Okay, I’ll admit… it doesn’t look good, but it’s not what you think. This week, Danny Lawrence, a former engine builder for Dale Earnhardt, joined Dale Earnhardt Jr. on his The Dale Jr Download podcast, and of course, he had tons of great stories and insight into what it was like to work closely with the late, great Dale Earnhardt Sr. from both a personal and professional standpoint.
And they got into a very interesting discussion about that famous photo of The Intimidator during a tech inspection ahead of a race somewhere, which pops up online every few months or so and Dale Jr. has actually shared it before:
Going through inspection.
😂😂😂😂 @ the ol mans left foot. pic.twitter.com/NRvwvydskN— Dale Earnhardt Jr. (@DaleJr) January 14, 2016
And while upon first glance, it definitely looks like he might be cheating, Danny explained that it was “nothing” compared to some of the stuff people used to do, and in fact, he wasn’t cheating at all:
“There’s a picture floating around of your dad with his foot underneath the front of the car, that’s nothing. People are like, ‘That’s how he won all of those races!'”
Honestly, it’s impressive that so many people think Dale Sr. could just lift a whole car with his one foot to simply tip the scales, and honestly, from the many stories I’ve heard about him, I could see that actually being the case…
But Jr. went onto explain that he was actually taking some measurements, not lifting the car at all… but he still loves the photo because he thinks it captures how smart his father really thought he was, and honestly, he’s an icon for that (and he was also right):
“That picture, I see it every now and then, maybe every six months, on social media, and that picture makes me think, I kind of do want people to think dad was smarter than the technical inspectors.
I kind of like… because he was, you know, he thought he was smarter than everybody else, and that’s an image of him, in his mind.”
But what he’s actually doing is much less malicious, and Jr. broke it all down, saying he used his shoelaces as a makeshift tape measure in order to size up his competition:
“But what he’s truly doing in that picture is, back in the 80s and the 90s, the front valence height on the car was critical to speed and how competitive your car was going to be. and he would walk around, and he wanted to, if he could, take a tape measure to every car out there on the grid, or in the garage.
But instead of doing that, he’d walk over and slide his foot under there and see what shoelace, because he had those racing shoes on that laced all the way up to the ankle, and he’d see what shoelace that valence hit.
And he would then walk off and go, well, that went up to the seventh shoelace, that’s a little higher than the last one, and that’s what he’s kind of doing in that picture, like, measuring the valence with his foot. That was kind of his way of seeing if he was where he needed to be and where the competition was out.”
It’s not exactly as wild as it looks, but it’s still slick, and brilliant, and probably contributed to his strategy when it came to winning a few of those 76 NASCAR Cup Series races and 7 championships during his 26-year career.
You can listen to the full conversation below.
The entire podcast episode is worth a listen, and you can check it out here:
