HE’S NOT KING OF THE ROAD, BUT HE’S A . . . : Hard-Driving Man : As Dale Earnhardt Closes In on Sixth Winston Cup Title, His Rightful Place in Stock Car Racing History Is Assured

For NASCAR stock car drivers, perhaps the most unnerving thing is knowing that Dale Earnhardt and his black No. 3 Chevrolet Lumina are behind them--and on the move.

For spectators at Winston Cup races, the sight is familiar--and predictable. No one else commands the respect, fear and admiration of the 42-year-old North Carolina driver when he is moving up through the field, heading for the lead.

As long as there is stock car racing, Richard Petty will be “the King.” But no longer can he be called the sport’s greatest driver.

Earnhardt, a second-generation driver from nearby Kannapolis, has moved into the No. 1 position, much as Jack Nicklaus became No. 1 in golf even while Arnold Palmer remained the people’s choice in that sport.

Petty’s driving style was to move high up on the banking at the superspeedways, then swoop around startled drivers on the rim of the track. Earnhardt’s is marked more by sheer determination, a combination of talent and will power that enables him to pass high or low, sometimes with such abandon that it seems as if he almost drives right over other cars.

It’s no wonder his rivals call him “the Intimidator.”

When Earnhardt wins his sixth Winston Cup championship and its $1.25-million prize Sunday at Atlanta--he can hardly miss--he will be only one behind Petty’s record seven. With the driver saying he expects to race until the year 2000, he and his Chevrolets, prepared by Richard Childress, figure to move onto a new level.

All Earnhardt needs to do to win the title Sunday is finish 34th or better--among 42 starters--no matter what happens to Rusty Wallace, his remaining challenger.

The last time Earnhardt finished that far back was in July of 1992 at Talladega, Ala., where engine failure dropped him to 40th.

“We feel pretty good about going down there (to Atlanta),” Earnhardt said. “It’s still not in the bag, but hopefully we’ll pull it out.

“Pressure? Hey, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what a driver needs, what a team needs. If you can’t respond to a challenge, you shouldn’t be out in front. I think you’ve got to be under a little bit of pressure to perform at your best. I know I do better under pressure.”

Bill Elliott, Darrell Waltrip, Mark Martin, Harry Gant, Ernie Irvan and the rest of the Winston Cup regulars will attest to that.

This is the sixth time in the last seven years that Earnhardt and the Childress team have been in the hunt going to the final race, either leading or within striking distance of the leaders. Four of those times, 1986, 1987, 1990 and 1991, Earnhardt won the championship, adding to the 1980 title he won while driving for Rod Osterlund.

In 1989, he missed by only 12 points when Wallace won.

It took Petty 16 seasons to win seven titles. Presuming Earnhardt wins this year’s, he will have six in 14 years.

Even so, this has been a topsy-turvy year for him. After winning six of the first 18 races, he led second-place Wallace by 309 points in August and was already being fitted for a tuxedo to wear when he collects the $1.25 million at the NASCAR awards banquet next month in New York.

Then Wallace began a torrid comeback, winning four of six races as Earnhardt suffered problems. The margin was cut to 72 points before the Phoenix race on Oct. 31. There, however, Wallace lost almost all hope when he finished 19th as Earnhardt was fourth. The margin jumped to 126.

“What chance have I got?” Wallace said, repeating the question. “Well, something could happen to him on the first lap (at Atlanta) and I could win the thing and still get the championship.”

Despite his record and his hard-charging tactics, Earnhardt admits to being a bit of a fatalist.

“Every race, every track, every situation is different,” he said. “You can prepare and do the same things that got you to this point and if things aren’t meant to happen, they aren’t going to happen. If they are, they are.”

Childress, a former driver turned car owner, has the same outlook.

“There’s pressure and then there isn’t,” he said. “I mean, you’ve got sponsors who pay and support you and expect a return on their investment. There’s pressure to give them that. There are fans who expect a lot. And once you get to the position we’re in, leading the points, there’s pressure to hang on and win.

“But whatever happens is going to happen. All we can do is our best to try and make sure we put the best car out there for Dale to drive. From there, it’s really out of our hands. We worked our butts off to have a good car for Dover (Del.) and we got caught up in a wreck. Nobody’s fault, it just happened. We just hope it doesn’t happen again.

“If we get beat, I mean outrun on the race track, we’ll be disappointed. But that’s something you’ve got to live with. You don’t like being outrun, but if somebody does, they’ve earned it.”

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For years, Earnhardt looked as if he wore a perpetual scowl. Even in victory, his trademark mustache gave him a foreboding appearance. One approached him with caution, if not trepidation.

In interviews, he was caustic and sarcastic, often answering questions with a question. As, when asked at Ontario Motor Speedway in 1980 how it felt to win his first championship in his second year in Winston Cup racing, he snapped, “How do you think it feels?” Asked to pursue the question a bit further, he said with a detached air, “It’s OK.”

His nickname of “Ironhead” seemed fitting.

The years of success, however, have left him with a mellowness bordering on charm. The Intimidator has become a bit of a softy.

When the citizens of Kannapolis, a textile town of 30,000 in west-central North Carolina, wanted to throw a black-tie party for their favorite school dropout, Earnhardt insisted that proceeds from the all-day event go to the Kannapolis City School Foundation. More than $50,000 was raised from an auction of Earnhardt memorabilia.

“When you never had an education, you appreciate more how important it is,” he said. “I quit to earn money to go racing after the eighth grade. I never got a high school diploma, but I know now that education should come first. Then you can get on with what you want to do.”

Earnhardt is particularly proud of his children’s education.

Daughter Kelley, 20, is working toward a degree in business administration at UNC Charlotte. Kerry, 23, got his community college associate of arts degree and Dale Jr., 19, finished high school before starting his racing career.

“And the little one is starting preschool this year,” Earnhardt said, his usually steely blue eyes sparkling at the thought. “Ain’t that great?”

The little one is Taylor Nicole, who will be 5 on Dec. 20. She is the one often carried into victory circle by her dad.

The Intimidator was touched when Bachman Brown, the mayor of Kannapolis, announced that a stretch of highway had been renamed Dale Earnhardt Boulevard.

“I used to go bird hunting with my father at the end of that road,” Earnhardt recalled.

He was also touched when his sister, Kathy, read a poem from his brothers and sisters telling of their early upbringing and how much “her little brother” means to them.

“I was about to die for lack of words,” he said later. “Can you believe that? Kannapolis throwing a party for a kid who quit school on them? I was about overcome.”

Earnhardt doesn’t live in Kannapolis now. He moved up the road a piece to a 300-acre ranch with his own lake--stocked with catfish.

“I’m not so far from the old place that I can’t get there in a few minutes,” he said. “I’ve got 80 head of cattle, seven horses, two llamas and a herd of deer, plus 32,000 hens that lay 30,000 eggs a day.

“When I’m not racing, I consider myself a working rancher. I fill in whenever anybody’s laid up or taking a day off. Last week I helped wash down the chicken pens. That’s something we have to do from time to time. I’ve got four hen houses, with 8,000 chickens in each one. When they drop their eggs, they land on a conveyor belt.”

Earnhardt also has a Chevrolet dealership in Newton, N.C., and is an active member of the board of directors of the North Carolina National Bank in Mooresville.

“Lots of folks think I spend my spare time hunting and fishing, but that’s only when I’m not busy on the farm or working on my other businesses,” he said. “I love to keep busy. I don’t think I could enjoy a more comfortable living than I have now with (wife) Teresa and the little one, but I could never quit, the way Michael Jordan did. I think he’ll find out he made a mistake.”

The comfortable living has been made possible by a motorsports-record $18 million in race earnings alone. With another $1.25 million coming in a couple of weeks.

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Earnhardt grew up in a two-story, white frame house with red brick pillars, on tree-lined Sedan Street, between V-8 Street and Coach Street in Kannapolis. It’s just off U.S. 29, the same highway that passes by Charlotte Motor Speedway a few miles to the southwest. His mother, Martha, still lives in the old house, shaded by a gigantic elm tree. The garage, where his father, Ralph, worked on his race cars, stands as a reminder of Dale’s roots.

“I’m really proud of what I’ve done,” Earnhardt told the gathering in Kannapolis. “But I’m still just Dale Earnhardt from Kannapolis. That’s all I’ll really ever be. But then again, that’s all I ever wanted to be.”

Ralph Earnhardt was a dirt-track racer who scratched out a living on the small tracks in the South, racing stock cars two, three or four times a week. He won the NASCAR late model sportsman championship in 1956, but never moved up to the circuit now known as Winston Cup.

Television commentator Ned Jarrett, a former two-time Grand National champion who raced against the elder Earnhardt, said, “Ralph Earnhardt was the most intense, hard-driven man I’ve ever known. If ever there was a chip off the old block, it’s Dale Earnhardt. He came by it honestly.”

Ralph Earnhardt died of a heart attack while working on his car in 1973. He was 45.

“I started racing the year before my dad died,” Dale said. “He was against me dropping out of school to go racing, but he has always been the biggest influence in my life.”

Father and son were in the same race only once, in late 1972 at Metrolina Speedway, a dirt track near Charlotte. It happened by accident.

Earnhardt recalls: “They only had about eight cars for the sportsman feature, so they told us that the top five finishers in the semi-modified (race) could start at the back of the field for the feature. I won that race so they started us in the back with six-cylinder cars against the eight-cylinder sportsman cars.

“Me and this other guy were running for third but I couldn’t seem to get by him. Daddy was leading and had lapped just about everybody. I saw him coming so I moved over to let him by, but he wouldn’t pass me. I kept moving aside, but he stayed right behind me. When I moved back in the groove, he gave me a nudge and shoved me past the boy for third. Then he slipped below me and went on to win. You should have seen that guy I beat out for third. He about went nuts.”

A third generation of Earnhardt racers is on the way.

Kerry races in the Goody’s Dash series, where he finished 11th as a rookie and Dale Jr. raced late model stocks at Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Kelley, who got into racing on a dare from her brothers, raced street stocks this season at Concord Speedway. In her first 11 races, she never finished out of the top 10.

“She was hanging around the garage one afternoon, helping her brothers fix their cars, when they started kidding her about why she didn’t race,” Earnhardt said. “She said she didn’t have a car, so I said, ‘Hey, there’s a couple of old street stocks out in the barn if you want to fix ‘em up and try.’ Next thing I knew, she was racing at Concord. That was last July.

“The way she ran, I can tell she’s got a lot of Earnhardt in her.”

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If--or when--he wins his sixth championship at Atlanta, Earnhardt says it will have a special meaning because the competition has grown so much stronger since his first title in 1980.

“Obviously, the first one was great--just because it was the first--but I don’t think I was old enough to appreciate what I had accomplished,” he said. “I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t until later I realized just what I had done.

“With each one, I realized how lucky I’ve been. The win in ’87 has always been special because we won 11 races and dominated everybody. But ’90 was special in another way because we had such a tough battle with Mark (Martin). He had led almost the whole season and we managed to catch him in Phoenix.

“It keeps getting more special every year we’re in contention, especially with the way the competition has kept changing. It’s so much deeper than it was 10 years ago.”

How big a blow would it be for Earnhardt if he lost?

“No worse than Atlanta losing to the Phillies,” he said with a laugh, doffing his Braves cap. “Win or lose, Daytona is going to come next year and it’s going to start all over again.”

The Daytona 500--the one stock car racing prize never won by Earnhardt--will open the 1994 season on Feb. 20.