The Last Lap

By Robert Sullivan

For Dale Earnhardt, the race was never over. Back when he was winning everything in sight--11 races one year, nine in another--he would come home some nights mad as hell about something that somebody had done to him on the track. Squeezed him, bumped him, as if he would never do such things himself. And this was after a victory.

Earnhardt had been a wild-child teenager, as reckless as they come and headed for nowhere, but he grew up to be his sport's father figure, Dad without the breaks, and a corporate titan to boot. He could regale a crowd of GM dealers with war stories for an hour--Mr. Charm--then shift gears in a heartbeat, chiding drivers who wanted to slow the cars down as "candy asses." He made tens of millions of dollars racing and tens of millions more running Dale Earnhardt Inc., but even at 49, a man of considerable responsibilities and with nothing left to prove, he would never take his foot off the gas. That is why they loved him.

Ironhead, the Intimidator, Earnhardt: he had massive, irresistible appeal. He brought fans into the sport who wouldn't know NASCAR from NASA. He was the rebel soul of a sport that had gone corporate. What roiled inside him usually came out, sometimes in fits of temper or unruly behavior behind the wheel. Whenever a race started, you wondered what Dale Earnhardt might do today.

At Daytona Beach, Fla., a Sunday ago, it was an Earnhardt kind of day: contradictions everywhere. It was going to be a triumphal afternoon, with a huge network audience watching, the ultimate proof, as if anyone needed it, that NASCAR was nationwide. Yet the sissies had won too, and rules were in place to slow the cars, but the changes seemed to be making the racing more dangerous. An earlier crash looked like an Armageddon of a wreck: 19 cars careering around, smashing into one another, Tony Stewart's Pontiac soaring through the air, ripping the hood off another car, metal clanging, a 16-minute red flag to clean up the mess--and only a bum shoulder, Stewart's, as a result. Then on the last turn of the last lap, Earnhardt's famous black No. 3 Chevy Monte Carlo plowed--thud--into the wall and drifted back out, nose smashed. No fire, no catapulting frames. Ironhead had walked away from stuff that looked a lot worse than this. "No one ever expected Dale Earnhardt to die in a race car," said Max Helton, a NASCAR chaplain.

NASCAR racers drive stock cars, simultaneously primitive and ultrasophisticated versions of the Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs and Dodges in America's driveways. These cars have engine blocks of 1960s vintage; neither you nor I have bought a car with a carburetor for 15 years, but Earnhardt drove one at Daytona. Certainly his Monte Carlo was a modified machine: its engine had been juiced to about 720 h.p.; its sheet-metal skin was lighter than a road-ready car's; its roll bars were designed to render the cab a fast-moving cage.

Outwardly, though, a NASCAR car looks like any old car wearing a sweater of decals, and in NASCAR racing there is little psychic distance between the superstar and the fan in the stands. The popular image of the European Grand Prix circuit, with its dukes and duchesses and ascot-wearing playboy drivers, is as foreign to NASCAR as Bordeaux is to Bud. NASCAR in America is religion, replete with charismatic figures, creeds and commandments about how life should be lived.

It didn't start out as such a holy thing. Early on, stock-car-racing events ranged from illegal to highly illegal, emerging from races between law officers and moonshine runners. It wasn't until a racer named Bill France started the National championship circuit in 1946--which incorporated as the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing in 1948--that jalopy races began to look like something resembling a league, an organization, a sport.

It was roughshod and regional, but France negotiated the bumpy road efficiently, and then in the late 1950s, Detroit moved south and everything changed. Much of America thinks stock-car racing broke through about five years ago, when the Kid--Jeff Gordon, he of the Tom Cruise looks and the middle-class Indiana upbringing--started winning everything in sight and turning up on the Today show to hobnob with Katie and Matt. But consider this: by 1965, NASCAR was already the second most popular sport, by attendance, in the country. And it hadn't started its Northern offensive.

That would be mounted gradually. To an itinerary of Spartanburg, S.C.; Birmingham and Talladega, Ala.; and Hickory and Asheville, N.C.; NASCAR added, over time, Long Pond, Pa.; Sonoma, Calif.; Joliet, Ill.; Brooklyn, Mich.; Dover, Del.; and Loudon, N.H. The fans were attracted, in this mature iteration of NASCAR, by the thunder of the cars, which have been able to reach 190 m.p.h. for 40 years now, and also by a host of stars every bit as human and accessible as some of the early characters, if better scrubbed. Richard Petty won 200 races. David Pearson beat Petty head to head 33 times to 30. Bobby Allison won 84 times in 25 years. Cale Yarborough won 83 times and was an entertaining throwback, a broad-bellied, bullheaded racer, maybe the biggest s.o.b. on the track this side of...

Dale Earnhardt.

It was Petty and Earnhardt, each of whom won the season-long Winston Cup title a record seven times, who had the largest legions of fans. King Richard's subjects loved his laconic aw-shucks manner and the way it contrasted with his ferocity behind the wheel. Ironhead's followers reveled in their hero's orneriness. Jeff Lancaster, owner of Lancaster's BBQ, a restaurant and car-racing shrine in Mooresville, N.C., explained it last week, the walls around him covered with souvenirs of racing giants: "He was the John Wayne of NASCAR. He was a kick-ass, take-names kinda guy. A guy's guy. Somebody that made things happen."

He was his father's son. Born in Kannapolis, N.C., in 1951, he didn't take naturally to school--he would drop out in the ninth grade--but loved being around cars. Ralph Earnhardt, known as Ironheart, was a short-track racing god and taught his son to wrangle a stock car. Dale married at 17, and he and his first wife had a son, Kerry. By the time he began his pro racing career at age 24 in 1975, Earnhardt had a young family to support and, more than most other drivers, was all business and no fooling. When strapped for cash, he would borrow from fellow racers, banking that he would win enough in Sunday's race for payback on Monday. That's pressure, and it made Earnhardt bear down.

Sometimes too hard. In one early-career incident, he tapped and spun the car of dirt-track driver Stick Elliot. The word went out that Stick's mechanic had a gun and was looking for Ironhead. The grease monkey didn't find him, and the racer who would soon be known by a second sobriquet, the Intimidator, drove off to greater glory. Earnhardt was NASCAR's rookie of the year in 1979 and won the season-long title in 1980. Even critics of his aggressive tactics acknowledged that in Earnhardt, NASCAR had as talented a driver as it had ever seen.

He married a second time, and then a third; his family grew to include Kelley and Dale Jr., with second wife Brenda; and Taylor Nicole, with Teresa, his widow. He got into the business of racing, using the money from his on-track success, which would eventually burgeon to an all-time record $41.6 million, to start Dale Earnhardt Inc., an auto-racing company that would grow to employ 200 in Mooresville and field three cars on NASCAR's Winston Cup circuit.

But as Earnhardt thrived, two elements of his driving career--his readiness to mix it up and his regular place at the center of crashes--continued to make him controversial. His great rival of the 1980s, Darrell Waltrip, once spoke for the field when he said, "You ought to get 10 bonus points for taking Earnhardt out of a race." Neil Bonnett, Earnhardt's best friend at the time, said, "If I can ever catch him, I'm gonna knock the s___ out of him." Bonnett, it is eerie to note, died in 1994 after crashing his Chevrolet into the wall at Daytona's Turn 4.

As Earnhardt's legend grew, so did NASCAR's popularity, and in recent years both took on a nuanced appearance. Earnhardt settled down with Teresa, and by all accounts settled down a bit on the oval too. He came to be seen as a grand, grizzled gentleman of the game, the kind of athlete you take your kid to see, so that a decade from now the kid can say he once saw Dale Earnhardt drive. Another change: Dale Jr. joined him on the circuit. "These past two years, having Junior on the track, we've all seen a marked change in Dale," said David Allen, his longtime p.r. manager.

For all its immensity and newfound wealth, NASCAR is in some regards still a traveling Southern tent show, a caravan of families who just happen to go very fast. It is nothing if not dynastic: Bill France handing the reins of his empire to Bill France Jr. Lee Petty handing the wheel to his son Richard, who hands it to his boy Kyle, who hands it to his kid Adam--who, tragically, is killed in 2000 at Loudon. Dale Jarrett teaching his son Dale how to drive, as Darrell Waltrip encourages his brother Michael. Bobby Allison teaching Clifford and Davey, then losing both boys, Clifford to a crash and Davey to a helicopter accident. Ralph Earnhardt teaching Dale, who teaches Junior.

The coziness of that community couldn't hide the fact that NASCAR has become a corporate force in spectator sports and television programming, with 13 racing circuits involving stock cars, open-wheel cars and trucks. It is now a well-tuned operation, staging 2,300 races in 42 states each year, the cream being its 36-event Winston Cup series, which, heading into 2001, landed a six-year network-television contract worth about $400 million annually. The NASCAR organization is still owned by the France family; its public corporation, International Speedway Corp., owns or operates 11 tracks coast to coast, with new venues in Chicago and Kansas City, Kans. Last year ISC had revenues of $440 million, up 47% from 1999.

In the past five years, NASCAR has been electric, and its reach has been growing. Its sponsors, which include wholesome chocolates and colas as well as cars and cigarettes, have been delirious. This year, for instance, UPS dropped its Olympic sponsorship and added NASCAR. Keep in mind that UPS sells its delivery services mostly to other businesses, an upmarket audience. If outsiders wanted to continue in ignorance of NASCAR because of class snobbery, who cared? Not UPS.

Success is not without its risks, though, and drivers perceived that the level of danger on the track was rising as NASCAR and its sponsors pursued maximum entertainment value. This year marked the return of DaimlerChrysler's Dodge division to stock-car racing. Chrysler, despite deep corporate troubles, had committed north of $60 million to the effort, and it was out for glory. "Dodge's appearance certainly did increase the level of competition," says Kevin Kennedy, a spokesman for Ford's racing division. "There was [Dodge] red everywhere you went in Daytona."

So they had the new cars and a brand-new $2.4 billion network TV contract, and the last thing NASCAR officials wanted at their showcase event was a repeat of the boring 2000 Daytona, which featured only nine lead changes and a walkaway win by Jarrett. Last autumn they experimented at the circuit's other superspeedway course, Talladega, with ways of slowing down the cars to make for bunched, exciting racing. Some of the drivers had come out of Talladega looking ashen--"A little too exciting at times for me," admitted Gordon--but there had been 49 lead changes and no big wrecks, so it was determined to go with restrictor plates on the carburetors (to reduce horsepower) and aerodynamic spoilers on the cars' surfaces (to increase drag) at Daytona too.

Earnhardt, who won that race at Talladega, had opinions on slowing down cars, as you might imagine. "If you're not a race driver, stay the hell home. Don't come here and grumble about going too fast. Get the hell out of the race car if you've got feathers on your legs or butt," he said a year ago, addressing the chicken-hearted. He had opinions about proposed safety measures too. He wasn't wearing the new Head and Neck Support (HANS) system, which fights whiplash in a crash. But Earnhardt was in favor of so-called soft walls. Countering track officials who said the cushioned barriers would take longer to clean up after a wreck, Earnhardt said earlier this year, "I'd rather they spend 20 minutes cleaning up that mess than cleaning me off the wall."

So with new rules in place, new controversies in the air and TV cameras ready to roll, the gentlemen started their engines. It was, from the first, a terrific, thrilling race. If it was marred by that 19-car melee with 27 laps to go, this was offset by constant jockeying that would eventually produce 40 more lead changes than last year. Earnhardt, for his part, was having a decent day. Some dings to the Monte Carlo changed the car's aerodynamic shape and let him know before the endgame that he wouldn't be the winner. But up ahead, there was a solid chance that someone else from Dale Earnhardt Inc. would be, as Michael Waltrip and Dale Jr. were leading the pack. By talking with his pit crew over the radio, Earnhardt started coaching his teammates. "Those last 10 laps, I saw such a different Dale Earnhardt," said his friend and former crew chief, Larry McReynolds, who was calling the race for Fox from the press box. "I can't imagine how proud he was to look out his windshield to see his son and his good friend up there." Waltrip claimed victory, his first in 463 NASCAR races.

Earnhardt was seconds from the finish line when the first contact was made--with Sterling Marlin's car. It didn't seem a big thing, although Marlin would receive death threats in the week ahead. No. 3 veered right, plowed into the wall and slid back just as Ken Schrader's car broadsided it. The crash was undramatic. Ironhead had survived much worse.

The track hounds knew better. They knew that when a car isn't coming apart, the energy isn't dissipating. The sheet metal in these cars is designed to shred and fly away so that a driver isn't crushed or sliced. Earnhardt's car was still more or less intact. "Talk to us, Dale!" The plea from the pit crackled in the earphones of a driver--a champion, a legend--who was, in all probability, already dead.

It was learned later that Earnhardt's left lap seat belt had torn apart, meaning he may have been thrown into the steering column. No one could ever recall a seat belt failing that way. In the aftermath, NASCAR determined that any new safety rules would not be hurried, and that the next week's race, in Rockingham, N.C., would be held as scheduled.

Incredibly, or possibly not, Dale Jr. announced he would race his Earnhardt Inc. car. And Childress Racing, which had employed the senior Earnhardt, got a replacement driver for Sunday too. Some outsiders were surprised by these responses. But they fit both the old and new codes of NASCAR: first, that racing is what Pettys and Allisons and Earnhardts do, come what may; and second, that NASCAR is a Big Business that doesn't stop for one man, even though it's the man who helped make it big. So they planned to rev the engines and drop the green flag Sunday. No one in the vast, grieving NASCAR family felt that Ironhead Earnhardt, Ironheart's boy, would have wanted it any other way.

--With reporting by Brad Liston/Rockingham, Michelle McCalope/Mooresville, Collette McKenna Parker/Daytona Beach, Eric Roston/New York and Joseph Szczesney/Detroit

Chat on AOL with TIME's Robert Sullivan about NASCAR at 7 p.m. E.T. on Wednesday. Keyword: LIVE

With reporting by Brad Liston/Rockingham, Michelle McCalope/Mooresville, Collette McKenna Parker/ Daytona Beach, Eric Roston/New York and Joseph Szczesney/ Detroit