Racing to the Finish Page 7

  That was the biggest statement of them all. We had announced to the garage that after the consistency and the momentum we’d built over the previous three years, 2014 was what we had been building toward, and they had better be ready. My exact quote standing in Victory Lane that night was, “We are going for the jugular this year.”

  These feelings were a big improvement from how I’d felt just one month earlier. That’s when the news broke that Steve Letarte would be leaving our team at the end of 2014 to become a TV analyst for NBC Sports. I’d actually known about it before the public found out. My fan base—Junior Nation—was devastated. But not as devastated as me.

  The day I found out, I cried. I went to him and I let him have it. “Man, why are you doing this to us?!” I couldn’t believe that he was going to bail, not now, not as I was experiencing this career resurgence, feeling so great on the track and finally feeling just as great off the track. But he had two kids at home that he never saw. He was killing himself to try to keep up with the crew chiefs of the other title contenders, especially Chad Knaus, his mentor, who called the shots for Jimmie Johnson’s seven-time championship team right there out of the same race shop we worked out of. I got it. I knew why he was doing it. But I didn’t have to like it.

  Steve and I agreed that instead of worrying about what life was going to be like apart, we would focus on making sure we got everything out of the time we had left. We still had a whole season to work together. We could worry about 2015 when the time came, so we agreed that we were going to run 2014 like we had nothing to lose, because that’s exactly what we had. That’s how we ran the Daytona 500, and after we won it, we really had nothing to lose. We were in the postseason, so we threw caution to the wind. When we had a chance to win, we could roll the dice to make that happen. If we didn’t have a shot to win, we could try stuff in races to see if it would or wouldn’t work when we went back to those same tracks in the fall.

  It was awesome.

  We started the year with three straight top-two finishes. We won four races, the most I’d won in a single season since 2004. We spent the entire twenty-six-race regular season ranked in the top five and ended the year with an eighth-place finish in the championship, the third time in four years we’d finished in the top eight in the points standings and our fourth straight season in the postseason.

  But behind those numbers was an ugly truth. I was having symptoms again. Remember those notes I told you about at the start of this book? This was the season when I started taking those notes.

  I know what you’re thinking. I had promised I wouldn’t keep those kinds of secrets again. I had promised it in 2002 and I had promised it in 2012, to myself, my team, my family, and the public. During my comeback press conference at Martinsville, after missing the two races, I said to the world: “This has definitely changed the way I feel about it. If I know I’ve suffered another concussion or I know I have symptoms after an accident, I’m definitely going to be a lot more responsible about it.”

  That promise was easy to stick to in 2013, when there were no symptoms. In 2014, in a position to maybe finally win a championship, I broke that promise. I was keeping secrets about what was happening inside my head. Again.

  Monday, April 7, 2014

  Texas Motor Speedway

  The first notes came seven weeks after the Daytona 500 win, when I ran into the wet grass and had my frontstretch crash at Texas Motor Speedway, dot-dot-dotting along the wall. As I wrote in the notes app of my iPhone, I felt foggy almost instantly. The other word I used was trapped. That’s a man that is thinking, After nearly two years of feeling fine, now this?!

  With that slight return of my concussion symptoms came a much more significant return—my anxiety. When I think back on it now, I realize that worry over the fact that one day my symptoms might return, I guess it never really went away. It was always in the back of my mind, whether I realized it or not. I took down only one note between my return at the end of 2012 and the Texas race in April 2014; it was after the Daytona 300 Xfinity Series race on February 23, 2013. People remember that race for the scary crash at the finish line when Kyle Larson got airborne and his car ripped the catchfence apart at the start-finish line. I was caught up in that wreck too. All I wrote was, “Slammed wall at finish line during Larson flip. Had headache and pressure all night. Felt fine Sunday for the 500.”

  Over that time I continued following the NFL controversy with CTE but also continued to stay in touch with Micky. I referred several other racecar drivers to him so they could be checked out. I answered a lot of questions from both the media and even some of my fellow competitors about concussions and how they are diagnosed and treated, especially when NASCAR made changes to its concussion-related policies. At the start of the 2014 season it became mandatory that all drivers do baseline concussion screenings. Some of the guys complained about that publicly, so naturally the media came to me for a reaction. Now I was NASCAR’s unofficial concussion spokesperson. I had “earned” that job because I had been through it and had healed. Now, though, I wasn’t so sure about the healed part.

  My anxiety over that is apparent in my notes from the days after the Texas crash:

  Went home feeling a slight headache and visual issues like erratic eye movement. Not being able to focus on a single point or object. More than slight air-headedness or grogginess.

  Spent night on couch with Amy. Got tired and went to bed. Felt trapped in my head some, but just slightly. Couldn’t focus or remember simple things. Worried about my head all the time and couldn’t plug in to my surroundings.

  Groggy head Tuesday AM, over 12 hrs after accident. Emotional frustrations then too.

  “Emotional frustrations”—there’s that anxiety.

  Wednesday noon, still some slight mental mistakes or slip-ups. Walked into a clear glass wall I thought was a door while focusing hard on racing mural, looking for my car in it. Could be a “throw it in the concussion bin” moment but I think it’s still just a slight lack of mental sharpness that will be better by Friday.

  We had a test session at Michigan Speedway, and as I was walking into the door of the media center, I eyed a mural featuring a bunch of racecars and victory celebrations. I’d won there twice, including a huge win just two years earlier, and I was looking to see if my victories were included in the artwork. The walls of that building are all glass, and I walked right into one of them “Tommy Boy”–style.

  That misjudgment might have been concussion-related, an inability to focus. Or it might have just been a dumb mistake that I would’ve made anyway. I certainly wasn’t the first person to walk into a super-clean glass wall. But that’s what having concussion anxiety can do to you. It makes you question why you do or don’t do certain things. Micky calls it “throwing it into the concussion bin”—you just naturally kind of blame it on the condition, fair or not.

  So is that pressure I’m feeling inside my skull for real, or am I just imagining it because I’m super sensitive and stressed? Or is it real, not all that bad, and am I making it worse because I’m super sensitive and stressed? This is the cycle I would find myself stuck in whenever I thought I was feeling symptoms. It’s exhausting, and it never really goes away after you suffer through something like I did in 2012. Every day is a constant checklist. Every morning you make sure everything works okay, and the rest of the day you wonder if simple mistakes are indicators of bigger problems. Man, I don’t remember where I left my car keys or I have a small headache becomes Is my memory failing?! or Is my brain injured again?!

  You can also read in my post-Texas notes “. . . but I think it’s still just slight lack of mental sharpness that will be better by Friday.” There’s another cycle, the one I was used to from 1998 and 2002, and any other time I believe I was concussed. Most of the time, it improved by race weekend. But the race weekend itself had something to do with that. Micky and Dr. Petty both say that the focus it takes to do the job of a racecar driver sharpens your mind. It finds a way to
shut off those nagging, mild symptoms because it has to in order to achieve the super-intense level of concentration a racer must have. Any of my former crew chiefs will tell you the same was true of me even when there weren’t any concussions! Steve Letarte likes to remind me that nearly all of my pit road penalties—dumb stuff like breaking the pit road speed limit or overshooting my pit stall and sliding through the box where my crew was waiting to do their thing—those mistakes almost never happened in the real heat of an in-race battle. No, they happened when the race was under a caution flag or I was pitting by myself, the non-pressure situations. Why? Because I wasn’t as focused up.

  That helps to explain the strangest pattern from my notes. Like from that Michigan test:

  Test session . . . both Tuesday and Wednesday, when I was in the car I felt sharper than when I wasn’t. But when I drove on the highway Tuesday with sunglasses I felt odd and not sharp. Removing sunglasses makes it much better.

  So on the road driving a rental car—eye issues, that swishy feeling of my brain lagging behind my vision. Then, on the racetrack traveling 200 mph—no eye issues, always hitting my marks, and constantly collecting data on how the car is running.

  That’s a pattern that continued on a much larger scale throughout 2014: sharp on the track, but shaky off. After the Texas scare I finished second at Darlington and seventh at Richmond. The next was the Talladega event when I chose to bail in the closing laps. After a week of stress and no sleep worrying about how I handled Talladega, we cranked out ten top-ten finishes over the next dozen races, including a pair of wins at Pocono Raceway. But by summer’s end, the fog was back.

  Saturday, August 23, 2014

  Bristol Motor Speedway

  In the legendary night race at Bristol, a half-mile oval shaped like a giant cereal bowl, I was forced to open up my iPhone and jot down more notes. Roughly one-third of the way into the 500-lap race, leader Denny Hamlin got knocked out of the lead by Kevin Harvick, slid all the way down the frontstretch, and came back onto the track at the entrance of the first turn. I drove all the way up to the top of the track to try to get by him, but he smacked the driver’s side of my Chevy. Like a can opener, he peeled the sheet metal off that whole side of the car. The hit felt like nothing. It looked like nothing. But, looking at my notes, it didn’t feel like nothing. You can tell I was surprised and confused by what it triggered.

  Hit Denny in turn one.

  Immediately after the wreck I felt the very slightest mental oddness. Not trapped, not foggy. Just feeling anxiety of being judged. Felt people were really studying me and I had extra anxiety for that and worried if I’d done any physical damage. Got back in the car and drove. Drove good but it took me a second to zap back into my surroundings. Felt like a dream for a second. I wasn’t super sharp and “on time” but could handle repetition easy. From the time of the wreck until I went to bed I had a moderate to slight headache. Didn’t take any meds.

  I went to bed that night but couldn’t go to sleep. That’s not unusual for me, especially after a Bristol race. I told you my mind never stops. It’s always the loudest when I’m in bed. This night, it was particularly loud.

  I had no rapid eye movement. I didn’t feel trapped. Maybe a very faint feeling of trapped or really not being able to escape my own thoughts. The “voice” in my head or thoughts I have are much louder than normal.

  I took a sleeping pill and went to bed. Woke up to pee around 2 AM and had some problems going back to sleep due to the loud thoughts. I have loud thoughts normally, so this isn’t crazy.

  Woke up Sunday. Feeling 95%. The 5% is slight head ache and just knowing I had a hit and overanalyzing myself. Compared to Texas I think I’m gonna be ok?

  100% by 5 pm Sunday. Monday–Thursday no issues.

  Even after finishing thirty-ninth at Bristol, we were third in the championship standings. I ran good but not great heading into the ten-race postseason, and three races into that postseason we were among the championship leaders.

  Sunday, October 5, 2014

  Kansas Speedway

  Nearing the halfway mark of the race, we were leading. Okay, we weren’t just leading—we were cruising. I was about to lead my forty-sixth lap and had a full two-second lead over second place Joey Logano. Rolling toward the exit of the fourth turn, there was a pop. The right front tire had blown. I smacked the wall flush with the whole right side of the car, just flattening it. The guys fixed the car as best they could, and we got back out to finish the day 63 laps down in thirty-ninth place. This is what I wrote after the race. You’ll see I’d found a new way to describe my fogginess as I finished the race, traveled home, and attended a charity golf tournament the next day.

  No headache after the crash. Felt little drunk, 1/2 of a beer. But got in car and returned to the track and felt fine out there.

  After the race I got out of the car and felt 1 or 2 beers drunk, but still no pain. No rapid eye movement or any other symptoms.

  I have some slight coordination problems such as typing or fastening a belt because of the drunkenness.

  No eye focus or rapid eye movement issues. I double state that because I feel like that is the first symptom in a definite problem.

  By the end of the plane ride I felt much less drunk. The drunk is still the only symptom. Neck seems like it might get sore. Really flinched hard to keep my head from flying into the headrest.

  Driving home there was an increase in drunk feeling. Basically, when I take my eyes off the road I would get woozy. But overall even though I felt drunk today, I felt happy drunk. Driving home some headlights did bother my eyes. As soon as I got home and into the house the drunk feeling decreased quickly back to 1/2 beer.

  Played Madden. Felt forgetful in one game but sharp in a second game.

  Monday morning. Took a while to wake up. Focus on single objects was tough on drive to airport. Felt slight groggy feeling. Not really fog. Just sluggish. Took about an hour to get out of that. By noon I was feeling 90%. No headache. No eye issues. Just feel a little flighty or airheaded. 1/4 beer drunk.

  Felt decent at the golf tournament. Like I was 1 beer in. I did have a beer and felt the effects from it were a bit exaggerated. Hadn’t ate lunch. It was 2 pm.

  Was 100% next day.

  The next two weekends we ran well at Charlotte and Talladega, leading laps at both, but left with a pair of bad finishes. My drunken feelings had gone away and weren’t an issue. They certainly weren’t a factor by the end of the month.

  Sunday, October 26, 2014

  Martinsville Speedway

  In the season’s third-from-last race, I had a day that was as much fun as you can possibly have driving a racecar. There was a late restart and Tony Stewart had the lead. That guy always reminded people of my father, and with good reason. He’s one of the toughest racers I’ve ever seen, especially at places like the flat, gritty half-mile at Martinsville.

  But that racetrack is so special for so many reasons, because of the history of the track and my father’s history running there. Winning there earns you what might be the best trophy in professional sports, a grandfather clock. My dad won six of them. I remember one of them sitting in the hallway as you came into the house, just by the stairs, with an oval-shaped rug in front of it. That’s where I would spend Sunday afternoons, racing my Matchbox cars around that rug and listening to the radio blasting through the house with a broadcast of my father off racing somewhere. Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip won at Martinsville so many times that Waltrip used to joke that around his house at noon and midnight, everyone for miles would be woken up from all his grandfather clocks chiming at once. I grew up going to races at Martinsville and watching all those guys jamming into the brakes and jamming into each other, me playing in the infield with my friends while Dad raced.

  I wasn’t greedy. I didn’t need six grandfather clocks. I just wanted one of them. With only three laps remaining, I smoked by Smoke (that’s what we call Tony Stewart) and grabbed that win.

 
It wasn’t enough to get us back into the championship hunt. We ended finishing eighth in the final standings. But that win at Martinsville was my fourth of the year. It fulfilled a lifelong dream and put a grandfather clock in my den. I was also happy to finally add to the amazing Martinsville win total of my boss, Rick Hendrick. It was his twenty-second win at the NASCAR track that’s also in his home state of Virginia. His first win as a team owner came there in 1984, a win that saved his tiny new operation from going under. From Geoff Bodine and Darrell Waltrip to Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, Hendrick Motorsports had experienced some of the greatest days of its existence at Martinsville.

  It also experienced its worst day. On October 23, 2004, a Hendrick Motorsports plane went down in the hills near the racetrack, carrying friends and family to that day’s race. All ten aboard were killed, including Rick’s brother, John, his two nieces, and also his only son and my good friend, Ricky Hendrick. When my dad was killed at Daytona in 2001, Rick Hendrick was there for me. When he lost Ricky three years later, I tried to be there for him. That’s a bond that will never go away and was only strengthened when Rick hired me to drive for him three years after the plane crash. When I was a kid, he pushed a napkin across the table and asked me to sign it, claiming that it was a binding contract and one day, after I grew up, I would drive for him. When I made the decision to leave my only NASCAR employer—my father’s company, Dale Earnhardt Incorporated—Hendrick Motorsports was the only place I ever intended to go.

  Now, on the tenth anniversary of that worst day of his life, it meant so much to me to be able to bring a smile to Rick Hendrick’s face.

  That win was also the perfect sendoff for Steve Letarte. He was a Hendrick Motorsports lifer, having made his way up from sweeping the floors to calling the shots for Jeff Gordon and then me. So Martinsville meant a lot to him too. But if there was any sadness to that day, or to the two races that followed it, this is where it came from—knowing that Steve and I were done. It had been two years ago that very weekend when we had to sit together in the Martinsville Speedway media center and answer questions about my comeback from the two races off. Now I felt fine. I hadn’t added any new notes to the iPhone in the three weeks since Kansas, and I wouldn’t add anything new to those notes for nearly another year.