Dale Earnhardt & the NASCAR Boom

Ralph Dale Earnhardt, born in Kannapolis, North Carolina, in 1951, was a racer's son who raced from 1975 to 2001, most of it in Richard Childress's No. 3 Chevrolet, a black car with red and silver trim that became one of the most famous logos in motor racing. He won 76 Cup races and seven championships, tying Richard Petty with the seventh in 1994, and his style, bumping, blocking, and leaning on anybody between him and the front, earned him "the Intimidator" and "the Man in Black." He was also unbreakable in the fans' eyes: in 1996 he hit the wall at Talladega at nearly 200 mph and flipped, climbed out and waved, started the next race with a broken collarbone, sternum, and shoulder blade before handing the car to a relief driver, and took the pole the week after that. The T-shirts read "It Hurt So Good."

The one race that kept escaping him was the Daytona 500. In 1990 he led 155 of 200 laps and cut a tire on the last one; the team hung the flat tire on the shop wall. On February 15, 1998, in his twentieth try, he finally won it, and as he rolled toward victory lane the crew members of every team lined pit road to shake his hand. He drove onto the infield grass and spun donuts that left a 3 in the turf. "The Daytona 500 is ours," he said. "We won it, we won it, we won it!" In 2000 he was still doing things nobody else could: a win at Atlanta by a hundredth of a second, and a charge from eighteenth to first in the final four laps at Talladega.

He died on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, February 18, 2001, in a crash in the final turn, while the two cars he owned, driven by Michael Waltrip and his son Dale Jr., crossed the line first and second. He was 49. The tributes went on all year: fans held three fingers up on the third lap of every race, the Fox and NBC booths went silent for that lap, Childress pledged the black Goodwrench 3 would never run again and renumbered the car 29 for Kevin Harvick, who won at Atlanta three weeks later by six thousandths of a second, and that July Dale Jr. won at Daytona with Waltrip second, the February finish reversed. NASCAR mandated the HANS head restraint that October.

That same Daytona 500 had been the first race of NASCAR's new national television era, a $2.4 billion package of Fox and NBC contracts with Darrell Waltrip in the Fox booth, and the audience kept growing: the race drew 13 million viewers on CBS in 1998, 17 million on Fox in 2001, and 19.4 million in 2006, the decade's biggest, before the next contract came in at $4.48 billion. Dale Jr. was voted the sport's most popular driver fifteen years running, from 2003 to 2017, and Will Ferrell's Talladega Nights and Pixar's Cars both arrived in 2006, which says something about how big the sport had become. Earnhardt entered the NASCAR Hall of Fame's first class in 2010.