In the Blink of an Eye (6 page)

LOVE ALL AROUND:
Me and my girls, Macy and Caitlin, in Victory Lane on Valentine’s Day.
Kevin Kane/WireImage/Getty Images

UNBELIEVABLE LOSS:
A week later in Rockingham, trying to make sense of it all.
Donald Miralle/Getty Images Sport/Getty Images

MY ANGEL:
Macy sitting in my office prior to my 1,000th NASCAR start.
Autostock

WINDING DOWN:
With Macy at the last race of my last full season, Miami 2009. Still have the hair!
Autostock

BEHIND THE WHEEL:
Strapped in and ready to go.
Jason Smith/Getty Images Sport/Getty Images

FAMILY AFFAIR:
In Daytona, brother-in-law Dave, DW, niece Amy, sister Connie, Dana’s daughter Camy, me, Macy, Darrell’s daughter Sarah, and niece Dana.
Autostock

ALL THE KIDS:
Mom with Bobby, Connie, Carolyn, Darrell, and Mike
Courtesy of the Waltrip Family

PART 3:
DAYTONA

CHAPTER 15
HELLO, DALE

T
he year 2000 started out rough for me. Happy New Year. Y2K, my butt. My dad died in my arms.
No
child should experience that. And my racing wasn’t going all that great, either. Although Dale had told me many times that if I were driving for him I’d be winning, the longer I heard it, the less likely it seemed it would ever occur.

Dale’s team was doing well. The part-time-behind-his-house hobby had become a full-time NASCAR operation. The little shop where I used to hang around while Dale was working on his Busch cars and we would shoot guns his guys called the Deer-Head Shop—bet you can’t guess why, can you? Antlers everywhere. The Deer-Head Shop had morphed into a factory that included the old building and a couple new ones next door. Just outside Mooresville, North Carolina, on what is now called Highway 3 in Dale’s honor, that compound became the headquarters of Dale Earnhardt, Inc.

Folks in NASCAR had their own name for what Dale built. They called it the Garage-Mahal. By 2000, DEI was running two NASCAR Cup Series teams and one Busch team out of this massive, ultra-modern facility in a rural part of North Carolina. And all of them were winning. Dale Junior, the two-time Busch Series champion, had moved up to Cup and was winning in his rookie season. Steve Park, Dale’s other Cup driver, had won too. I completely agreed with Dale that I could be winning if I were driving one of his cars. But it didn’t look like there was room for me, and another year was about to be over. It was September 2000, and I needed to make some decisions of my own about 2001. But man, I was frustrated. All these kids—first it was Gordon and Labonte, now Dale Junior and Park—showing up and getting these great rides and winning. Meanwhile, I just kept logging laps.

Nineteen-ninety-nine and 2000
were the two worst years of my career. My patience was wearing thin, that was for sure. In two years, I almost won a couple of races, but that was about it. I wasn’t consistently competitive. I didn’t like what I was doing.

The team I was driving for didn’t operate out of a factory like Dale’s. They just put the pieces together. Go down the street, buy a car. Go up the street, buy an engine. Then just bolt it all together. Anyone could have owned a team like that. Just buy parts and pieces, put them together, and go race. That’s what we did behind the house in Sherrills Ford. But that was the Busch Series, which was bush league. If you wanted to win in Cup, you had to do it like Dale’s team was doing: make everything.

As the 2000 season wound down, the owner of the car I was driving, Jim Smith, offered me a new contract to drive his car again the following year. There were some other possibilities out there as well. A couple of owners had interviewed me and shown interest in my plans for 2001. But none of that had firmed up yet. And none of those opportunities was remotely close to what Dale Earnhardt could offer me.

I always loved it when Dale would say, “You’d win in my car.”

And I would think: Well, make it happen!

It didn’t look like 2001 was a possibility. We were less than five months away from Daytona. You can’t build a team that quickly, and I knew it. Looked to me like I was going to be signing a contract with a team I knew it would be nearly impossible to win with.

“I don’t feel good about this, Buff,” I told my wife. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do. If I sign with the same team for 2001, I’ll feel like I’m giving up hope of finally winning races, just signing to have a job. And I don’t want to do that.”

But I made my living racing cars. That’s all I knew how to do. You know, the whole sitting-on-my-butt thing. I had a wife and a couple of kids, and I had to provide for them. Whatever I decided would be a compromise. My desire to win, from what I could see, would have to take a backseat to just making a living, and that made me sad. I never raced cars just to make a living. But it felt like that’s what I was going to have to do then.

The truth is this had been a pattern with me, just staying with a team for stability, I suppose. I wasn’t confident enough—didn’t believe in myself enough to take a chance by putting myself out on the market. I’d been taking the safe route—or what seemed to be the safest bet.

But I was over that. I didn’t want to just sign or settle. Not yet, anyway.

I was waiting around as long as I could, although I kept wondering why.

Tick, tick, tick. A lot of time passed and it didn’t appear that one of the top rides was going to be offered to me. They never had been. Why did I think one would be now? Time kept slipping away. And I kept losing races, feeling stuck. 0–450. 0–451. I don’t know how many exactly. One thing I did know, I wasn’t expecting the Hall of Fame to be knocking on my door anytime soon.

Maybe I wasn’t the most sought-after driver, but I was good enough that I had people calling me. I was better than most of the drivers who were available.

What was the answer? I was so confused.

My thinking about all that was interrupted by the ringing phone.

“Hello,” I answered.

It was Earnhardt. “Did you sign that contract?” he demanded in that familiar tone. I laughed to myself. He was always so direct.

“No, why?”

“Well, don’t,” Dale said. “I’m tired of Busch racing. Makes more sense for my company to have three Cup teams. And I’m gonna fly down to Atlanta today and tell NAPA that. I’m gonna see if they want to move up to Cup, and I’m gonna tell ’em I want you to drive. I’ll call you when I get back and tell you how it went.”

Just that quickly he hung up.

What just happened?

I don’t think I got another word in after “No, why?” It was just Dale being Dale after that, telling me what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. Just like he always did. And I loved it.

Okay.

That’s a call I’d been waiting for. But I damned sure didn’t see it coming. As soon as we hung up, I called Buffy and told her about Dale’s call. We were both ecstatic. We knew if this came true, it would be my best chance ever to win consistently, or even at all. Maybe my last chance.

I’d be on a multicar team. Multicar teams were just beginning to become a trend in NASCAR. Owners like Dale had figured out that the more cars you had under one roof, the more cost-effective it was. For example, while a fabricator was stamping out a part or a piece in the factory for one car, he could just simply stamp out a couple more for the other cars. So if it took twenty people to build one car, maybe it only took ten more to build a second or a third—and so on. The owner then could take the money saved on the stampers and spend it on research and development or on testing to improve the team’s performance.

That’s a basic lesson on the modern economics of NASCAR.

Driving for my friend Dale was the opportunity I needed. He was wanting to take me under his wing at the ripe old age of thirty-seven. He wanted to show people I could win in his car. While Dale and his business guy, Ty Norris, flew down to Atlanta to meet with the NAPA people, all I could do was wait and wonder: Is my life about to change? Could Dale talk those guys into this? I figured NAPA was in for a million or two on Dale’s Busch team. I knew a season with a high-profile NASCAR team like Dale’s would be way more than that. And time! Was there time to do this? If so, Dale would need to know immediately in order to build the cars and hire the people.

In my mind, this sounded like a real stretch. But this was Dale Earnhardt doing the stretching. Maybe he could pull it off.

I could picture Dale in a corporate boardroom. I’d never seen him in one, but I could definitely picture him there. I wondered how he was doing at NAPA. This may have been a job that only Dale Earnhardt could tackle. He was smart. He was respected. He had a plan. And when he got there, Ty later told me, Dale was simply amazing. After a few minutes of hi-how-are-you’s, Dale told the president of NAPA, “We came to talk to you guys about moving up to Cup racing with us next year.”

“Next year?” one of the NAPA guys asked. “Like five months from now? Can you be ready by Daytona?”

“Not only ready. Ready to win. And I want Michael Waltrip to drive for us.”

Ty wondered how it would go over. That pink-elephant thing, you know. He was wondering if they’d mention my record. But the NAPA folks didn’t seem to mind.

“Can you get him?” the NAPA president asked.

“Yes, we can get him.” Then Dale summarized, matter-of-factly laying out the deal: This is how it’s gonna work, this is what it’s gonna cost, and Michael Waltrip will drive. Then he slipped in on them at the end: “Oh, by the way, I need to know by Friday.”

“Which Friday, Dale?”

“This one,” Dale said. “The one in a couple days.”

And with that, Dale and Ty were out the door and headed back to Mooresville.

Mike Rearden, the motorsports manager at NAPA, told me later that when Dale and Ty left the room, the company president looked at him and said, “Well, Mike, you said we should be in Cup. Sounds like Earnhardt agrees with you. You have a couple of days to present your case to me and the board.”

On the plane back to North Carolina, Ty said he told Dale, “You didn’t give ’em many options there, boss.”

“There ain’t no options,” Dale said. “That’s the way it’s gotta work—or it won’t.”

When they landed, Ty called me and told me to meet Dale and him at DEI.

“You tell me, Ty. Tell me now. What happened?”

Ty told me to chill out. “It went good,” he said. “But Dale wants to share the details with you. Meet us at the shop in the trophy room at seven.”

I had been to DEI about a thousand times, but driving there that evening was different. My mind was in overdrive. I was thinking about what it would mean if this happened. Man, my daddy would have been so happy.

Dad was funny when he would talk about Dale. Darrell and I used to laugh at Dad. When we were at the track and Dale would drive by, every time Dad would say, “Boys, that damn Earnhardt is flying. I don’t think he’s even letting off in the turns.” Dad would say that no matter where we were.

Dale was good, but everybody had to let off the gas for most of the turns. Whether Dale was fast or not, it didn’t matter. He just looked fast to Dad.

And Mom had become a Big E fan too. She liked the fact that Dale and Teresa and Buffy and I were friends. She enjoyed hearing about the vacations we would take together. But Dale became a favorite of Mom’s the day after Dad died back in January when he drove out to Sherrills Ford just to hold Mom’s hand and tell her he was thinking about her. That was special to everyone in our whole family because it meant so much to Mom.

I was thinking, “If I go home and tell my momma I’m gonna drive for Dale Earnhardt, she’s gonna have a fit!”

And what about me? This was what I needed, and what I’d wanted for years. I couldn’t wait.

So as I pulled up to the Garage-Mahal, it felt different this time. Oh, did it look mighty! Is this where they’ll build my cars? I wondered. My cars, being built in a factory, not just being bolted together somewhere. It felt like a dream.

I went around to the back and up to Dale’s private entrance like I always did. Up the stairs and into a hallway that opened into the waiting room just outside Dale’s and Teresa’s offices. It also led to the trophy room.

The interior of the DEI headquarters was just as impressive as the exterior. Other than walking past a display of Dale’s trophies, you’d never know you were in the same building where they were building a bunch of race cars. The walk to the trophy room took you across a marble floor. The chairs were covered in fine leather. And I’d eaten there before too. The chef was world-class and he prepared health-conscious food. And they also had a mighty fine wine list.

When I walked in, there Dale sat, in the same place he always did, his favorite chair. When I said, “Hey,” the grin on his face got bigger.

“You ready to win some races?” he asked.

“Are we going racing?” I didn’t give him a chance to answer. “All right! This will be so cool!”

“Hold! Hold! Calm down there. NAPA didn’t commit yet. They need a few days.”

What!
I thought but didn’t say out loud. Don’t do that, you teaser. “A few days”? What’s “a few” to Dale?

Then Dale started explaining to me how the deal would work if NAPA were to commit. Like he needed to, I thought. It would be just like it was with the Wood boys. “Just tell me what I gotta do and—check, check, check.” You think I was going to sit there and negotiate with Dale Earnhardt?

But he seemed to be into telling me about the terms of the deal, like the length of the contract, how much he was going to pay me, what I had to do—all the things that Dale as the owner felt like he needed to explain to me.

In my mind all of that was just a formality until he said: “And we’ll know by Friday.”

What’s today? I asked myself. It’s Tuesday. Friday seems like forever. That’s three days of wandering around with my future hanging in the balance.

Would I have to take a ride just to make a living for my family? Or would I be able to drive a car I could win with? The frustrating part was that the decision would be made in Atlanta. All I could do now was pray. And hope.

But now I had hope.