The shrieking siren parts the seas of people, and many stop and gawk at the unmarked SUV with its deeply tinted windows and flashing blue lights.
They cannot tell who is inside. If they could see him they would collapse around him, swarm him frighteningly, as so many walls of people did on Sunday mornings when he was transported by open golf cart to his prerace personal appearances at racetracks.
In the back seat, barely awake yet, in T-shirt, jeans and sunglasses, sits the real and unassuming version of the high-priced human commodity, the pop-culture icon with the brand name of Dale Earnhardt Jr.
He just as soon would like to be in bed back in his $1 million motor coach in the private, high-fenced, highly secure compound reserved for drivers and owners in the infield.
But this appearance is easy enough, relatively speaking. Michigan International Speedway is a traditional NASCAR track where fans by and large behave themselves.
“Here, everybody knows the deal,” he says. “Michigan, everybody knows the routine. They’ve been doing it for years.”
For real bedlam, “Mostly it’s the new places we go. You go to Kansas, or even Texas still, and, man (here he goes into his impression of a disc jockey, cheerleading on the p.a. system at a celebrity personal appearance), they’re in a fren-zeee! They can’t be-lieve it! They been waitin’ all year for this! And it’s here now! And they’re cra-zy!”
More bewildering and scary still are the appearances that have little to do with racing per se and a lot to do with America’s sweeping iconic perception of the wildfire image, the name that has transcended NASCAR more than his late father’s ever did.
“When we go to MTV deals or VH1 deals or anywhere in Hollywood or do any kind of talk show, it’s like another world,” Earnhardt says. “It’s not something I know much about. Not that it’s bad, or that I don’t like it. There’s just not the comfort level that you have here.
“This is like my living room, my bedroom, my backyard, everything. I’m really blind in those [other] deals. Jade [Gurss, his press agent and general aide de camp] has to remind me, `Man, you’re more popular than you imagine.’
“Because I’m always like, `Man, I’m not supposed to be here; I don’t feel like I belong here. I’m not at this level, man. Let’s get outta here, man.’
“And he’s like, `Dude, you just don’t know, man. Everybody wants you here. Everything’s cool.'”
The madness of it all sometimes translates into mirth for Earnhardt.
“One time in a crowd,” Gurss recalls, “I got knocked down to the ground. I mean, flat on my back in the middle of that crowd, and for a few moments I couldn’t even get up. He didn’t come back and try to help or anything. He just looked at me and started laughing.”
Maturation process
Shocking and dismal as the thought may be to NASCAR nation and American pop culture in general, Earnhardt is closing fast on age 30.
In most lives this is a bleak countdown, the first sense of aging, of youth lost.
But Earnhardt senses he is hurtling down the homestretch toward some blessed relief.
“I look forward to it,” he says, as if the next three months can’t pass fast enough for him. “I don’t know why, but I feel like it’ll take a lot of pressure off of me.”
Maybe the masses, the media and his peers among NASCAR drivers at last turn will their attention from what he’s going to be, could be, should be, to what he is.
“I think with the coming of maturity comes respect,” he says. “I want all of that I can get. . . .
“It’s funny when people refer to you as `this kid’ or `the kid.’ You hear that all these years, and you hear `Junior’ this and `Junior’ that.
“I’m looking forward to turning over that chapter in my life.”
And 30, which comes Oct. 10, may well bring another milestone in November. Here near the halfway point of his fifth season in the big time, he is a stronger contender than ever before to win his first Nextel Cup.
Heavy legacy
That prospect is mostly bright. But then again, there will be the inevitable extra baggage he already dreads. The comparisons, the questions, the references to . . .
“If and when I win a championship, it’ll be . . . I don’t know. I should just not even concern myself with it.
“Because I am his son, and I knew that coming in here. With my father dead or alive, it wouldn’t make any difference.”
He will be revisited by the enormousness of the burden that always begins with the written or spoken words “son of . . . “
Seven-time Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt. Seventy-six victories. The Man in Black. The Intimidator.
The shadow was long enough to make escape impossible, even before the elder Earnhardt was killed in the 2001 Daytona 500, leading the usually neutral-speaking NASCAR czar Bill France Jr. to say, “NASCAR has lost its greatest driver ever.”
After that, there was no one left to speak for the lineage but the surviving star of the family.
“I was always asked to talk about him,” Earnhardt says. “We told the same stories over and over and over. And it just kind of got old, you know? We did it over and over and over and over–how Dale Jr. was doing ever since the day his dad was killed. We ran it into the ground.”
Finally last off-season, he was feeling some relief, feeling “like my own man.” The fans’ grip on the “son of” aspect was loosening at last.
Then he won the 2004 Daytona 500, and the avalanche of comparison started anew.
“Everybody was like, `It’s been so many days and years since his dad was killed, so many days and years since his dad won here last.’
“And I’m like, `Why the numbers? What’s the point? What difference does it make that his dad won this race six years ago?’ Darrell Waltrip won it 15 years ago, and all those other people had their years.
“I swear, when I won that race, the emotion of winning that race and that day, and the people I was with, was mainly all I was feeling.
“There weren’t any memories. None of that stuff. I never thought about it the whole day.”
But in the aftermath, “Everybody wanted to talk about how it was connected to my dad in one way or another. And it was like, man, I don’t need those links and connections. It’s not necessary. We won the race. Write the story about the racing.”
Chicagoland Speedway is one place Earnhardt feels he can race without all the excess baggage. The track didn’t open to Cup racing until the summer after his father was killed.
“I hope we’ll definitely show up better there this year,” he says of Sunday’s fourth running of the Tropicana 400. “Last year we were really, really loose all day; we ended up wrecking the car.”
“[But now] I feel like we can go there and run good. It’s a good track, it’s a fun track, a lot like Texas, where we normally run pretty good.”
Up close and personal
The SUV stops suddenly where a half-dozen security guards wait at the gate to a fenced compound with hundreds of fans inside, having paid for the privilege of seeing Dale Earnhardt Jr. up close.
In a matter of seconds, in the swarm of security, he is whisked the 8 to 10 feet from the SUV into the compound–and still, thrust between the guards, there are the toy cars, caps, T-shirts, jackets fans hold out desperately, pleading for a signature.
His emergence onto the stage evokes a roar from within the compound, and from without, among the milling legions who know now who was in the vehicle with the sirens and flashing lights.
From the crowd, a question: “What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t driving cars?”
Earnhardt’s answer: “Probably working on them at some dealership. After I got out of high school, I worked at a dealership for 3 1/2 years.”
And there it is, his certification as Everyman, one who has labored in obscurity like them, is not above them, is from among them.
Except for the name that has been both his wings and his chains. Even if he remained a dealership mechanic today, he still would be Dale Earnhardt Jr., answering the opposite kind of questions: Why didn’t he race; why isn’t he at the pinnacle?
The appearance ends as suddenly as it began. The knot of white-shirted guards tightens around him again for the 10-second sweep back into the SUV and the doors close to the refrains of a woman’s voice:
“Just one picture! Just one picture!”
Competitive fire
What troubled him most during his first few seasons in Cup was not so much the great expectations as that he didn’t feel he was fulfilling them. He wasn’t winning enough, wasn’t running up front consistently, wasn’t contending for the championship his father almost personally had built into the primary goal of any NASCAR driver.
He and Jimmie Johnson are dueling atop the points standings, he just 27 behind Johnson, and they have three wins each, second only to Jeff Gordon’s four. But most of all, his Dale Earnhardt Inc. team has found the key to championships: getting the best finish possible out of a bad day when the car is incapable of winning.
“I used to look at our team as incomplete, inconsistent, incapable, hit-and-miss,” Earnhardt says. “Now I look at our team as solid, a standard, a mainstay up toward the front of the field, a good car capable of going everywhere and running good.”
He doesn’t worry about the standings because NASCAR’s new system this year will take the top 10 in points, bunch them up with only a 50-point differential between first place and 10th, and turn those drivers loose in a “championship chase,” a sort of playoff, for the final 10 races of the season.
“Being in the lead in points, all it is right now is bragging rights,” he says. “That’s it.”
At last, at least, he feels comfortable that he is living up to billing. “I feel cured in the sport,” he says, meaning seasoned. “I feel like a mainstay now. I feel long-term.”
And on his own, he is an icon.
– – –
163: Career starts by Dale Earnhardt Jr. in his fifth full Nextel Cup season. His first start was May 30, 1999, in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte. He finished 16th.
12: Career victories by the North Carolina-born driver, including three this season. His first win came April 2, 2000, in the DIRECTV 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.
45: Top-5 finishes by the driver of the No. 8 Budweiser Chevrolet. He has nine this season and 33 in the last 2 1/2 seasons.
42.9: Percentage of times Earnhardt has finished in the top 10. His 12 top-10s in the 17 races so far this season give him 70 for his 163-race career.
17.1: Millions of dollars he needs to pass his father in earnings. Dale Earnhardt won $41,742,384 in his 676 career starts; Junior has already won $24,663,639 in 163 starts.
