Dale Earnhardt Jr. has experienced his share of accidents as a professional race car driver in NASCAR. In a 2018 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, he spoke about the emotions he feels when he gets into accidents that make his car flip.
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You’d expect Junior to feel panic, anxiety, and fear. But surprisingly, that wasn’t the case. He admitted that he was never scared when his car flipped and that he felt extremely calm and safe.
Junior said, “I never was scared of flipping. My thought was, ‘I just did something a lot of people are never going to experience.'” The Kannapolis, North Carolina native acknowledged how the safety standards in the sport had improved immensely over the years and that it provided him with a ton of confidence that he won’t be harmed.
The icon also spoke about his first flip, which came during a race at Daytona in 1998. Junior said, “I got turned around at a race in 1998. I was racing at Daytona and I got turned around. I’m flipping for the first time in my life and this car is over 3,000 lbs.
“It flies up in the air like it’s paper, man. It’s the craziest thing in the world. It’s so weightless. The car rolled on its side and came down kind of on its side. It felt like somebody rolled a prop wall of grass up against the car.”
Gravity does its job best in such scenarios and pushes the driver into the seat. Junior thought that it was the weirdest feeling ever. However, he did feel safe inside the car even then. The biggest threat for a driver in these cases is that their arms might get crushed because they’re dangling everywhere. So, Junior stressed that they need to hold on to their steering wheels.
Footage of wrecks in the sixties and seventies features several instances during which a driver’s arm can be seen dangling out the window without control. This is dangerous beyond measure. Fortunately, awareness is a lot higher today. Junior himself had learned this lesson the hard way. He’d flipped his pickup truck on Christmas Day one time.
Junior hadn’t held on to the steering wheel when he flipped and his arm had banged against the window sill with great force. He narrated, “I was like, ‘Man!’ I got it back in and grabbed a hold of the steering wheel with both my hands. Ever since then, anytime I’m in a crash, you got to have your hands ahold of something ’cause that’s the one thing that you can’t control.”
The car flips of Ryan Preece in Daytona in recent years have generated a lot of attention to the case. NASCAR continues to work harder to prevent the Next-Gen car from lifting off upon contact. Hopefully, a time will come when safety reaches its maximum limit, if it isn’t there already.
