re: Earnhardt (Prime)

Son of a bitch. The July Daytona race always gets me a little. It was a core memory of my childhood, but damn… Michael Waltrip talking about it had me breaking down tonight.

The doc didn’t break a whole lot of new ground, but is easily the most well done Earnhardt piece ever.

Really hope its reception encourages Dale Jr to put other things in the works about different eras and drivers.

I forget how dominate Jeff Gordon was during Dale’s last years. Jeff won 40 races between ‘95 and ‘99. There’s no telling Dale’s ceiling if you take Jeff out of the equation.

I know all of jack shite about NASCAR…

Ep 1 and 2, I was kind of thinking Dale is kind of a POS…but man by ep 3 you were seeing the turnaround and it was setting you up for a gut punch. The father son stuff got me, it was a well done doc.

quote:

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There’s no telling Dale’s ceiling if you take Jeff out of the equation.

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Or how many less he might have if Tim Richmond, Davey Allison, and Alan Kulwicki had lived.

You were a Dale fan or a Jeff fan. F**k Jeff. Dale was the intimidator. He was the better driver. I watched Dale speed thru a massive multi car crash with an oil slick. With no a scratch to his car. No doubt he was an ultimate nascar driver. NASCAR hasn’t been the same since Dale died.

Melt.

I need to catch the one with Carl Edwards

He's had Kelley on a few times, also. Mostly as a co-host

He has one with Dale, Sr's brother Danny. Jr keeps asking about the immediate aftermath of the crash, at the hospital, etc., and Danny repeatedly answering "I don't remember".

He clearly did NOT want to talk about any of it.

I met Dale Earnhardt's pit crew at the Talladega 500 after Dale won the race. I was there with 2 good friends. We were in the infield drunk and partying. After the race was over I realized I had lost my car keys. Almost everyone had gone. A deputy sheriff kept telling us to leave while we were looking for my keys in the dirt.

We walked over to the pits and Dale's pit crew was still there and we asked them to hotwire my car (a 1970 Cutlass). They asked if I had a power steering lock. I said yes, and they laughed and said sure we will hotwire your car and then watch you drive around in circles.

We ended up hitchhiking home, and an attendant at the race track had told us when and where to go to pickup my car the next day. The next day we came back with a spare set of keys. We parked outside the open gate to the infield and walked in. The attendant there told us to go straight to my car, and to not drive on the racetrack. Well, we would have never thought of doing that if he hadn't warned us.

My car was a hot rod. We drove it approximately 100 mph around the tri-oval. Heading towards turns 3 and 4 I was accelerating, but decided not to go around those turns because they looked super steep and I was concerned that my suspension might not survive the turn. So I pulled down to the flat part of the track called the apron. We jumped out and bear crawled up to the top of the turn.

We decided we better leave before we got in trouble. On our way out the attendant was trying to flag us down. I punched it and went around him, dropped one of my friends off at his car, and we high tailed it out of there. We were lucky we didn't get caught. The race and everything that happened was a great experience.