Dale Earnhardt has been dead for nearly 25 years, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. retired as a NASCAR Cup driver nine years ago. Even so, NASCAR fans cannot seem to get enough of the stories about ‘The Intimidator’ or Junior.
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On a recent episode of the Dinner Drive podcast with Kyle Petty, Junior delved back into his personal memory bank of growing up as Dale Sr.’s son.
Admittedly, it’s hard to be the son of one of the greatest NASCAR drivers in history. Junior learned early in life that as the son of the elder Earnhardt—a.k.a. ‘The Intimidator’—he’d be subject to harassment and bullying because of who he was and who his father was.
Junior tried to make the best of it, but there were times where—as much as he didn’t want his father to get involved—the elder Earnhardt would have to step in either to protect his son or, if his son acted out or did poorly in school, give him a good kick in the pants.
“Not everything’s a bed of roses,” Junior said about his younger life to Petty. “I went to a lot of private schools. Dad finally decided, we’re going to go to a public school in Mooresville (North Carolina) when I was going into the ninth grade. And I thought, when I go to this public school, I’m probably going to have a lot of friends, and everybody’s going to know who my dad is, and they’re all going to think that’s crazy cool, and I’m going to enjoy all that attention.”
“It was the exact opposite. There were a couple kids that anytime that anything happened that was bad, they were ones that want to point it out to you. I remember a good example of this was when Bobby Allison blew a tire at Talladega in the Miller (High Life Beer) car. Dad was behind him, like three or four car lengths, not even close.”
“The cars were all strung out coming, and his tire blows out, and he goes into the grandstands, it just tears down the fence. It was a bad deal. I go to school on Monday, and three or four kids come up to me and go, ‘’Your daddy’s a dirty driver. He wrecked Bobby Allison.’ It was that kind of thing every week. If Dad didn’t do good, you weren’t real excited to go back to school on Monday cuz they were going to tell you about it,” elaborated the now Xfinity team owner.
Junior tried to shake off the youthful criticism from his peers, but it definitely hurt.
At the same time, criticism of his father by his fellow students lit a fire inside Junior that he, too, wanted to be a race car driver someday.
It was right around that same time that Junior more or less had an epiphany, and he made the conscious decision that he wanted to continue the family business. His grandfather, Ralph, was a racer; obviously, his father and namesake was a racer, and Junior wanted to be a third-generation racer.
While the senior Earnhardt initially brushed off Junior’s and stepbrother Kerry’s desire to become racers, he eventually relented, showed them both a newspaper story about a new street stock racing series beginning at nearby Concord Motor Speedway.
“That was it,” Junior said simply,
And the rest is history.
