Deep Reads: Chasing ghosts with Dale Earnhardt Jr.

16:24Kent Babb:In 1998, Junior got serious enough about racing that his dad gave him a shot to drive one of his cars in the Busch Series, essentially NASCAR's AAA League. Considering Junior's clearest talent was destroying these hyper-engineered machines, he had no idea why. The only advice Dale Sr. gave him? Don't lift, he told Junior, because success requires fearlessness. Cars are often separated by inches. Even as they try to avoid, or initiate, contact while approaching 200 miles an hour on turns with gravity-defying inclines. No matter the consequences, a good driver never lifts their foot off the accelerator.

17:04Kent Babb:Yes, sir. Junior, just 23, won seven Busch races in 1998 and six more the next year. He showed a familiarly aggressive style and a rare gift for feeling the air open up around his car. flying past competitors and, in 2000, into the big leagues. Dan Fee didn't win two cup races, one shy of his daddy.

17:34Kent Babb:Still, it took getting to victory lane for his dad to tell him he was proud. If Junior didn't win, Dale Sr. didn't show up. Junior was 26 when the 2001 season began. That year's Daytona 500, one of the most important events in motorsports, featured Junior and Senior starting 6th and 7th, right next to each other as they fired up their engines. Both were among the favorites to contend for the victory, with Dale Senior trying to win Daytona for the second time in four years. On the last lap, the Earnhardt's teammate, Michael Walshrup, was leading, and Junior was in second. That's when he saw his dad's car in his rear view.

18:16Kent Babb:but he wasn't trying to pass or wreck him in third place Earnhardt was blocking Sterling Marlin from a late surge protecting a win for his team

18:25Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I believe Dale Jr. and Dale Sr. both are doing all they can to help Michael make that happen

18:33Kent Babb:look at Earnhardt Sterling got into Earnhardt Jr. doesn't remember much about what came next after he and Waltrip crossed the finish line someone said something about a crash. Oh! Big trouble! Big wreck behind them! To the flag!

18:49Dale Earnhardt Jr.:Come on Mikey, you got it man! You got it! You got it! You got it! You got it! Park it! Oh! Yes! Oh my! I just hope Dave was okay. I guess he's alright, isn't he?

19:03Kent Babb:A golf cart took him and Danny Earnhardt, Junior's uncle and a member of Dale Sr.'s pit crew, to a van. Then a crowded hospital lobby, where he saw anguished faces and a curtain. He looked behind it and saw his dad, who'd been pronounced dead. Junior doesn't remember the trip back to Kannapolis either, or convening with extended family at his grandmother's house. Instead of processing what happened, he tried to be everyone's rock. No one saw him cry. A week after Daytona, he was at the track in Rockingham, acting as if nothing happened. Thousands of fans waved flags with Earnhardt's three on them, and 23 seconds after the green flag waved, Junior crashed into a wall.

19:47Kent Babb:It isn't grief he remembers feeling. It's numbness, he told me.

19:51Dale Earnhardt Jr.:After my dad died, I didn't care if I died. And, you know, it's silly, but I didn't have a family, I didn't have a wife. I was thinking, you know, I didn't want it to happen, but I was like, I was just like, I don't give a f*** what happens. The next minute I could care less.

20:16Kent Babb:Two months later, during a practice at Fontana, he crashed again.

20:20Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I had a crash in practice. and I was, during that experience of crashing in practice, I said, you know, I kind of had this thought.

20:34Kent Babb:He says it took that wreck to, quote, get my s*** together and focus on not dying. But there were other stresses back home. Dale Sr.'s last will and testament hadn't been updated since 1992, when Kelly and Junior were 20 and 18. It transferred the entirety of his estate, the race team, the property, nearly two dozen trademarks, to Dale Sr.'s third wife, Teresa, who he'd married after divorcing Junior's and Kelly's mother. Junior's car and his number eight now belonged to his stepmother. Kelly says she and Dale were never invited to look through sentimental possessions, childhood items, or even family photos.

21:13Kent Babb:Teresa rejected their input, she says, when planning Earnhardt's funeral or choosing a gravesite. His final resting place is less than a mile off State Route 3, behind a tall screen fence, down a dirt road, protected by cameras and more fencing. Not far from a pond is a walkway that leads to a mausoleum with Earnhardt stamped in gold. Kelly says Teresa invited her and Junior to see it after their dad's internment. Kelly hasn't been back. She says it's understood that she and her brother are unwelcome. She says of Teresa, quote, quote, she's so extreme that we might get arrested. I tried to reach Teresa Earnhardt directly, but couldn't.

21:54Kent Babb:Her lawyers declined my interview requests and did not respond to a question about whether Earnhardt's children actually are forbidden from visiting their dad's grave. Junior, for his part, said he, quote, might have gone back by himself once. Fueled by some combination of liquid courage and Earnhardt defiance, he admits.

22:13Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I might have drove over there on my own one day, back when I could get back in there, just to sit and think for a minute.

22:23Kent Babb:That was at least 20 years ago, he says. Around the same time, NASCAR was issuing sweeping changes in the wake of Earnhardt's death. Drivers complained about having to wear head and neck restraints, and cars had to be outfitted with stronger roll bars and carbon fiber seats. Speedway walls were updated with upgraded barriers. that dissipated energy during a collision. Cars were expensive enough before the changes, but by 2002, teams were cutting full shells off car bodies to replace them with newly mandated materials. Junior hated the idea of sending those shells to the scrapyard, so whenever he wrecked, he asked Sonny to tow the car home and dump it in the yard.

23:03Kent Babb:Other teams offered their cars too, and the collection grew. Daryl Waltrip's number 11, covered in leaves and twigs. Mike Wallace is number 52, resting among the skinny trees. Kevin Harvick's number 29, resting in peace behind Montoya's. There is, noticeably, nothing ever driven or owned by Dale Sr. Teresa controls those things too, and Kelly suspects that's the real reason her brother did this.

23:31Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I mean, there's just this longing to put pieces together of things that you just didn't have access to or weren't readily shared and talked about and stuff like that, even at family gatherings and things like that. Junior shrugs at that theory, but it's hard to deny what the assemblage amounts to,

23:54Kent Babb:a graveyard he doesn't have to sneak into. Each car body is a rusting monument, just five miles from his dad's more traditional memorial, to stories and recollections and moments in time. He built a place he can visit whenever he wants, for as long as he'd like, thinking about things such as the oddities of grief and how it leads a son to gather up twisted metal because it's one of the only ways to feel close to his dad.

24:46Kent Babb:Junior dreaded turning 40, in part because that's when he thought people naturally slow down. Some drivers go so far as suggesting that having kids makes you two-tenths of a second slower. But considering there's no evidence for this, It's just a convenient excuse for these Peter Pans to put off responsibilities while they keep chasing each other for a living.

25:07Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I feel a little bit lost and I feel a little bit like I don't matter if there's not something happening that I'm excited about. I feel like when I don't have that thing to look forward to, I'm like, where's my purpose? Where's life's purpose?

25:32Kent Babb:When he was in his 20s and early 30s, nobody staved off adulthood quite like Junior. Before the graveyard, he had Sonny build a 1 ,000-square-foot treehouse on his land, which he calls Dirty Moe Acres. He added a paintball course and a small herd of bison. A bit farther down the hill, he started dreaming up plans for the town of Whiskey River. Quote, We needed a place to party, Sonny says of Junior's bachelor paradise. specifically one that, unlike the local bars, had no last call. At Junior's direction, Sonny brought in three 18-wheelers' worth of reclaimed Kannapolis timber and spent nine months constructing an Old West main drag.

26:16Kent Babb:Barbershop, mercantile, post office. The hub was a saloon, naturally, across the street from a church and the jail.

26:23Dale Earnhardt Jr.:When we partied, we didn't start until 10 or 11 o 'clock at night. Dang. And then you watch the sun come up. You'd be sitting out here on the porch watching the sun come up. Many times. I believe that.

26:33Kent Babb:While sunny built, Junior kept the pedal down. Four months after his dad's death at Daytona, Junior dominated the same track to win the Pepsi 400. Then the Daytona 500 itself three years later. This cemented him as NASCAR's most beloved figure, named the sport's most popular driver for the first time in 2003. Nobody else won the award for 15 years. Budweiser was paying$1 million per race to sponsor Junior's red No. 8 Chevy, which, like his dad's black Goodwrench car, was becoming inextricably sewn into the fabric of Americana. It was Junior, after all, who'd won Dover 12 days after the terrorist attacks of 9-11, and then circled the mile-long oval with an American flag dancing outside his window.

27:21Kent Babb:He was, like his dad, a perfectly imperfect brand ambassador. Relatable, sure. But also the guy who fired up his car at Pocono with a gash on his head after a drunken swan dive into the shallow end of a pool. Who occasionally started his own engine with a breakfast bud and a lung dart. Who once scoured his house for anything carbonated because he wanted the hot tub to have more bubbles. at his 30th birthday party his crew rented out an irish pub in mooresville they closed it down a maryland monroe look-alike saying happy birthday and somehow a few of them wound up in a boxing ring where a professional bull rider gave junior a black eye refusing to grow up 30 wound up being the age he stopped winning

28:11Kent Babb:junior blew off post-race analysis meetings to play madden in his bus and had so much beer delivered to him that the distributor accused him of reselling it his fans ignored the fact that over a 108 race stretch he won just three times he withdrew sparred with reporters told girlfriends that he was never settling down yet people were buying so much merchandise, companies so keen on sponsoring him, that Junior averaged about$20 million in yearly earnings. He made a cameo in Will Ferrell's Talladega Nights, flew to Monaco for dinner with Jay-Z and Beyonce before appearing in a music video, traveled a nearby Concord, North Carolina in his private helicopter to race NBA legend Shaquille O 'Neal in a made-for-TV spectacle.

28:59On the flight back to Mooresville, he looked through the window at a field below.

29:04Kent Babb:Mike Davis, his longtime road manager and branding specialist, remembered the moment when they flew over his father's off-limits gravesite. We would have been coming back. The trajectory from Concord Speedway, where it was, to Dale's house, would have put us going right over DEI. And I just remember him going, hey, there's Daddy. And I'm looking over at that garden, and I'm like, what? And I remember him saying that. In 2007, Kelly and Junior got tired of working for a company their father started but was now controlled by their stepmom. They announced they were starting their own racing team, JR Motorsports, and leaving behind Junior's famed number eight Bud car.

29:48Kent Babb:When Junior won in Brooklyn, Michigan in 2008, his first victory in two years, it was in a number 88 owned by Rick Hendrick and sponsored by Amp, and energy drink. He wouldn't win again for four more years. In 2012, he crashed during a tire test at Kansas, leaving him with the first of several concussions that would force him to miss starts for the first time. His reaction time and peripheral vision weren't sharp, and he was experiencing balance problems that, because junior is junior, he measured in beer. Quote, small headache, he wrote in his phone's notes app, which became the basis of Racing to the Finish, his 2018 memoir, quote, Drunk, One Beer Feeling.

30:33Kent Babb:Another time he wrote, quote, I got out of the car and felt one or two beers drunk. Quote, Felt lazy and one beer drunk rest of the day. Before the 2014 season, Steve LaTarte had become as much life coach as crew chief. Because it wasn't age that was slowing Junior down. It was immaturity. brain injuries, and increasing self-doubt. That year at Talladega Super Speedway, where Dale Sr. won ten times, Junior went into the pits before stomping the accelerator in an attempt to make up time. Then, up ahead, he saw a massive crash unfolding. He did the one thing Daddy told him he couldn't. Junior lifted.

31:15Kent Babb:And the worst part? There was no crash. He'd avoided a collision that existed only in his imagination.

31:23Dale Earnhardt Jr.:My team was like, what was that? I couldn't really hide what I had done from my team. They knew, they watched it. And so that was when I was like, oh, I wonder if I'm going to do this a whole lot longer.

31:37Kent Babb:With LaTarte in his ear, Junior, 39, won four races in 2014. That October, Kelly and Junior's girlfriend, Amy Ryman, threw him a blowout party for his 40th. the band 21 pilots played kid rock mingled and the night came alive out in junior's woods everybody congregated in the saloon at whiskey river drinking and singing and pounding the keys of an old red piano at some point long before sunrise the guest noticed the birthday boy was gone having slipped quietly into the night after walking past a painting of an aging cowboy

32:25Kent Babb:My dad, like juniors, is a frequent subject of my dreams. He is, as I remember, beaten down and resentful, frizzy gray hair, knuckles swollen with rheumatoid arthritis and flecked with paint. He's frozen in time, even as my 20s and 30s have come and gone. Eight years ago, I became a father myself. I want to know more about the old band and why I broke up. To tell my two daughters about him. To answer questions about him, and therefore myself. The dreams often end with me feeling guilty. He's at home, surrounded by guitars he rarely plays. But not wanting to bother him, I just haven't called. I explained this to Junior.

33:11Dale Earnhardt Jr.:Tritza said something really interesting one day, very recently after he passed away. She said, I have to remember that when I'm missing Dale, it's just a selfish thought because I want him here for me. I want him here for me. I always kind of kept that in the back of my mind, and it made me try not to be selfish about it.

33:41Kent Babb:Once he accepted this, he realized that there's nothing selfish about grief. So he stopped caring about what anybody else thought and tried to think of new ways to connect. These days, people close to Junior joke that if you're up late trying to score some obscure piece of Dale Sr. memorabilia on eBay and keep getting outbid, it's probably Junior who's outbidding you. Indeed, the last username you want to see in an auction history is DMA7488, who has bought and sold more than 1 ,000 items since 2013. And with an estimated net worth of$300 million, isn't about losing. Vintage racing hats, early Dale Senior shirts, scale models of cars his daddy once drove.

34:27Kent Babb:Most sellers have no idea it's Junior, but one figured it out. Junior bought so many of the seller's die-cast cars that the two started emailing, and they recently spent an hour on the phone discussing the details of a custom 1976 No. 8 Chevy, the first car Dale Sr. raced at Daytona. His phone is a portal, taking him to racing fan sites to look over photographs Junior has never seen. Pictures of the icon or the ghost? That's not the objective. It's the man. Junior says he has a dozen photo streams, organized by chapters of his dad's life. There, in Dad's 70s Sportsman, is a bushy-haired kid whose car is sponsored by a construction company.

35:11Here, in 1980-81, is a young man toasting victory with a Coke cup.

35:18Kent Babb:Quote, what hotel did they stay in? Junior wrote on social media alongside a black and white picture of the actual Chevy Nova his dad drove. Did they eat at any local restaurants? Who all went down there with him? Was he nervous? I want to time travel. These folders are precious, to be sure. But there's one he rarely shows anyone. Just Dad? Contains photos of Dale Sr. lounging at home or tinkering in a shop. Junior shows me a picture of his daddy at sunset. that familiar profile backlit as a fishing line drops into Lake Norman. Junior's smiling. He says, just being a person. In 2015, the portal took him to 18th century Bavaria, where Johann Ehrenhardt Sr.

36:06Kent Babb:and his son boarded a passenger ship bound for Philadelphia. Two decades later, Johann Jr. would be granted a tract of farmland in the British colony of Carolina. There, he would turn over the same dirt where, much later, his descendants would plant seeds and play games and, starting with Junior's grandfather, lay rubber. Junior was so moved that, standing next to Amy in the ancient chapel where the Ehrenharts once worshipped, he dropped to a knee and proposed marriage. He was 40 and engaged, two things he once believed would slow him down. But he won three times in 2015, after reaching victory lane just eight times in his 30s.

36:45Kent Babb:The next season, he finished second in three of his first eight races. Then his concussion symptoms returned. There were no horrific crashes, just dozens of minor ones, each jostling his neck and head. He struggled to tie shoelaces and buckle a belt, and his reaction time and vision had dulled. Quote, angry for no reason, he wrote in his notes app. He told no one, not even new wife Amy. Quote, close to puking, he wrote later. seems to be getting worse. He pledged to donate his brain and was ruled out for the final 18 races of 2016. During his time off, he took interest in a new project, actually hosting his own podcast.

37:32Kent Babb:His plan was to interview racing buddies and the sports pioneers, and soon Dirty Moe Acres was adding a dedicated studio. As time passed, Junior noticed that his questions and guests seemed to follow a trend.

37:45Dale Earnhardt Jr.:In about six out of 10 podcasts I do with a guest, I'm usually apologizing at some point for some, you know, for not being more self-aware, not being a better kid.

37:56Kent Babb:Well, that was clearly some, like, psychological, like, meaningfulness with Tony Sr. just now.

38:00Dale Earnhardt Jr.:And so that would be great with that, right? I would love to say, hey, you know what? When I pissed you off that day, I get it. You know?

38:10Kent Babb:Never got to do, like, the get, like, bourbon drunk and, like, you know, when you're, like, equals. You know, like that's, I mean, I'm over-identifying here. No, that's it. We never got to sit down, drink a couple beers, and bull****. Yeah, like I'm a dad, you're a dad. Hey, like let's talk about, man, how stupid I was when I was like 17.

38:31Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I think you're probably the same. We're sort of that part of our lives where we're sort of reconciling with our past.

38:38Kent Babb:And we, like so many men who have lost their fathers, or attempting to understand it, if not make peace with it, before time runs out. After my dad died, I felt an urgency to accomplish every goal and live as much as possible before age 51. I needed to be established in my career, to have started a family, to see the world in what felt like a truncated time. Even as I notched those things, I wondered what my dad would have thought. You never stop wanting to impress your parents, even after they're gone. There's a longing to speak as equals. But when all you have are memories, yours and those held by others, you protect them.

39:19Kent Babb:Concussions were now threatening Junior's long-term brain circuitry. And after the 2017 season, he retired. When he spun out at Daytona, after the front of Kyle Busch's car sent Junior's careening into a wall, that was it. However much time he had left, he didn't want to spend it in pursuit of more wins. He wanted closure. Junior had traditionally avoided conversations about his dad's death, partly because he didn't remember much about that day. Now armed with a microphone, he interviewed guests about the things they remembered, trying to bring a blurry picture into focus. Mike Helton, the NASCAR president in 2001, described the moments before his announcement that Earnhardt was gone.

40:01I said, you know, we just lost the greatest driver we've ever had.

40:06Dale Earnhardt Jr.:What am I supposed to say? And I think it was Brian or Paul Brooks both at the same time stepped in and said, just say that, you know, just say we lost him.

40:13Kent Babb:Then came Kenny Schrader, who, after peeking into Earnhardt's car window after the wreck, frantically waved for emergency personnel. Schrader had never revealed what he had seen, and Junior didn't want to do so on the podcast. Instead, he wanted to read Schrader something.

40:30Dale Earnhardt Jr.:You've been a great friend to me. You're one of only a few to see the darkest moment from my dad. that you have intimate knowledge of those moments. You are a keeper of that delicate information. It makes me feel close to you, Kenny. I feel pain for you to have to carry that memory, but you carry it for me, you carry it for Kelly, Dad's family, you carry it for anyone who's ever cheered for him. It's a secret that you'll keep to your last breath. Kenny, I know you might sometimes wish you weren't the one, but I'm glad it was you.

41:04Kent Babb:And Sterling Marlin, whose collision with Earnhardt had preceded the crash and, in the weeks afterward, spurred death threats.

41:10Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I just hope that you've had, I hope that you've carried no problems or carried no sliver of guilt or any kind of thing going forward with that, because I haven't, I've always thought the world of you.

41:27Kent Babb:Junior turned 46, and age as grandfather Ralph had died before reaching, and kept asking questions.

41:33Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I want to learn who this guy was, and how he evolved, and what were some of the not-so-great things about him.

41:44Kent Babb:So Junior and Kelly asked their mother, Brenda, why she and Dale Sr. had divorced. He was addicted to racing, yes, but there was also a clear avoidance of responsibility. His own father's fatal heart attack had shaken him, kicking off a few years of emotional instability and financial distress. Rather than confront his own grief, he distracted himself, driving, tinkering, or disappearing into the woods. Hank Parker Sr., a pro fisherman and one of Dale Sr.'s closest friends, came on to tell Junior about one of their hunting trips. As they were waiting for a deer, Parker's son called, and Parker told his boy he loved him.

42:23Kent Babb:Dale Sr. looked jealous. Your dad looked at me and he said, I don't know how to love my kid like you love your kid.

42:32Dale Earnhardt Jr.:And I said, well, we're different, Dale. We're different. You love him just as much as I love Hank Jr. You just don't know how to express it. And he said, well, you know, I'm in broken marriages and I'm not married to the mom and it's hard. I said you just have to let go you are who you are and I know how much you love your kids you just have a hard time expressing it and he never was able to express to you how much he loved you he never was able and you always felt like he loved you when you won and he didn't when you didn't win right and I could tell that and I've always wanted somehow to get you and just grab a hold of your shoulders and tell you how hurt he was that he did not know how to express his love to you and and he teared up and for biggie the intimidator just he and i sitting in the living room to share that with me showed me how much how tight we were at heart as friends yeah But it also showed me a side of him that was sad because he really wanted to have the same relationship.

43:47Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I'm outgoing. I'm free to talk. And I'm not intimidated to say I love you. All that didn't fit his demeanor. But it was in his heart. I said, oh, you love him just as much. You just don't know how to express it. Dang. And that was heartfelt. felt. I'd have loved to have heard that story a long time ago.

44:15Kent Babb:Last year, Junior's longtime crew chief, Tony Urie Sr., was his guest. It was the same day JR Motorsports announced that after Teresa Earnhardt let the trademark expire on the old number eight bud car, Kelly and Junior had bought it back. He and Urie were talking about Dale Sr.'s fateful decision so many years ago to put Junior, after all those wrecks and so many arguments, into one of his cars. You knew he wasn't happy, but he let you know he wasn't happy. Urie said, Dale Sr. wasn't sure Junior even wanted to race.

44:47Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I said, Dale, they're kids. Put him in it. Spend your money on him. Quit spending it on other people's kids. We'll go see. I said, we'll know in a year. I said, we'll know in a year if he's got it or not.

45:08Kent Babb:It's September 2024, the end of summer, sunset on a humid Friday. Junior is 49. Since retiring from full-time racing, he does one or two tracks a year. This time is Bristol Motor Speedway, where in 1979, Dale Sr. got his first win. Junior won't say it, but everyone knows this is his last NASCAR race. There's something poetic about a circle closing here. At the precise moment a new rotation begins, Junior and Amy's two young daughters, six-year-old Isla and three-year-old Nicole, are here on pit road, smelling the singed rubber and hearing the air guns as Daddy stands next to his car. He picks up Nicole and points toward the speedway lights, then his blue number 88 car.

45:57Dale Earnhardt Jr.:I guess that's why I'm still driving, that is, they'll like to see if it might kind of register with my girls that I did this, that I do this, that this is what our family does, this is what our family's about, and they'll see pictures of Pavard Dale.

46:13Kent Babb:Junior kisses Amy and high-fives Isla. Then he climbs in and buckles his head and neck restraint. Junior knows it won't be long before his girls start asking about the man they see in so many pictures, eyes hidden by sunglasses, usually looking fearsome. That'll be a good day, he says, to ride over to Kannapolis and, because they can't visit the grave, show them the statue. It belongs to everybody, he'll explain, because the Intimidator was everybody's. But Papa Dale, the man Junior has spent the past decade getting to know, he's theirs. And the two little girls with strawberry hair don't have to share him.

46:50Dale Earnhardt Jr.:he was this guy and he did this thing and then he died and dad did that thing too i hope you know that one day they go hey dad uh tell me about you know daytona yeah you know or tell me about uh winning the winning the daytona 500 in 2004 or tell me about going to victory lane with your dad when you were a kid what was that like you know i want them to get to a point to where they're asking me about that part of my life and it may take some time but i'm not pushing or rushing it because there's a lot to talk about as i wrote this story i reached out to my dad's

47:40Kent Babb:old bandmates to ask about the man I never got to meet. Before he was my dad, they said, Michael was a prankster who'd do anything for a laugh. The band toured the East Coast, opening for the Doobie Brothers and the Allman Brothers, and a disagreement with Ted Nugent's road crew nearly led to an onstage brawl, lead singer Jeff Logan told me. Logan and Philip Flip Myers, the band's drummer, disagree on why things eventually fell apart. Too little money, Jeff says. Creative differences with legendary producer Alan Toussaint, Flip says. They recorded a second album that was never released. Quote, We were damn close to breaking through, says Flip, who's 76.

48:24Kent Babb:I think about it every day. Not long after we spoke, a package from Jeff arrived. An eight-track of High Cotton's first record, a remastered CD, a half-dozen pictures of a man in his early 20s, lively and groovy. I handed the packet to Lila and Lucy, my daughters. The guy with the dark hair flowing from beneath the cowboy hat, that's Grandpa Michael.

48:58Kent Babb:That day in Bristol, Junior finishes 7th and climbs out of his car. Someone hands him a water on pit road, and he drains it and asks for a beer. Fans line a walkway, yelling for an Earnhardt one last time, and drivers walk over for high fives and hugs. Junior empties the one can so somebody brings out a cooler. He reaches in and slips another bud, select, into a koozie. This was a race, sure. It was also a goodbye, the kind drivers used to not get. Junior changes out of his fire suit and into a t-shirt and jeans, opening a third beer as he walks over to mingle with fans. A staffer hands Junior his glasses, and the lines ripple across his cheeks as he smiles for selfies.

49:42Kent Babb:It's nearly midnight when Amy and several friends join, another party just getting started. I ask Junior about the podcast guests he wants most, the one he can never have. But if he could, what would be his first question? What is it he wants to ask his father? He pauses, thinking about it, and smiles. How'd I do, he says.

50:13Kent Babb:Last October, just three weeks after Bristol, Junior woke up into what felt like a dream. His dad wasn't in this one. In fact, the visit stopped around the time Junior turned 49. Instead, he was in a beach house in the Lowcountry. A wife and two daughters next to him in bed. it was his 50th birthday he made it reaching an age his daddy never did the last person to ever pass the great dale earnhardt the family spent a lazy day on the coast just amy and my girls he says they went to a local joint with a balcony and kelly venmoed amy to buy her little brother a drink the four of them sat there for hours all junior wanted just feeling the breeze and listening to his girls for as long as he could.

51:18Kent Babb:This story was reported, written, and read by me, and edited by Joe Tone and Matt Rennie. Audio was produced by Bishop Sand.

51:52Dale Earnhardt Jr.:We'll see you next time.

51:59Dale Earnhardt Jr.:or in the app.