Dale Earnhardt Jr. — only the human fuel that makes big-league stock-car racin’ go, that’s all — is once more safe to drive at 190 mph. No air-sickness bag nor map to the finish line required.
He reported to Daytona 500 media day Wednesday, and declared that he is both worry- and symptom-free. It’s news that made NASCAR’s engines of commerce hum with anticipation.
“I feel great,” Earnhardt said. “And I’m really happy that I feel great. This is what I was looking forward to, to get well and just feel like myself again. I’m really thrilled about that.”
The very serious business of recovery from a concussion that knocked him out of the last half of the 2016 season is well behind Earnhardt, as evidenced by his starting position in Sunday’s big race. NASCAR has its Tiger Woods back — talking here in terms of popularity here, not production. Only in this case, the star is running out front. Earnhardt qualified for outside the front row for Sunday’s 500, alongside young teammate Chase Elliott.
An Elliott and an Earnhardt starting up front. What is this, 1993?
Daytona is the scene of both grievous wounds and great healing for Earnhardt Jr. It is the place where he seems to come to get himself right, whether it is winning the next race on the track after his father died in the 2001 Daytona 500 or resuming his career following a frustratingly open-ended recovery from head trauma.
Earnhardt’s recent issue is an insidious one and one that could reappear with equal or greater ferocity the next time he inevitably crashes. This concussion he traced to a crash in Michigan in June. He ran three more races before he could no longer work around his compounding loss of balance, his mood swings and blurred vision. There followed nearly two months of scant progress and another month before Earnhardt began feeling close to himself again.
There have been other concussions, he realizes now, a handful of them. Whether there will be more, that is the question riding shotgun with him every week. Football may be the sport where all the concussion news seems to pool. But, mothers, let it be known that auto racing might be hazardous to your baby’s long-term health, too.
It’s not that Earnhardt was seeking to raise awareness of the issue of concussions in racing. He didn’t set out to be a case study or the impetus for NASCAR refining its concussion protocol (which it did to start this season).
“I don’t want to be defined by the concussion,” he said, “but I certainly love to help people, no matter what it is.”
“If it helps somebody, that’s important,” he said. “But I was just looking out for myself, listening to my doctors. If it taught someone a lesson or helped someone, that’s awesome.”
A 28-time race winner, who at 37 is five years younger than Earnhardt, Carl Edwards retired this season. His reasons vary, but health concerns were a part of the package. As quoted in an ESPN the Magazine story, Edwards said, “I don’t like how it feels to take the hits that we take. I’m a sharp guy, and I want to be a sharp guy in 30 years.”
Rather than sweat the future, Earnhardt has chosen to trust the science. He now counts his neurologist among his closest friends. Thus, he said, “As far as the long-term effects, I can only believe. I’m not an expert. My doctor is. So when I have concerns, questions, I go to him. I say, ‘What’s going on? What do you think about this? Am I in danger?’
“(The doctor) gives me confidence in our conversations. He doesn’t care about racing. He just cares about me being healthy. He knows I just got married. He knows I want to have a family. He knows I want to have a good quality of life the next 40, 50 years that I’m alive.”
More to the point of this weekend, Earnhardt will attempt to reassert himself at a place where he has won four times (once more than his old man), and where he has finished in the top 10 more than half of his 34 career starts.
He’ll doubtless be the emotional favorite this weekend — “To see him go out there and win a race, I’d like to see that happen,” said two-time Daytona 500 winner Michael Waltrip, competing Sunday in his last 500.
Although Earnhardt does not claim to be the mechanical favorite. He gives that edge to the Joe Gibbs and Roger Penske teams, somehow painting his powerful Hendrick Motorsports bunch as underdogs.
As the curtain closed on 2016, Earnhardt got married. He’s contemplating fatherhood. All the signs are there of a one-time party guy wising up.
And now that he is adding layers of responsibility there comes with that the question of how much longer he wants to drive in circles and risk more trauma.
Two scenarios would rush him to retirement, he said.
If his doctor ever told him to get out of the car, Earnhardt said there’d be not a moment of debate.
And, as he confirmed Wednesday, creating a little bit of a stir, if he ever won the series championship that he and his fans have so long coveted, “I would definitely not want to come back and try to race anymore. I would be outta here.”
“You know, I’ve always wanted to win a championship so badly,” he added. “Coming back from this injury, we worked so hard. To come back this year, win a championship — it would be hard not to hang it up.”
And, so, the prospect of an Earnhardt championship run became simultaneously the best and worst possible scenario for racing.
