Like any race car driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr. went for the win every time he took the green flag to start a race. He succeeded 26 times in his 631 starts in the Cup Series in his NASCAR Hall of Fame career.
Advertisement
Sure, there were races that got away from him or others that left him upset that he felt he should have won. But there’s one race in particular that Junior started off behind the 8-ball and almost wound up winning the race.
“There’s this one race I always talk about,” Earnhardt said on a recent addition of Bussin With The Boys. “It’s always great to celebrate the wins, obviously. … At Martinsville, probably 2004 or 2005, we start to race, and there’s a big crash in Turn 1, I’m in it and tear the right front off my car and damage the back of the car.”
“After we get it repaired, I’m out there, it’s like five laps into the race, it’s going to be a 500-lap race at this tiny little bullring. I get out and say, ‘Dang, this is going to be a long day. The car’s wrecked, it’s not going to be competitive and I’m going to be in the freakin’ way all day and it’s going to suck.”
But Junior ultimately did not suck. In fact, he was just as surprised as anyone at what happened from that point.
“As the laps start clicking off, I start passing a few cars and a few guys, I drive through the field all the way into the Top 10,” he recalled. “ I spin myself out, go to the back of the field, and drive back to the front. I finish fourth or fifth in the race, I’m battling for the win in Turn 4 (on the final lap).
“This is like my favorite race I didn’t win because of all the stuff that went wrong and how bad it should have been, but we just didn’t stop trying, and the car was bad-ass. The fact the fender was missing it kept the tire cool and allowed the tire to outperform everybody else who had a fender and tires that was getting cooked.”
“So the fact my car was out in the wind, it was really more competitive than it should have been.”
From that point on, including the sole win of his career at Martinsville in 2014, Earnhardt looked forward every time he returned to the little .526-mile bullring — but in a different way than one might expect.
“After this happened, I joked with my teams for the rest of my career like, ‘Hey, when we go back to Martinsville and the front fender falls off, it’s okay.”
