I think the real reason he hid it was because he was afraid of his dad… and I don’t blame him one bit.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. has spoken before on his various podcasts about how he used to be a hardcore smoker, though a lot of people didn’t know because he went out of his way to try and hide it, and it sounds like he did a pretty good job at it. Even his wife, Amy, was surprised to learn that about him, because she started out on his interior design team for his house and had no clue until they all met out a dinner and she saw him smoking in a bar.
She explained during an episode of their Bless Your Hardt podcast that Jr. nor his house really smelled like smoke, though Jr. has previously admitted that for 15-years he smoked a pack-and-a-half-a-day, but he had quite an elaborate set up to vent the smoke out of his basement. He also said that he would light one up, start playing his video game and let it burn out, so he was really going through them fast, which would eventually lead to the ashtray catching on fire:
“The only time I smoked in the house was downstairs in the basement drinking, which was in the house. I played video games all day, and I had a fan cut into the wall and a hose ran to the exterior of the house, kind of like a vent for a dryer. And so I’d flip that fan on, and I’d set the ashtray right next to the fan.
And I had one of the ashtrays where you could flip it, and it would drop everything into the can underneath. And so I’d sit there and have a cigarette, I’d smoke racing online. I mean, I would smoke one after the other, over and over. But I would light the cigarette, take drag or two, then run a race and then the cigarette would be burnt out by time I was done.
And so I was going through all these cigarettes not really even smoking them. I would have so many butts in this ashtray that it would catch on fire, and I’d have to put out water in it to stop it. It was a hazard, it was is crazy.”
When he was out on the road for races, Jr. managed to vent his tour bus so the smoke wouldn’t make it all smell, which meant it would go straight over to fellow driver Matt Kenseth’s bus, who eventually had to put a stop to it:
“And we were at the race track, I had this little fan, so I had this couch on the interior the bus and I’m watching TV, and there’s these windows right next to the couch and I could I could crank them open. And they were just about 5 inches tall and they would open up at an angle.
I’d lay a little fan just a little square fan right there and put the ashtray on top of the couch and it sucked the smoke right out the window, and so that’s how I kept the bus from stinking. But Matt Kenseth parked right next to me… I hid it from everybody, and Matt comes over to me one day, he goes, ‘You need to quit smoking out of that bus, man.’
And I mean, he would know every time I fired one up, cause smoke would be pouring out the damn side of the bus when he was sitting there. I didn’t give a s***, I just hid it from everybody because I thought it was bad for a driver to be thought of as a smoker. But I mean, Dick Trickle did it. And my dad hated smoking, he wouldn’t have approved of it, but eventually I just quit. I tried to quit a lot of different times, and finally got it to stick.”
After he got over the two month mark of quitting for good, Jr. says he actually started to hate the smell of smoke, and he’s never had the desire to pick it back up:
“And once I quit, the funniest thing happened… like, I would be around it at a restaurant when I was a smoker and not really think that much of it. I didn’t think it stunk, I didn’t think it smelled strong or bad or anything like that. And if somebody was a block away from me, I couldn’t smell it.
And as soon as I quit smoking cigarettes, the smell of it instantly became disgusting. Once I got over the hump, it took me about two months, and when I finally got over that hump, the actual smell of it made me disgusted. And I didn’t wanna be near it. I could smell a cigarette from like a block away. We’d be in Key West and I’m like, who the hell is smell smoking?
I’m like, it feels like right here and it would be somebody walking in front of us, you know, half a block away and the wind is blowing it towards us. I’m like damn, that’s strong, let’s go left on this next street and get away from them.”
It’s pretty funny to think that even his own dad couldn’t scare him to stop… it was his bus neighbor Matt Kenseth who couldn’t take the direct hit of smoke from the makeshift vent Jr. came up with to keep everyone else inside of his bus happy.
And actually, all of his tricks worked pretty well, because no one really knew he smoked, or at least not as much as he did, for a really long time.
You can see the full video below.
