Junior, On The Move

It’s the day after Christmas and Dale Earnhardt Jr. and three friends embark on a road trip—one of those journeys you take when you’re 27, wealthy, single, and anxious to kick around for a few days.

Another friend, a 21-year-old aspiring racer, is ready to make a career move, relocating from Buffalo to the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, and Junior and company head north in a red truck borrowed from Dale Earnhardt Chevrolet. They’ll lend a hand to their New York buddy, and, while they’re at it, live it up a little before they return to North Carolina.

“We got just past Greensboro (North Carolina) and turned off the interstate and just followed the compass from there on out, never got on another four-lane road,” says Earnhardt. “It was pretty cool going through all those backroads. We went to Washington, D.C., and took our picture in front of the White House and in front of several of the monuments. We went through Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and saw the battlefields, but it was about two in the morning so it was kind of hard to see what was going on. We had a good time, just kind of messed around. It took us 22 hours to get up there because we were fiddling around all day and all night.”

Road trips have become prized therapy for Earnhardt, mainly because they’re not at all complicated. He and some buddies will simply hop into a car and drive somewhere. Usually they’ll head to a place that doesn’t have a local racetrack and—here’s the key—where the locals don’t follow racing. It’s not so much what the trips offer as what they don’t offer: no public appearances to worry about, no strict schedules to adhere to, no one in your face all the time wanting you to do this or that or go there. “It’s been more fun and beneficial for me when I do get time off to get totally away from it, to just go somewhere and get out of my element altogether,” says Earnhardt.

So on the way back from Buffalo the week after Christmas, Earnhardt and his buddies detour a little west, going through Ohio. Not exactly a place to get away from racing, given the 50 or so racetracks that dot the Ohio landscape, but a diversion nonetheless.

“We stopped at a bar and spent the night and had a good time,” Earnhardt says. “It was a lot of fun. It was kind of cool just to get away and be normal for a while. That was definitely a reality check to get you pumped up about the year and get you back into life.”

Eye of the Storm

Taking a road trip and relaxing is one of those requisite life functions when you’re suddenly the face of an entire sport and the whole world wants a piece of your time. Or when your new book, “Driver #8,” is on the New York Times bestseller list.

If we peep into Earnhardt’s life for a glimpse of how hectic and demanding it is to always be in the public eye, then it’s easy to see why something so innocent as a road trip, nothing more than an escape into a life resembling normalcy, is so valuable.

Earnhardt’s sister, Kelley, and his publicist, Jade Gurss, are charged with the task of making sense and order of Earnhardt’s professional life.

“It’s like a big, giant jigsaw puzzle,” says Gurss, who co-authored “Driver #8.” “You have a lot of pieces that are strewn all over the place and the challenge is to get them to fit in the best way possible. If he were to do all of the interviews or all of the appearances that are requested, he would be working 24 hours, seven days a week. In the 10 days at Daytona, he did almost 95 interviews and nearly a dozen different sponsor appearances or functions, plus one massive autograph session for his new book.”

This whirlwind of attention has surrounded Earnhardt since he took the Busch Series by storm and won back-to-back titles in ’98 and ’99. Since moving up to Winston Cup in 2000, when he promptly won two races and two poles, the intensity has increased as Earnhardt has almost single-handedly redefined stock car stardom, standing before people in places previously outside the NASCAR reach.

“We’ve been in a unique situation to go to different places and show people a little bit about NASCAR,” says Earnhardt. “I might not represent the average mold for a NASCAR driver, but we were able to go to certain areas and certain people throughout the country, especially toward the West Coast last year, with some of the articles and some of the networks we worked with, and showed ourselves and our sport to some interesting groups of people.”

Bringing Them In

It may seem odd that Dale Earnhardt Jr., with five wins in his first two Winston Cup seasons and a driver defined more by what he hasn’t done on the track than what he has done, is the guy leading the NASCAR charge into new and mostly uncharted territory. It hasn’t been that long ago when he was running Late Models at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Now he’s the face of the sport. Does that sound right?

Nearly all of the sporting press, and some on the outside looking in, think so. Look around and the guy is everywhere: magazine covers, profiles, everywhere a story. Not to mention appearances on MTV and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, stories in People and Rolling Stone, an interview in Playboy ... the list goes on. This is definitely not his daddy’s NASCAR, and that’s the whole point.

Could it be that Dale Earnhardt Jr., the man of the hour in U.S. motorsports, is just the guy to stand before an entire country and represent stock car racing? He meets all the requirements.

NASCAR has long been about lineage and heritage and many of the things in society that speak family—from American-made automobiles to children hoisted high in Victory Lane. NASCAR remains to this day a family-run business, one born over 50 years ago in the South and raised on traditional Southern values of hard work, loyalty, and dedication. So who better to represent the sport than a third-generation driver who is the son of the man who personified the very soul of stock car racing?

If Earnhardt Jr.’s bloodline alone is not enough to justify his place in the sport, consider this: The NASCAR growth curve demanded a younger audience, some maintain, and Earnhardt Jr. has met and exceeded the demand, and that alone has set him apart from those who’ve gone before him.

Humpy Wheeler, the Speedway Motorsports president who is a respected observer of the sport, says the timing was right for Earnhardt to make his mark.

“I think the pop culture that they introduced him to—or he introduced them to, that’s debatable there—that’s the first time that has happened, and I think it signifies the broader market we have today compared to even five years ago, particularly the youth market,” says Wheeler.

“A decade ago we were beginning to be concerned that our demographics were reaching up too high as far as age was concerned. But Jeff Gordon, as he started winning, began to change that. Now Gordon is 30 and along comes Earnhardt Jr. at the right time with the right kind of personality. He’s bringing that youth group along. It’s just extraordinary how the demographics of this whole business are changing even as we speak.”

It’s not just teenagers and twentysomethings who count themselves among the Earnhardt Jr. legion, though. Watch nearly an entire grandstand rise to its feet whenever Junior turns in a hot qualifying lap or makes a charge into the lead of a race and you’ll see a cross section of fans. He can bring that young person into the NASCAR fold, but he’ll also grab the loyalty of that young person’s father and grandfather. Some of those fans come from his father, no doubt, but they’re in the fold either way.

Another factor in Junior’s ascension to the top of the sport is his ability to be himself. It’s an old battle cry, but it remains a relevant one: A sport built on colorful characters lacks color today. And NASCAR drivers have long been poked fun at for their willingness to walk the walk and talk the talk to appease image-conscious sponsors. Then along comes Earnhardt Jr. with his laid-back personality, dash of color, and air of genuineness.

“I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about representing the sport and whether I would be one of those guys to do that or not, and maybe that’s why I pressure myself on wearing just normal clothes every day and being myself,” says Earnhardt. “I get a lot of flack from my sponsor for not having their logo all over my back and my shoulders and my head. Walking around in a pair of Adidas is pretty cool to me, and I want people to know that’s who I am. And if you don’t mind that guy who represents the sport wearing Adidas and the hat backwards, then that’s fine. But if you do mind, then look somewhere else.

“You can’t fool the public. When you dress somebody up and they do the dance, I think the public can tell the difference between somebody who’s sincere and somebody who’s not. Although I’m very proud of my relationship with all my sponsors—whether it be Budweiser or Drakkar or whoever—I don’t feel like it’s that necessary to don their logos everywhere I go. For some reason I think we can go further just being ourselves, and I think people will be more interested in that than billboarding.”

Seeking Balance

At 27 Earnhardt Jr. is firmly established in the sport at the same age his father was as a rookie. Junior epitomizes NASCAR cool while his father at 27 was a throwback to the sport’s rough-hewn past. Where Earnhardt Sr.’s trademark was a bushy mustache, Junior’s trademark is a ball cap worn backwards. Yet there’s a mellow, somewhat domesticated nature that reveals itself, despite the road trips—or rather because of the road trips and the balance they lend to his life. Last year he even shut down “Club E,” the basement nightclub at his house. No, he’s not married yet, although he has said a wife and a son would go a long way toward leading a full life. But there’s only so much you can pack into a life like the one he’s lived the last few years.

“For the most part, it’s been a lot of fun,” says Earnhardt. “Even the really heavy structure, when it gets to be like we’re doing something every day, it’s still fun. There was a point last year and the year before that, every once in a while, where you seem to kind of lose touch with your home life and your family and your friends. This year I’m going to try to be a little more related toward that end of it, to be more involved with my friends and family than I was last year and spend some more time around them and try to get what I want out of my professional life and social life. We’ve been so busy running around and everything over the last couple of years that it’s been really hard to maintain good relationships with my family and my friends. I’ll try to do a little better with that this year.

“My mother moved from Norfolk (Virginia) about a year ago. I can just drive two miles down the road and see her, and that’s really great. My sister (Kelley) had Carson, my little niece, about a year and a half ago, and that’s been a lot of fun to be around her. Those things like that have made a lot of difference.”

The specter of who he is and where he’s going in his chosen profession is never far away, though. Ultimately, he realizes success will be gauged solely by his performance on the track. “There are all kinds of things that I want to do, and I know that to be able to do I’ll have to continue as a race car driver and be good at it,” he says.

There are also the inevitable questions about goals and motivation that young, rich athletes face. Earnhardt fields questions about the importance of a breakout season with reference to a couple of drivers who reached the sport’s pinnacle. “It’s pretty important to me,” he says. “I would say it’s as important as it was to my father. If there’s a gauge to go off of, I believe it would be just as important to me as it was to him or to Jeff Gordon or anybody else.”

Wheeler has developed a theory on stardom and its place in NASCAR. During his five decades of involvement in stock car racing and from observing sports in general, he maintains that NASCAR got to where it is today by consistently having two superstars. The same formula applies to other sports, according to Wheeler. Since Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s fatal crash a year-and-a-half ago, Jeff Gordon stands as the sport’s only true superstar, Wheeler maintains, and for Earnhardt Jr. to claim a spot alongside Gordon, he’ll have to win more often.

“In this type of racing, to really be a superstar you’ve got to be a prolific winner,” Wheeler says. “You can act like a superstar, you can look like a superstar, and just that charisma, those elements right there, will vault you up where everybody can see you. But you can’t stay there unless you win races. So the pressure is on him to continue to dazzle people with his image, his youth image, but he’s got to deliver on the racetrack to keep that flame burning as strong as it is.

“If he wins two or three races a year and we have the type of parity we have now, he might just be able to keep that going and might emerge as that second superstar.”

For now, Earnhardt says his spot at the top of the sport, the spot that holds superstardom, will have to wait.

“I think,” says Earnhardt, “that I will establish that a little more once we win some more races and maybe get closer to winning a championship. Right now we’re just kind of growing.”

Yet if we look out on the NASCAR horizon, we’ll spot Earnhardt Jr. He’ll be easy to pick out and not just because of his hat turned the wrong way. He’ll be the one with the road trips to make, family to embrace, friendships to nurture, races to win. The key to being a superstar, after all, might be the ability to live with it.