Earnhardt Asleep at the Wheel

The mystery surrounding Dale Earnhardt’s health problems at the Southern 500 took a new twist Tuesday when a close aide said the driver twice nodded off at the wheel before the race.

The revelation by Don Hawk, president of Dale Earnhardt Inc., came as Earnhardt underwent more hospital tests in an attempt to determine what happened at the start of Sunday’s race in Darlington, S.C.

The results of those tests will determine whether NASCAR allows Earnhardt to rejoin the Winston Cup circuit at its next race Saturday night in Richmond, Va.

“It’s beyond Dale Earnhardt or whether he can race,” said Kevin Triplett, a spokesman for the stock car racing sanctioning body. “We just want to make sure that he’s OK.”

Earnhardt’s Chevrolet Monte Carlo slammed off the concrete retaining wall in both the first and second turns on the opening lap Sunday. He then failed to respond immediately to radio calls from car owner Richard Childress and also had difficulty finding the entrance to pit road.

It was a troubling sequence of events for a driver who has won a record-tying seven Winston Cup points titles and cultivated a calm, cool, tough-guy persona, earning him the nickname of “The Intimidator.”

That demeanor was the reason no one in his pit became concerned when Earnhardt first nodded off while sitting in his car waiting for the race to start.

“It’s not unusual for Dale to doze off before a race or under red-flag conditions,” said Hawk, who runs the Mooresville racing and marketing company owned by Earnhardt.

Team members became suspicious, though, when Earnhardt fell asleep a second time. But by then the drivers were being ordered to start their engines and begin the race, so Earnhardt fired up the car and drove away with the rest of the field.

After Earnhardt wrecked, Childress repeatedly called him on the radio, trying to find out what happened and telling him to bring the car into the pits. Earnhardt didn’t respond, said Hawk, who was standing near Childress and monitoring the radio frequency with his own headset.

When Earnhardt finally got on the radio, it was not encouraging.

“Richard screamed at him to park the car right now,” Hawk said. “Dale said, ‘I’m sorry, I saw two racetracks.’ ”

Earnhardt was pulled from the car and carried to Darlington Raceway’s care center, then transferred to McLeod Regional Medical Center in Florence, S.C. He spent almost 24 hours at McLeod for tests, all of which were negative.