1,000 Greatest Drivers: Dale Earnhardt

Note to Fox Sports: Stop using the footage of his fatal crash in promotions.

Obviously this took a while to pare down. I started at 1,686 words, but I did get just about everything I wanted to cover in here. I intended to do the Ryan Newman column on February 17 and the Dale Earnhardt column on the anniversary of his death then decided to do the Earnhardt column first so I could try to finish it on the 18th, but although I did start the Earnhardt column on the 18th I didn’t finish it until just now. Earnhardt was my first favorite NASCAR driver back in the day for the stupidest of reasons. The first race I watched was the 1994 Pepsi 400, where NASCAR famously let Jimmy Spencer win with an illegal intake manifold to ensure that McDonald’s would not leave the sport as a sponsor (at least that’s the popular conspiracy theory…) In that race, Earnhardt was running third in the #3 car and I was somehow intrigued by the symmetry of that that I started rooting for him. That has to be the stupidest fandom origin of all time. I was then a bandwagon jumper in my childhood (Earnhardt → Mark Martin → Tony Stewart → Newman) before I eventually over time grew sick of all those drivers. While everybody likes to condemn bandwagon jumpers and I do understand why, I don’t regret it. I feel my bandwagon jumping enabled me to be able to look at the sport from a variety of perspectives rather than going “my driver right or wrong” and made it somewhat easier for me to eliminate bias from my analysis. I think I do justice even to the drivers I hate while there have definitely been a number of drivers who I like even though I think they suck. I don’t particularly consider myself any kind of Earnhardt fan like I was as a boy, but I do understand why he became such an icon and grew to define the sport for a lot of people. I will write an update about my mom before the Newman post.