Inside Garage Mahal, DEI is racing 'in a different way' (cont'd)

In an industry full of former DEI employees, you hear occasional talk that all this is a last gasp. Steiner is quick to refute. "We're ahead of our plan," he said, "and it was a pretty aggressive plan." Even so, walking through DEI today, the past is everywhere. You hear stories about how much Earnhardt loved the place, how he couldn't bear to be away from it, how employees would arrive at 5:30 on Monday mornings, and he'd already be there. Down one hallway is the old No. 8 shop, once home to 17 race wins and Earnhardt Jr., now filled with old cars including Junior's first late model and one Big E raced in Japan.

If DEI ever fields another car, that's where it would be built. But right now, there are no such plans.

"Are we disappointed that the lights aren't on and we don't have 300 people working in here? Sure we are," said Rex Garrett, the technology group's director of operations, and hired by Earnhardt himself. "But we work very closely with the EGR program."

If anything, DEI seems quite comfortable with its role as a middleman. If a sponsor showed up one day with $15 million and wanted to field a race car, Steiner said, the organization wouldn't say no. But he adds that Teresa is adamant that the company isn't going to subsidize a program on its own. And Steiner's grand vision for the future of DEI revolves less around a return to the race track, and more toward an expansion of its current role as a provider of parts and research and development services. He'd like to see DEI become a place where start-up organizations can come in, set up shop, and take advantage of people and equipment already in place before venturing out all by themselves.

"It's my vision that NASCAR needs an incubator, for lack of a better term, to help teams get into the sport at different levels," said Steiner, a former executive at Johnson Controls and American Specialty Cars who met Teresa Earnhardt through a common acquaintance at General Motors. "I think some people ask, are they going to run a DEI car out of Highway 3 as a race team? I'd say yes, but with a little bit of a twist. It's more along the lines, I think, of Dale helping other teams, because we're very satisfied with what Chip is doing and that relationship with EGR."

Across town at the old Ginn shop, the signs of DEI's contraction are evident. In 2008, around 300 people worked out of the facility, which turned out 65 race cars that season. Now only a few vehicles sit in the vast parking lot, and the security booth is empty. But inside the seven-post is humming, working on Montoya's setup for the upcoming road course race at Sonoma, Calif. Viewed from underneath, it's a stunning piece of equipment, with seven hydraulic actuators, four of which attach to the tires and three others that mimic aerodynamic forces on the car. It sits atop half a million tons of concrete anchored 35 feet into bedrock, and is powerful enough to launch a car 15 feet in the air.

Seven-post rigs, which provide crew chiefs with an informational flowchart they take into a race weekend, are massive in size, importance -- and expense, costing about $2 million each. Ganassi doesn't have one in his shop, which sits a few exits down I-85.

"We all know there is a market out there for this kind of service, if we could approach it properly," said Dave Charpentier, DEI's technical director. "With the Ganassi team being down to just two [cars], with the cost of operating and maintaining this facility, paying personnel, it's hard to justify it with just a two-car operation."

So DEI made it available to customers, which thus far have included several GM Nationwide and Truck teams, and, in a strange twist, even Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing itself.

Steiner has done something similar with DEI's aircraft, a pair of 50-seat jets based in Statesville, N.C., which now operate on a charter basis and fly several race teams to tracks each weekend. Even the Garage Mahal is available for events, like a gathering this week by Sherwin-Williams at which Kerry Earnhardt was scheduled to appear. DEI's showroom has even hosted a high school prom.

"It's a different company today than it was in the past," Steiner said, and that much is evident. DEI is still very much a timeless place, with signs of the Intimidator everywhere, from his many Bristol trophies lining an upstairs hallway, to the darkened room where he signed autographs every morning, to his office, just as he left it before his death at Daytona in 2001.

Nearly a decade later, Earnhardt himself remains a relevant figure with strong souvenir sales and a legacy that will endure well into the future. Inside the Garage Mahal, they're hoping that a reinvented DEI will do the same.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.