Sister Knows Best

After months of pondering the contract offer, Dale Earnhardt Jr. decided he needed some advice.

He didn’t call a lawyer, an accountant or an agent.

He took the paperwork to his sister, Kelley, and let her hash out a deal.

If it’s business, pleasure or personal, Earnhardt’s 30-year-old sister is the first person to whom the NASCAR superstar turns.

“Dale Jr. was always littler than everybody -- shy, got picked on a lot at school -- and I was always the caretaker for anything he needed,” she said. “He borrowed lunch money from me. I did his chores when he wasn’t in the mood to do them and would have gotten in trouble. I was always the mother hen.”

It started when they were children of an absent father, living with their mother in Virginia. Kelley was two years older than her brother and always looked after him.

Eventually, they moved to North Carolina to be with their father, the late Dale Earnhardt, but were split up when Dale Jr. went to boarding school and Kelley went to college.

The time apart was good for the little brother -- “he started to become his own person” -- but not so good for their father.

After years of focusing most of his time on his racing career, Earnhardt had decided he wanted to reconnect with his children. He begged Kelley to leave school in Wilmington, N.C., promising her she could live by herself and even start her own racing career.

“He was just starting to become a lot more family-oriented, and we just never got to see each other,” she said. “He sent me flowers one time at school and I still have the card, it said ‘It’s been so long, I have almost forgotten what you look like.’ ”

So Kelley came home, transferring to North Carolina Charlotte, where she earned her business degree while driving Late Model cars. At the same time, Dale Jr. was getting his start in NASCAR along with an older half-brother, Kerry.

As Dale Jr. started to blossom into a NASCAR star, their father took care of everything. The son had little interest or involvement in the business side of racing, and no one had a problem with it.

Whatever was good for the father was good for the son.

“When Dad was here, him and [stepmother] Teresa, whatever they did for Dad, they mimicked for Dale Jr.,” Kelley said. “They made his decisions. Even when he started his own company, they made the decisions about where he banked, all of his insurance ....

“They told him what they were doing, but he didn’t really care to sit there and understand it.”

Then, Earnhardt was killed in a wreck in the 2001 Daytona 500.

Brother and sister were on their own, and Kelley knew Dale Jr. would need her.

“I called Dale up and said, ‘I need to work for you, and you need me to come work for you,’ ” she remembered. “It took him about three weeks. He always had the trust in me, he knows how I operate.”

Those close to the family have always said Kelley is most like her father -- no-nonsense with a keen sense for business but able to kid around at the proper time.

And when it comes to her brother, no one has looked after him the way she does.

So Dale Jr. turned everything over to her, making Kelley his business manager. She’s president of JR Motorsports, his company that encompasses everything not related to his Winston Cup team, which is owned by Teresa and Dale Earnhardt Inc.

Dale Jr. said he has a lot of trust in Kelley “because she’s pretty smart about this stuff.” “And let’s face it,” he added, “I’m probably not too experienced in it. I would probably let people walk off with the bank.”

Kelley didn’t let that happen when it came time for Dale Jr. to sign a contract with DEI. He had worked under a handshake agreement with his father but wanted something official this time around. He rejected the offer of a lifetime contract that Teresa offered and worked with Kelley on the things he wanted included in his new deal.

So the two of them packed up the paperwork, crossed the parking lot from JR Motorsports into the main building at DEI and had a meeting with their stepmother in the conference room. After months of going back and forth, Dale Jr. finally signed off on a five-year deal that included one main sticking point: a cap on the amount of personal appearances he had to make for the sponsor and DEI.

Although they have solid relationships with Teresa and their half-siblings, Dale Jr. and Kelley have created their own mini-family. The birth two years ago of Kelley’s daughter, Karsyn, has changed them both. Dale Jr. spends hours with his niece, sometimes playing computer games with her, sometimes secretly teaching her curse words, and sometimes simply sitting back and watching her.

And Karsyn’s arrival finally allowed the little brother to look after his sister.

“He’ll tell me about dating, going out or outside interests,” she said. “He definitely is way harder on me about personal things than I am on him.”