Dale Earnhardt Jr. Still Fascinated by His Father’s Stubbornness and Refusal to Lose in Iconic Victory

Even decades later, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is still fascinated by his father’s stubbornness and refusal to lose. When asked to name the most impressive move he has ever witnessed, he did not point to a modern highlight like Ross Chastain’s “Hail Melon” at Martinsville in 2022. Instead, he went back to the 1987 All-Star Race, won by his father, Dale Earnhardt.

The 1987 event was a three-segment, 135-lap exhibition featuring the sport’s 20 most recent winners, with $200,000 on the line. Bill Elliott started from the pole and controlled the first two segments, leading 121 of the opening 125 laps. The final 10-lap segment determined the overall winner. In the closing stretch, Elliott moved low exiting Turn 4 in an attempt to pass Earnhardt.

The latter blocked to the left, and contact between Earnhardt’s left-rear and Elliott’s right-front sent Earnhardt into the trioval grass near the start-finish line. He kept the car pointed forward long enough to return to the racing surface still in front. A few laps later, Elliott’s charge faded after a cut tire, while Earnhardt held off Terry Labonte and Tim Richmond to secure the win.

Dale Jr. has often revisited that race and admitted that he couldn’t get over that. “I like to go back and watch the 1987 All-Star Race that my dad won. I like to watch that because my dad didn’t have the best car that day but his almost stubbornness and refusal to lose…”

“I don’t know that I can honestly say I see that in a lot of drivers, or have seen that in other drivers in the past. He just wouldn’t concede. He just fought as hard as he could to win that race, and if you go back and watch it, I think it kind of explains itself, but that sort of terribly stubborn refusal to concede [attitude] was so interesting to me,” he added during his interview with Hard Rock Bet.

Dale Jr. also pointed to seeing a similar edge in Max Verstappen during the Miami Grand Prix last season, the first Formula 1 race Junior attended in person. He recalled that the McLaren cars carried pace, yet Verstappen held track position and forced them to work for every attempt to pass rather than yielding ground.

For Dale Jr., that refusal to concede stood out, making it a compelling one to watch. He has applied the same lens to his own career, revisiting races from the early 2000s at Talladega. He cited the closing laps of the 2004 Daytona 500, where he had to find a way past Tony Stewart without drafting help, as an example of the kind of fight he values when looking back at his time behind the wheel.