Dale Earnhardt Is the Greatest NASCAR Driver of All-Time

In 10 days it will be the 10th anniversary of Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s death.

The Intimidator was struck down on the final lap at the 2001 Daytona 500 when his car slammed into the wall at turn four. After nearly three decades of racing, the impact didn't look that serious compared to some of his past wrecks. But, as Earnhardt well knew, angles matter, inches matter, milliseconds matter. And Earnhardt's wreck hit the wall at the precise angle at the precise inch and at the precise millisecond that was most disastrous. One-hundred and sixty miles an hour, life to death in an instant. The impact of Earnhardt's crash fractured the base of his skull and left all of NASCAR in mourning.

Now, 10 years after his death, it's easier to consider Earnhardt's own legacy in racing. And that legacy is undisputed, Dale Earnhardt is the greatest race car driver in the history of the sport. We can run down a roster of accomplishments -- his seven championships, tied for the most all-time -- his 76 racing wins in 677 races, and his legacy that continues to this day through his son, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who owes much of his popularity to a latent love affair of racing fans to his daddy. But what stands out the most is this fact, Earnhardt brought racing to the masses.

Now that he's gone, Earnhardt's image has softened. Racing fans who have come of age in the last decade know Earnhardt as a benevolent figure, the father of modern racing. Gone is the lightning-rod legacy that demanded you either love or hate him, the duality of personality that made fans across the nation slowly take note of what had been an exclusively regional pursuit. Being hated isn't a race car driver's enemy, indifference is. And no one was ever indifferent to Dale Earnhardt, Sr.
The Other Side

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The Petty-Earnhardt argument is tit-for-tat, but every NASCAR observer can agree the men went about their business differently. Petty tried to go around cars to win; Earnhardt tried to go through them.
--David Whitley on why Richard Petty is King of NASCAR drivers
Indeed, Earnhardt's legacy is such that he represents much more than just a racing figure, he was the first race car driver to cross over into the mainstream, the first driver to make a single digit iconic. Earnhardt's No. 3 isn't officially retired, but it might as well be.

Ask anyone in the country to name a race car driver who is no longer racing and 90 percent of the general public's response will be Dale Earnhardt. That's because Earnhardt was a bridge from regional to national figure, the star who made the old school fan more comfortable with the new school fan. The iconic figure who helped to bring racing to California's wine country.

In order to be the greatest of all time in any sport, your legacy has to be about something more than domination, your legacy has to be a window into a changing sport. Earnhardt dominated in a time when racing was losing its regional connection and becoming more cosmopolitan. He bridged the gap between racing as a regional pastime -- young fans today will find it unbelievable that NASCAR's premier award was named after a cigarette company -- to racing as an entree into the pocketbooks of millions of consumers. Find me a more drastic marketing move than the Winston Cup changing to the Sprint Cup. From cigarettes to cell phones? You can't find it anywhere, racing moved faster to grab the country than any sport ever has.

Rapid movement like that can alienate long-time fans who might otherwise feel left behind by the rough edges of a region's sport being sanded out for mass consumption. But Earnhardt kept that from happening. He bridged the gap between the South and the rest of the country, maintained the old NASCAR lifers while welcoming in the new fans. Now when NASCAR fans look up from a wine tour in Sonoma and wonder how the hell they got here, Dale Earnhardt is the answer. His larger than life persona brought racing to the masses, and his sunglasses-covered stare made intimidation a way of sporting life.



In death, Earnhardt has become something more though, not just a preview of what the sport was to become, but a nostalgic emblem of what NASCAR used to be. Icons are like that, the greatest of their sport aren't fixed in one place, they veer, like a race car affixing new rubber to the track, from the top to the bottom, flit across time like that old black number three veering into an opening for a final lap pass. Close their eyes and old school race fans can picture the day back in 1979 when Earnhardt won his first race. It's another era, a time of vastly different cars, bigger feuds, and much less corporate hospitality. A time, they like to believe, when racing was still pure.

Open their eyes and out on the track in front of them his son, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. offers a perfect encapsulation of the growth of that racing brand. In fact, many racing fans would argue that his son is nothing more than a packaged encapsulation of all that NASCAR hopes will come, a hip, rap music aficionado with little of the racing skills of his father. A product, marketed and sold, for mass consumption. Racing, it might even seem, exists not for the pleasure and torment of the sport's competitors, but simply as the latest means to convince you to buy something that you don't really need.

I suppose you could blame Dale Earnhardt, Sr. for what racing has become since he made his final pass. But you should also praise him. That's the way things go when you're the best at anything, you embody every single detail of your sport, from the tiniest spark plug to the shiniest car, newly waxed and shining in pre-race introductions. Dale Earnhardt is racing, and racing is Dale Earnhardt.

Follow Clay Travis on Twitter here. With All That and a Bag of Mail back on a weekly basis, you can e-mail him questions at Clay.Travis@gmail.com.