NASCAR Hall of Famer Dale Earnhardt Jr. has long wanted to dive deeper into the origins and stories that make up the career of his legendary father, Dale Earnhardt.
That moment is here, and in a unique format as well. Earnhardt Jr. and Dirty Mo Media unveiled a new podcast Wednesday titled “Becoming Earnhardt,” an eight-episode series centered around the 1979 NASCAR Cup Series season in which, during his first full-time season, Earnhardt scored his first of 76 career wins en route to the Rookie of the Year Award.
https://twitter.com/DirtyMoMedia/status/1678884533247123458?s=20
As Earnhardt explains in the first episode, following the death of his grandmother Martha in 2021, the Earnhardt family poured through old newspaper clippings and highlights she had kept over the years. But it was a scrapbook specific to the 1979 season that Dale Earnhardt’s older sister, Kaye, had kept all these years that spurned the idea for this podcast.
“Thumbing through this collection of news articles was like discovering a treasure chest of hidden secrets. I was hooked,” Earnhardt Jr. explains in Episode 1.
RELATED: Listen to Episode 1
On July 7, Earnhardt Jr. shared his thrill for the series in an Instagram video, acknowledging the work he and the Dirty Mo crew put into making this series a reality.
“I have been working with the Dirty Mo Media team very, very hard on this for months and wrote the majority of the script, and I narrate it myself,” Earnhardt said. “It’s ballooned up to about eight episodes. They’re about an hour, hour-and-a-half apiece. And I listened to the first episode a little bit (Friday), about a couple minutes worth, and I cannot express how excited I am to get that out so that y’all can hear it.
“I hope you’re gonna enjoy it. Something I’ve been working on in the background that I’m very proud of.”