You’d never guess this reaction by the way he raced on the track…
This week, Dale Earnhardt Jr. had his childhood friend and longtime race car fabricator Brad Means on his Dale Jr. Download podcast to talk about their growing up together, sharing many great stories and rehashing some of their favorite childhood memories.
It’s pretty typical for stories about Dale Jr.s dad, the late, great Dale Earnhardt, to come up no matter who his guest is, and this episode was obviously no exception… and Dale told a great story I’ve never heard before. I believe the race he’s referencing here is the 1987 All-Star Race, when with eight laps to go, Dale and Bill Elliott were battling for the front spot, and Earnhardt pulled his legendary “Pass in the Grass” to win the race.
Dale Jr. would’ve been about 13 years old at the time, which makes sense when you hear the rest of the story. He recalled getting a t-shirt that read “Guess who ran into me today” airbrushed with his father’s #3 on it, thinking it was just a fun way to rep his dad. He ended up running into Bill Elliott while he had it on, but again, he didn’t think anything of it.
But there was hell to pay when his father saw the shirt, and made him take it off immediately, and he was very upset that his son was inadvertently rubbing in the fact that his dad won. For as aggressive as he was on the track, he was known as The Intimidator after all, it’s hard to imagine he was so different outside of the race car.
Dale said his dad was surprisingly humble when he wasn’t driving, and only thought of his on-field antics as “good, hard racing”:
“I do remember getting my a** busted by Dad once, and I think this was with you. Dad and Bill Elliott duked it out in the All-Star race, and there was, I kept seeing these shirts. And it was just a white T-shirt, and it had blue and yellow and red and gold marks. and it said, ‘Guess who ran into me today.’
I looked at those shirts and I went, ‘Oh man, that’s neat. I want one of them.’ I somehow had $20 to get one of them T-shirts, and I put that T-shirt on, get to the racetrack and there’s somebody airbrushing shirts. And I’m like hey, I wanna get the three airbrushed on my shirt. In my mind I’m thinking, now I’ve made the shirt dad‘s car. And guess who ran into me is Bill Elliott. We get done ****ing around on the dirt track and go back over to our dad‘s. My dad saw that shirt, he went through the roof, and that shirt came off and it disappeared.
He didn’t see it the way I saw it. He’s like, ‘Get that ***ing, my son‘s not gonna wear that s***.’ As much as he wanted to start that s*** on the race track, he didn’t believe in rubbing anybody’s nose in it off the track. He would always get interviewed after he run over somebody, ‘That’s just good, hard racing.'”
It’s just hard to wrap your head around, but I think Dale Sr. was an often-misunderstood character of sorts, so in a lot of ways, this doesn’t really surprise me.
I know Dale Jr. and his father had a pretty complicated relationship most of the time, and it’s not hard to understand why when you hear stories like this. Obviously, it’s funny to look back on now, but I imagine a young, teenaged Dale Jr. was mostly confused about his dad’s reaction to what he thought was a fun, nice gesture:
@dirtymomedia_Dale Earnhardt was NOT a fan of Jr.’s shirt – not even a little bit. 😬👕♬ original sound – Dirty Mo Media
I’d love to know if he still has the shirt somewhere, but it sounds like Dale Sr. made that thing disappear decades ago… seems like you can still find an original “guess who ran into me” shirt on Etsy though.
You can watch the full podcast below.
