just as he was becoming a NASCAR superstar. That meant he was gone a lot. And that meant Kelley was the one who was raising me. At one point I was sent to military school—you know, I guess to undo some of that Hammerheadedness—and Kelley quit her school and enrolled in the military school that I’d been sent off to, just to look out for me. That’s how awesome my sister is.

  That’s who Amy and I went to see the Monday morning after the restless night that followed Talladega. I told Kelley how bad I was feeling and how the wreck less than twenty-four hours ago had caused that. Then I told her how I’d hidden my concussion from Kansas and how it had just now gotten better, but now it was back again and I was in bad shape. We called my big boss, Rick Hendrick, the owner of my Cup Series ride, and told him what I’d just told Kelley. Rick insisted that I go see Dr. Jerry Petty and that I do it immediately.

  In the motorsports world, especially in the NASCAR world, there is no more respected or trusted doctor—I would even go so far as to say no more respected person—than Dr. Jerry Petty. He is not related to Richard Petty, but among people who make their living in the NASCAR business, he is looked at with the same respect and regard as the King. He’s a neurologist who has worked on international motorsports councils, been a team doctor for the Carolina Panthers, and served as neurological consultant to the NFL and the NFL Players Association.

  But he’s also a natural-born member of the NASCAR community. He’s from Gastonia, North Carolina, just outside of Charlotte. He went to school at UNC–Chapel Hill and started working races at Charlotte Motor Speedwa
y’s infield care center in 1970. Dr. Petty was one of the key figures in helping NASCAR through its massive safety changes after my dad was killed in 2001. Five years later he won the Bill France NASCAR Award of Excellence, an honor that goes to people who have reached the top level of lifetime achievements in motorsports. In other words, if Dr. Petty tells you something, no one in the NASCAR garage argues with him. He’s earned that honor a thousand times over.

  My entire life he has been the guy that racecar drivers want to see when they are facing the scariest moments of their lives, the first moments after they’ve been badly injured in a crash on the racetrack, or like me on this day in 2012 and in the days following. No one likes feeling vulnerable, but racecar drivers hate it more than maybe anyone else in the world. So, in that moment, they want to see someone they can trust. A good doctor is no different than a good crew chief. When they tell you what’s wrong and they tell you how to go about fixing what’s wrong, you don’t question them because their record tells you they know what they are doing. You trust them. Everyone trusts Dr. Petty.

  Tuesday, October 9, 2012

  When Amy and I arrived at his office in Charlotte, Dr. Petty took me in his office and gave me an ImPACT test. That stands for Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing. It’s actually pretty simple, but don’t mistake simple for easy.

  The ImPACT really starts as an interview, getting your medical history and asking a series of questions to help figure out how a patient really feels. It goes through twenty-plus concussion symptoms. Am I dizzy? Am I nauseous? Do I have headaches and if so, what are they like? Then there are a series of tests to measure how fast or slow the brain is processing different kinds of information. Visual memory, verbal memory, reaction time, visual motor speed. You sit in front of a computer terminal for twenty to thirty minutes and it throws a bunch of fast-moving exams at you. It gives you a dozen words to memorize, but only flashes them up there quick, twice. Then they double up, adding another dozen to the first ones you saw, but you’re still only supposed to remember the first ones, the target words. Say you might get car in the first group and truck in the second. Then later a window pops up and says, “Was car one of the words displayed?” There are similar drills using shapes, letters, colors, stuff like that. It’s a lot to process all at once, and that’s how it’s designed. The idea is to push your brain, put it to work, and see where its limits are.