TALLADEGA, Ala. — An NBC assistant in the broadcast booth had an urgent message to deliver, one of huge importance. As 40 drivers barreled around Talladega Superspeedway at 200 mph a few hundred feet below him, he grabbed a marker and started writing on a dry erase board. “17-13,” he wrote. “Final 5th straight win.”
He showed this to Dale Earnhardt Jr., a guest analyst for NBC’s coverage of the race. Upon reading it, Earnhardt Jr. turned around, away from the track, and smiled broadly at Tyler Overstreet, his road manager, and pumped his fist. The handwritten note purported to report the score of the Washington Redskins, of whom Earnhardt Jr. is a big fan. Alas, that news was premature. A few minutes later, the same assistant showed him another dry erase board, this one apologizing for the first and reporting that the Lions had come back to win the game.
Junior half smiled, half grimaced and turned his attention back to the race track, where he wished he could be on this sun-kissed fall day. Earnhardt Jr. has missed the last 14 races, and he will miss the rest of the season, with concussion-related symptoms. But talking about the race was the next best thing, and the hour-plus he spent in the booth was vintage Earnhardt — funny, insightful and candid.
Wearing dark-framed glasses, sneakers, jeans and a blue and gray plaid shirt, he sat atop a stool between NBC analysts Steve Letarte, his former crew chief, and Jeff Burton, against whom he raced hundreds of times. They lapsed into a conversation like old friends.
His eyes darted from the track to the TV screen in front of him to Letarte to Burton. His body language was almost exuberant. He smiled often and at one point raised his hand excitedly when he wanted to interject a point.
He seemed relaxed and at ease with Letarte, Burton, play-by-play announcer Rick Allen and the race’s producers. “Has he got in the top 10 yet?” Earnhardt Jr. joked off camera about his replacement, Alex Bowman. “Damn, I told him everything I know.”
As his appearance wound down, NBC announced Junior would return to the booth at next week’s race at Martinsville Speedway. Producer Matt Marvin, who was just outside the track in the production truck, keyed the microphone that allows him to talk with the broadcasters off air and told Junior what a great job he had done. He paused for just a second and said, “Next time, if you’re not as good, we’ll kick you out early.”
Junior laughed at that. This was the Earnhardt Jr. that fans have loved for more than a decade — living and dying with the Redskins, offering transparent insight into his life and breaking down racing like few others.
Consider this exchange with Burton at Lap 68, when Earnhardt Jr. discussed his drafting philosophy: “I look at the air coming off of the front of the car as a boat wake. And it’s very dense coming off of around the headlights of that car that you’re trying to side draft. So you don’t want to continue to be beside that guy as you get toward the front, or pretty much dead even, because you run into that dense air coming off of the lead car. So you have to ‘jump’ that wake, much like if you were water skiing. You also have to get away from him so that he cannot side-draft you, because then you’re both sort of bouncing back and forth. That’s why it’s so much easier to side-draft on the outside, because you can pin the guy on the bottom, side-draft him, drive up the race track and take the lead.”
Burton: “Now, you know all the drivers are going to play this race back and listen to all of this, right?”
Earnhardt Jr.: “From what I’ve seen, these guys have got it all figured out.”
After months of his public appearances being focused almost exclusively on his health, it was refreshing to see him confident and comfortable. At least for this hour, the pensiveness that saturated so much of what he has said lately was gone.
And on the topic of his health, he sounded upbeat. The simple fact he was able to make the appearance was a sign of improvement. In previous comments he has said large crowds sometimes trigger his symptoms, and it’s hard to imagine a larger crowd than Talladega. His doctors have encouraged him to challenge himself, and certainly being on live TV would accomplish that.
“I’m feeling great and all of the progress that we’ve made over the last several months has been really good,” he said. “Obviously, I’m able to get out and do things. I’m having so much fun at the race track, and to be able to come up to the booth has been a lot of fun for me.”
