Childress reflects on career that started behind wheel (cont'd)

Q: You stepped away from the cockpit in 1981 and found a young driver named Dale Earnhardt to replace you. How did that come about?

Childress: When the money started coming into the sport about 1978, when M.C. Anderson, Warner Hodgdon, Rod Osterlund, all these money people started coming in, where I could run in the top 10, now I was running 15th, 17th. That wasn't any fun, so I said I was going to get out of the car if I could find the right person. Well, the people at R.J. Reynolds, they kind of hooked me up with Dale. Dale and I got together at Talladega that evening, put our plan together. The story didn't come out like it was in that one movie, I can tell you. We went through some s--- over that, too.

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At Talladega, Dale and I put a plan together to run the rest of the season, because he wanted to get away from J.D. Stacy. We ran 10 races. We were pretty decent, but I knew I didn't have the money to run an ex-champion and he was better than the equipment that we had. We still had some real good runs with him. We knew we had something special. I had been hunting with Dale in South Carolina, knew the people, the taxidermists and stuff. We were at Darlington, got us a six-pack of beer, drove back and sit in the parking lot.

He told me his options were to go back and drive for Stacy at Harry Rainier's, and I said, "Well, you left there because you didn't want to have nothing to do with them." Or go to Bud Moore, or stay with me. I told him, "I can't run you like we are." So he left and went to Bud Moore. I hooked up with Ricky Rudd and Piedmont Airlines. We were talking about me getting back in the car and driving. They wanted a young and up-and-coming driver. They were a young and up-and-coming airline, so we ended up hiring Ricky Rudd.

I never will forget, we had two or three chances to win, but in late '82, we went to Texas World Speedway down there and he won, and I said, "Now you see that you can win in a stock car." So we came out the next year and won four poles, a couple of races I think it was. Dale and I were talking that whole time, we were still friends and we'd always talk about getting back together. So we got back together and 1984, and I like to say, from that point on, the rest of it was history.

Q: What would you say was your greatest thrill in this sport?

Childress: I've had so many. Great would be thinking back on winning your first race with Ricky Rudd at Riverside. Thinking about winning your first race with Dale at Talladega. Winning the championship in '86 was probably one of the biggest thrills. You always got to count the Daytona 500 in '98. Winning Indy in '95. There's so many great thrills, I couldn't narrow it down to one, but those are just a few of the highlights. The championships, the hunting trips, the fishing trips, all of the things Dale and I did together. Winning Indy with Kevin was a special day. Winning the Nationwide championships. It's hard to pinpoint one.

Probably the three most pleasurable ones was to win our first race, win the championship in '86 and win the 500 with Dale. Those would be the highlights.

Q: What's your favorite Dale Earnhardt story?

Childress: There's so many. I've never been able to narrow it down to one, because there's so many great hunting stories, so many great racing stories, so many great fishing stories. And personal stories. There's so many fun things that we did, and in our racing side, we were very serious at what we did. Seeing the look in his face after winning the 500. Enjoying the celebration in New York after winning the championship. Shooting a big elk out from under him in Arizona and seeing how upset and mad he got at me. That was just one way of getting back at him. Some of tricks he'd play on me.

We were just friends. We had a lot of fun together. We had so many of them, I couldn't narrow it down to one. I could sit here all day long and tell Dale Earnhardt stories, but it's hard to narrow it down to one story. I can remember sitting there in an old four-wheel drive Ford pickup farm truck, before he built his big shop over there. He had it leveled off and he had a well there. And he said, "This is what I want to do." And we sat there for probably two hours, he and I in that truck, and talked about what he wanted to do with his business, and creating DEI.

Q: I would guess the most difficult day would have been at Daytona in 2001.

Childress: It was. This sport gives you highs and lows, and you will always have highs and lows in this sport. And that was the lowest of low that day. The highest of high was winning the championships and the Daytona 500s. But that was a hard one to get over. I'd been over at Mike Helton's house the day afterwards, trying to decide really what we were going to do and what we needed to do. We were standing out on the dock, talking with the guys at the shop, telling them that I was thinking about closing down. I got to thinking about it and thought back on what Dale and I talked about when we crashed on the mountain with them horses that time, and I said, "We've got to keep this thing going. We've got too many jobs, too many people, depending on us."

So I came home that night and I had been talking back and forth on the phone with the people in the shop, and we decided to put Kevin in the car. We bought him over that night and talked to him, and he said he was up to the challenge. I said it was going to change his life and it did, from that day on.

Q: What will be your legacy?

Childress: I've been asked that before. I know how I'd like to be remembered, that I treated everybody fair and tried to be as fair to everybody as I could be, and as honest as I could be. I'd soon as rather be remembered for that as winning races.

Q: If you could vote on the first five members of Hall of Fame, who would you choose?

Childress: Without having the complete list in front of me, there's so many greats there. It was just such an honor to have me be picked in that group. I mean, it's a huge honor to be named in the group with the great, great pioneers of the sport. Some of the people who took the sport to where it is today, that helped make it to where we can do what we're doing with it. We have to be able to leave the sport ourselves for the younger generation, to where they can carry it on to the next level.

I think that's very important. A lot of people sort of overlook that. You want to leave the sport better, when you do have to go, than it was when you were here. And leave it there for other people to carry on.

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