RELATED: Junior busy in final Daytona practice
Dale Earnhardt Jr. isn’t the same person we saw in a race car July 9 at Kentucky, his last of 2016 before stepping aside with concussion-related symptoms.
He’s much better, he told NASCAR.com. He’s a husband now after marrying girlfiend Amy Reimann on New Year’s Eve. And he’s on the front row for Sunday’s Daytona 500. But how we got from July to February has had fans transfixed and reporters writing a whole lot about the journey. Here are some of the best stories and tidbits from Junior’s recovery and return.
Junior sees himself as altered in significant ways, telling the New York Times, “I do feel like this is a new chapter, for whatever reason. I don’t have a vision for what’s going to happen. I don’t know how to explain it, but it feels like a new me.” And that new man is less stressed out and more at ease in every aspect of his life. | Read more
Tommy Tomlinson captures the soul of the driver and the images from Junior’s test session this winter at Darlington. And goes deep into what makes our sport’s perennial NMPA Most Popular Driver tick.
One key piece of the new-and-improved Dale Jr. is Amy. Now his wife, she told Tomlinson she often provides Earnhardt with confidence and stays close, especially in stressful situations: “I’m his binky.”
But she’s much more than that, and he gives her credit for improving every relationship in his life. | Read more
A tale about brisket and pickled eggs from Dan Wetzel at Yahoo! shows us yet again how forthright and just, well, normal Dale Earnhardt Jr. is — even when his life felt like it was spinning far out of that normal range. | Read more
The days of dizziness and blurry vision were nightmares for Junior, who told USA Today’s Brant James exactly how hard it was fighting back from wrecks at Michigan and Daytona.
“My eyes were jumping around in my head real bad just riding down the street or in the car,” Earnhardt said. “Like a road sign jumping around. It was so annoying. I was scared to death I was going to be stuck with that all my life.” | Read more
Friends and colleagues MartinTruex Jr. and Elliott Sadler tell Bob Pockrass of ESPN all about how grueling the exercises were to bring Junior back. And Pockrass writes what everyone in NASCAR is feeling: “When Earnhardt rolls off Sunday for the Daytona 500, the industry will celebrate it as an accomplishment of a race car driver and also with a huge selfish deep breath that the sport is whole again.” | Read more
Junior’s return to racing is a victory for him, for the sport and for fans.
SB Nation sums it up: “It’s always more compelling when its favorite son is in the news for what he’s doing on the track.”