Dale Earnhardt was a one-of-a-kind in every sense.
Both on and off the track, he exemplified his nickname “The Intimidator” and was every bit the bad*ss in real life that he was portrayed to be as a driver.
And his son Dale Earnhardt Jr. has told many stories about his father growing up, and will often throw some great ones out there on his podcast The Dale Jr. Download. This week, he shared a story about Dale Sr. that I’ve never heard before, which involves him flipping over a bulldozer completely by himself.
A fan asked if Dale Sr. had any ways to blow off steam, as Dale Jr. had told fans that he needed to “drink and smoke cigarettes” to calm him down when he wasn’t racing, which certainly sounds like the most efficient way to do it.
And while Dale Sr. did drink beer with his buddies, he really preferred to blow off stream by working the land on his property in Mooresville, North Carolina, which sat right behind the DEI headquarters:
“Dad did drink beer, but he wasn’t a smoker. He never smoked. What dad did was, he drank beer with his buddies, and he rode a bulldozer. He would go spend Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday moving dirt and shaping his land.
He had property and he loved to build a dam or clear a field, there was always a job and a thing to do. This property wasn’t making him money, but it was a project of his. Someting to piddle with.”
Which obviously required some pretty heavy equipment. And back in day, when his dad was still alive, Dale Jr. wrote a few columns for the Winston Cup Scene, many of which were about his dad. Dale Jr. recalled one in particular, which took him less than half an hour to pen had talked about “how great dad is.”
In that article, he also remembered coming hime from school one day when he was around 16 years old, driving his truck through the land to go see what his dad was up to. He found Sr. sitting on his bulldozer clearing some trees, as he often did, right in front of the log cabin he lived in.
But as Sr. pushed over a “giant freaking tree” (Jr.’s words), it pulled all of the roots of the ground with it and actually flipped over the massive bulldozer his dad was sitting on, where it landed on its side. Sr. popped right out from under it unscathed, but with an entirely new problem on his hands:
“I had just pulled down and stopped getting home from school, and I’m sitting there watching him do his work for like 5, 10 minutes. And as soon as he recognizes me or sees me, maybe he shuts it off, climbs down and we BS a little bit.
But he’s sitting there runnin’ this bulldozer, and all of a sudden it flips over and I jump out and run over there and he come out from under it. And he likes, ‘Hurry, get in the truck. Lets drive, we gotta go back to the farm. I gotta flip this thing over.’
Gas and all this stuff’s leaking out of this tractor. I thought ‘Great, he’s not hurt.'”
They drive to another part of the farm and get a different bulldozer that Sr. drives “wide open” (duh) to get back to the flipped bulldozer as quickly as possible.
Sr. then proceeds to flip it over entirely on his own, pretty quickly it sounds like, then jumps right back on “cranks it up and back to work” right away. Like I said, one-of-a-kind…
“He jumps in the truck and we drive on the back of the farm, and he gets another bulldozer. And he drives this bulldozer wide open about a quarter mile, maybe longer, to this spot and flips the other one over.
Jumps on it, cranks it up and back to work. And I’m like ‘Man, flipping a bulldozer is hard to do.’ And he got out, flipped it back over and just started back to work.”
You can watch Dale Jr. tell the story himself below, and I’d highly recommend doing so. It’s awesome:
