The Dale Jr. Download - 248 - He Stood on the Gas (feat. Kirk Shelmerdine)

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

Legendary crew chief Kirk Shelmerdine joins Dale Jr. for a revealing interview and more. Check out Dirty Mo Media on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DirtyMoMedia  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is a production of Dirty Mo Media. Hey, this is Dale Jr. for another episode of the Dell Jr. Download with my co-host, Mike Davis. We've got a great show today. We're going to talk about Kyle Bush, his 200 wins. We're also going to talk about dumb things you did as a kid that got you hurt. And we got some great stories between us and everybody else on social media. Also, guest, Kirk Shalmardine. It's going to be a great show. Let's get to it. Are you ready? All right.

Bring with a dow. Into the creek. Where's some cream? I'm going to do on a fire. Holy shton. Man, that is so good. That's the best one. Take a leak in the creek.

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Man, I'm still wiping the tears out of my eyes from, golly. When did you make that? I really kind of am curious. It was just me. I saw a blues riff that I kind of liked And then I Did you remember Dave?

That was like two weeks ago I started on it Oh shoot So but then I I would assume that this is something You know you just kind of took you 15 minutes over Friday or Saturday I did use my Zaxby's cup That was part of the ice

In my Zaxby's cup Really? Yeah They got good ice That was good They got great crushed ice So That reminds me of a trip I took to

Hang out with Matthew Good In his apartment in Vancouver And he was doing demos for a new album and there was a sound of like a bell and he was like you hear that i was like yeah he's like that's me banging on that pipe over there in the ceiling he was in this and he had this kind of industrial apartment he was banging on this pipe with like a kitchen utensil and they ended up in a real song to create the sound yeah that's crazy that's cool so yeah very creative Matthew um okay kirk's here let's go all right so here we are kirk shembert he's in the building and at the big table

Thanks for coming. Glad to be here. I appreciate it. We've got quite a lot of questions to ask you, and I hope you're ready. Dale says you're a mystery man. Yeah. I love that because he's like, we got questions that we ourselves are dying to know. Well, I guess that's still a good thing that people even know enough about me that I am a mystery.

It's getting to be a long time ago, some of that stuff. You're right. And I've always, you know, man, I remember as a kid, you and dad, and y'all having all that success. and that whole thing. Dad was real intimidating. The team was intimidating. You guys had a lot of success and a lot of things going on. Y'all were on top of the world,

particularly in the mid-80s, early 90s. And then, you know, as I got to, as I got older, I started to learn a little bit more, try to learn a little bit more about your career and who you were. And it is interesting, and maybe you can fill in some of the gaps for us, but talk about you're from Pennsylvania. How did you get in racing? How did you end up on the cup schedule?

I guess I was pretty lucky. I had a neighbor across the street that was the guy actually drove the pace car at Dover. He was a car dealer there in town, and his son was about my age, and we went to school together and stuff and got to be pals. So he would take us to the races and hang out. And I guess I'm probably 11, 12 years old. something like that, 13 in that time period, and just sort of had a foot in the door like that. And by the time I got finished with high school, I was supposed to go to college.

I mean, he was already at Penn State, and I didn't even know what I was doing there. I wanted to race cars. So I had kind of a big talk of my parents and ended up this fellow, Jack Whitby's, his name, he got me a job with James Hilton down in Spartanburg. What kind of job? Just sleeping, just to hang in. I was loud in there. was cool enough for me.

I didn't even know if I was getting paid or not. It was just like, and the first day I got there kind of a day earlier because I put all my stuff I had in my car and just drove down there. You know, I'd never been away from home much. And that was quite a different culture than I was used to. And I even got there early and I was like afraid to go. I wouldn't do until the next day. And I didn't want to get chased off before I was even supposed to be there.

I mean, that's how nervous I was and how much it was like a dream to be around race car. You were already in college? I had started, I didn't show up for any classes yet. This was like September, and I either had to go there and really didn't want to do that or do something else. And I just tried to something else for a little bit to see sort of how it went. And you worked for, you worked for Hilton until 79 and eventually became crew chief on James Carr in 77. So how did, like, how did that happen where you just sort of, you got to do more?

and more and got more and more responsibility over time. And how did he decide one day, hey, man, I wanted to. Being with a team like that, I got my hands on kind of everything because there wasn't, most of the guys were part-time. There weren't very many people that worked there. And, you know, it was an independent deal. And there was several of them back in that day. And so I got a little bit of, you know, I worked on engine stuff sometimes, you know,

cleaning parts, whatever, or sweeping floors or working on the truck or just whatever it was. needs to be doing so in a short time i got a lot of a little bit experiencing a lot of things and you know it was a good move really had i gone to work for the peti's or somebody i'd been like mowing grass or something you know and probably not even delivered a lever allowed to touch a car so it accelerated things as far as me learning what to do and what not to do and and one day i was only one there full time so here i'm crew chief well wait now how did that happen well you're just the only one there because because of what yeah so i elected myself and then It's sort of stuck.

Well, there you go. That's how you do it, kids. Be the only one there, and you can just give yourself a promotion. There you go. What's the difference in crew chieffin in 1977 for James Hilton versus crew chief in the mid-80s or the early 90s at RCR? What is the difference? Did James help you make a lot of the decisions throughout the race? He really did.

I mean, as far as that basic stuff, that all the mainstay guys, the old guys knew that had been around since, you know, the 50s or whenever it started, the car still had stock frames under most except for the front snout. I mean, they were just big old cars. And just all that basic stuff is what James was good at, and that was his kind of bread and butter thing. And he'd always campaigned his own cars, and he sort of had a system for how this all worked. And every little situation it came up, this is how you handled it.

And, I mean, I learned a lot from as far as the basics go. And then it's such a transition from that time period you're talking about, the beginning to end, the whole sport became a sport, actually, instead of just some guys racing cars, you know. And it really grew a lot and changed a lot. And then that crew chief position has evolved nonstop, you know, since then, really. When you went to, you went from 79 to 80, you went to work at Childers's. A brief, most of 79, I was with DiGuard, actually. Oh, really?

Darrell Walter's car, yeah. How did that work? I had no idea. Buddy Parrott was there. Robert Yates, Gary Nelson, I mean, it was like the whole cast of character from home and Moody just about that was there. And they were, had had a lot of success already. At this point, they're about ready to implode, and I didn't know that.

Gary and I kind of got to be pals, and he got me a job there when I was, I kind of saw that I was learning all I could with James already and future-wise. I mean, I wanted to be Winston Cup champion by now. Here I was already like three years into racing and still not racing a car. And, you know, and I wasn't sure. Well, that was initially, I mean, every kid, 10, 12-year-old kid does, you know. James was, I wasn't sure how long they were going to be able to survive. Things were changing.

And the independent teams were not really going to be able to, the way I saw it, it wasn't a whole lot of future right there for me. It probably would have been. And now looking back at James, how long he stayed in and stuff, you know, I probably could have had a job forever. But I wanted, you know, on and inward and upward. And so I went there to die guard as one of the best teams at the time and a lot of success. And it was a pretty big awakening about how they did things versus how the small teams were. And it seemed like all they did was fight.

And it didn't last year probably after that, so maybe I just helped them get done. Oh, wow. What was your responsibilities there? It was cool. I mean, we ran in the front, and it was a whole different spectacle than surviving was, you know. And so, again, I learned a little bit about how that end of the society works and some of the politics involved, too. Yeah, more politics than those established teams. Yeah, and then the bigger gets, there's more of that than there's race, as you probably know.

And so, yeah, but so I didn't last real long there. I actually stayed on some extra races as just a crew member when my mechanic job went away and I think I quit but stayed on because I'd been I started changing tires I was a rear tire changer at the end and Jake Elder was another when he was there buddy parrot got gone and Jake came in so he kept me on for a little while changing tires but I didn't know what I was going to do at that point I almost went back home

I just had no idea what was going to happen and then Childers approached me one day and says, look, you got all this experience, you shouldn't waste it, and I need somebody, my guy's quitting. And he kind of twists tomorrow. I almost didn't want to do it. I didn't want to live on the road all the time. I mean, it was all the time back then. You just stayed at the track and gone and traveling and driving a truck and everything else.

Yeah, a lot of people don't remember that you would go into the racetracks on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Talladega would open Tuesday, yeah. Practice all week. Right. The track would open from like eight to five. Charlotte, open Tuesday or Wednesday. All day. Anybody wanting to practice, go to...

Oh, wow. Sometimes it's too hot you didn't go because you'd wore out all your stuff. You know, there was a strategy to just how you worked all those days and kind of like still be good by Sunday, you know. So you were getting a little frustrated, it seems. You were getting frustrated at a bunch of different things, whether it would be the politics or whether it'd be the schedule or was it the fact that you weren't driving yet? I was, again, so excited still to be part of racing, but I wasn't, it wasn't what I thought it'd be, and I wasn't getting where I wanted, yeah, I wasn't any closer to driving in a car than I ever was at the beginning. But there was some momentum, you know, I was learning all this stuff, and I kind of had a knack for some of it,

and it was good at some things, and I just didn't know how it was going to play out, and it kind of, Chilter sort of, he can talk people into things, and Richard's one of those guys that he can almost, will stuff into existence at times. I've seen him just like conjure stuff. Jedi Mind Trance. Yeah. It takes a while to absorb that,

to get that from him, but he's like that. He can do stuff. And I don't know, he just got me interested. He says, look, just hang out for a while. My crew chiefs quit. He's gone somewhere else. Just sort of help me keep up with this

for a little while until I can get somebody else. And it took him 12 years and get somebody else. And things, again, momentum, the current takes you, you know, and things were changing. We started building our own chassis, which nobody did, just right about that same time. It was another reason he wanted some more people there that knew about the cars and knew everything kind of from one end and the other. And things just kind of geometrically started changing. This is about 81, about that time, and racing started getting on a map, and the technology was beginning to get a little bit out of Stone Age.

Again, momentum and the current kind of takes you And driving stayed on the back burner There was bigger and better things out there going on And it was exciting and you get caught up in it And years go by I didn't know that you had inspired to be a driver So soon in your life And that that was always in the background

I thought every kid did you know You go see a race and as a fan And it's like man I want to be out there I want to do that you know especially when you're a dumb kid It's like it looks pretty easy and those guys are the coolest ones here. Yeah. So I want to be one of them.

Yeah. So you work with Richard in 81. Dad comes into the team. Dad had a breakup over at... J.D. Stacey had bought their team from Osterlin in the middle of the season. That lasted a couple weeks with Dad. He ended up over at Richard's car. What was the conversation like with you and Richard when Richard was talking about getting

out of the race car? It all happened over a weekend at Talladega. We were talking about being there for several days, but it's kind of when everything blew up. And Richard was struggling. Again, he was probably the top one of the independent teams at that time. He had some sponsors that were steady and a little bit more polished kind of than most of them. And he wanted to go places, and he was kind of structuring it to do that,

even though he didn't quite know how he's going to pull it off yet. but one night at Talladegh, the thing blew up with Stacy. And I think Phil Homer, the guy from Goodyear was the manager of the tires. He contributed a little something. Junior Johnson, I think, put in some words with Chevrolet about engine things. And like some of these missing pieces just kind of all materialized at once. I think everybody sort of had their eye on Dale, on your dad, on keeping him in the fold, you know. You know, let's don't let Ford get him.

Let's don't let some of these things happen. This is a commodity we all need to protect, and Chevrolet want him. And just it all happened to overnight. And Richard and I were riding back from the track one night towards a motel, and he says, you know, I got a decision here, and I think I'm going to do it. It's like one of those things that you can't avoid, you know. It's not really what a plan, but it's here it is,

and we've got to jump on it. And, you know, he told me what was happening. And we had like two cars. And then Doug Richard and a bunch of the guys came from with their dad's team. And all of a sudden we had a big sponsor. And we had like all this stuff we had to do in a couple weeks. And I think last 10 or 12 races of that season, that was 81, I believe, yeah. We finished it out trying to be big time, even though we were sort of just getting started.

So again, it was sort of a trial by fire and jumping right in the day. deep end but it's how you learn to swim serve I guess so dad moves on for whatever reason after the end of 81 season RCR Richard will say that him and dad had a conversation and Richard said his team wasn't ready for dad just yet but y'all had three great years uh with ricky rudd yeah well 82 and 83 I think in 84 rich Ricky Rudd went to bud morris so two great years with Ricky Rudd and sat on a lot of polls, won some races.

How can you explain the way that y'all built that team up so quickly to be that competitive? I mean, from when Richard was driving the car to when Ricky Rudd's setting on polls and winning races. Yeah. That was a big transition. And then not that long of a time, too.

Again, some of the stuff was on pretty shaky ground. I mean, I was coming in there at night. Richard would go at night after everybody went home, and he'd build his own engines back at this point in early 81. And he taught me, I'd go there and help him at night, and he taught me how to do, I mean, I could assemble one finally. And when the stuff got too many miles on it,

that it was just, you're too scared of it anymore, he let me put a couple of them together and put in the floor. We were going to sell them to, you know, modified guys or something to race on short tracks. And by that summer, a few months, weeks before this happened with your dad, we were racing those engines that we'd already decide we were going to sell. There wasn't anything else left.

I mean, stuff was looking kind of slim. But at the same time, he was trying to expand. Again, we'd already sort of got off the ground building our own chassis, and we're learning our way through that. So then we jumped in and tried to race big time. those last 10 races with your dad, and we did all right, but not great. However, whatever success we had was pretty much because of his talent and some sponsor money to buy new tires and things.

The cars weren't that great. But we were seeing what would make them great maybe or what some of the problems were. And again, building our own cars, we can control a lot of that stuff. And we could change things bigger and quicker than another team did. I mean, there's other than just whatever came on a chassis and you could adjust stuff. we had things we could build in if we decided what it was you know so and rickie was it was a good time for somebody like him because he was really a pretty good chassis guy and he loved a he liked to fool around with developing the car more than he did a race i think you know he was he was

he had an act for that kind of stuff and commuting and came with us and and these just all these little details that go in from start to finish we started tampering with that and controlling it and and And we didn't know what we were doing, but at least we were doing it. And we could eliminate a lot of stuff that was bad and, you know, try to work on things that were good. And so that development, over 83 and 84, I mean, we started getting some pretty fast cars. We had Piedmont Airlines for a sponsor, and, you know, our engines were getting better. The cars were getting better. And Ricky really had an act for especially the short tracks.

And I think the first race we won was a road race out there in Riverside. We had like eight people, and that was counting the part-timers. It was huge. Did Richard ever win a race? So this would have been RCR's first win then, right? Yes. As far as the Cup Series goes, yeah. He had a lot of pretty good finishes, and especially in the points,

and he might have had a pole position once. I'm not sure about his record, but, yeah, I mean, we went a long way in a short time, and I'm still not sure exactly how, and I was there. And I still don't know exactly how. of factors. I got a question, and maybe you already know the answer to this, but like I'm hearing out of Kirk here a lot of uncertainty during this time. I mean, you guys are moving fast with the expansions and stuff, but I'm hearing

uncertainty, and I also am hearing that there was sort of a, I don't want to call it a bidding war, but when Dale Earnhardt becomes available, obviously that was the conversation in the garage. So I guess my question is, do you recall what made Dale Earnhardt choose Richard Childress in the first place? Were they already buddies? Because, you know, I'm hearing from you sort of this... Probably all the established big teams had contracts with their current guys,

and maybe he didn't want to get hooked into something. He needed to do something now like this week. There wasn't much space between races, and stuff went bad on a Monday, and we've got to have another car by Sunday. I think Richard was probably his best choice. Wow. Yeah, availability. Yeah.

And, you know, yeah, it's kind of like two-ass girl at the bar, you know. And I think we both surprised each other how well it really did go, even considering we didn't have much to work with. We turned some heads, you know. Everybody knew was Dale was that great, or they thought he was, but he hadn't really had the success he got later. You know, he was still sort of a question mark. Nobody doubted his talent, but whether he could avoid Rex and do the things you had to do to win championships was still the job. jury was still out on that I think. Was that your impressions of him too? I mean like no we just we knew he stood on the gas and this was going to be fun plus we got we got new part I'd never seen new breaks before

and stuff for the cars that I'm like this is going to be so cool you know and we thought it would we do better than we did of course it takes a whole lot of other things than that but um no we were just stoked about it and I think the doubt you were mentioned before was more looking back now that we thought we knew everything that was going on. We were sure about all the stuff we did, even the mistakes. I mean, we had confidence in ourselves, even though looking back, man, it was, I don't even know how we did it. Yeah. Y'all, you know, you kind of built that team up with Ricky behind the wheel, and then I guess, you know, you're in the shop one day and y'all find out that Ricky's going to move to Bud Moore,

and Bud Moore is going to send Dad back to Richard. what was the reaction in the building and around the team at that moment when that decision was making? Again, it was another big step, and it was positive. We kind of always wanted him to stick around, and I think that story is true about he and Richard. They had really hit it off in that short time period and had a lot of, had a lot of same kind of upbringing as far as racing goes, and they hit it off. It's the best thing to do, and I think they trusted each other, and, you know, we knew we weren't up to snuff at the time.

But over those two years with the Piedmont car and Ricky knows, we kind of got, we got there. We got a whole lot better. We got our chassis figured out or at least a basic start on them. And we'd always wanted him to come back and sort of hoped it would. And they made it happen, you know. People involved got it to go. And we kind of just swat with a 15 car.

And off we were. Off we went. So dad was aggressive, and there was a lot of times in, especially the 80s, when he would get himself into some hot water. Wrecked Darrell at Richmond that year, coming down to the final when Kyle won his first race in the Woodbrother's car, spun Sterling out in the middle of the race at Bristol, the Winston with Bill Elliott.

I mean, I'm just going over things that come to the top of my mind. he was polarizing and he was a winner. You knew when you went to battle, you had the best guy behind the wheel. I know that you felt that way, but how is a team did y'all navigate those choppy waters? Like how did y'all, I know you can try to describe some of the moments there where maybe like the All-Star, the Winston in 86 or 87,

when him and Bill are beating on each other. the race. That was, there was a lot of hurt feelings. You know, how did you guys, how did you guys navigate the garage and all that? We figured we weren't supposed to be there anyway.

No matter how big we got, it was always like us against what we figured were the big teams, all these well-financed factories. Y'all still felt like a small team. No matter what we, and we weren't really. So all this stuff you're mentioning as controversy, that was positive.

That was great. That was all part of our persona, we were learning to get, you know. And so, you know, the more stuff he got into like that, that was better. I mean, we supported him and, I mean, if he backed into somebody in the parking lot with the van, it was air damn fault for parking there. It was just, we had each other on anything. It didn't matter.

If he did something, you know, we were kind of like, look each other and oh, who's it doesn't matter. That's, yeah, this was a game plan. He was supposed to do that. And he did pretty good job, didn't he? You know, like just we sort of tried to build that all we could, and his confidence got better or the cars got better. We were able to sort of figure out what he was going to be in the front of the other cars.

It didn't matter if he was going to go in the fence or not or had to take him all out to do it. He was going up there, so he might as well just accept that and give him what he needed to do it with. And, you know, we had to alter a lot of things, and we kind of demanded that let's let the guy hold the gas wide. open if that's what he's going to do instead of telling him to slow down that ain't happening let's fix a car where you can hold the thing while open or close to it so you know we we just had that attitude the the more aggressive he is or however you want to term it the all that started later they started calling it you know the intimidator stuff or whatever but just the more afraid of us they were the better so we tried to back at all we could and even even enhance it one time did you

ever go wow that was a little screwed up but you know Like one time, you didn't have to publicly say it, but did you, just everything he did, it was. We wouldn't let ourselves think like that. All of us, the whole team was, didn't matter what the other one did. It wasn't just Dale, it was each other, or we were, we had each other's back. And that's something you can't do nowadays. Yeah. And it's such a crazy mixture of people. None of us had individually had that much success really anywhere else. So we knew this was our only shot, I guess, but it's also kind of what made the cohesion. and we kept almost the same lineup for about the whole time.

Right. About how many people are we talking about? How big was the team? At the start, six or eight. Okay. And I mean, at the peak of it, probably 20. Wow. At the most.

We only had four or five, six cars. Wow. By like 1990, you know, it took a lot of people, and we were slowly taking on more, but again, it was us, the big teams that had twice at. Y'all got to have 50 people, and you ought to still been the small team in your head. Well, I don't think we could have controlled things as well.

You know, we all worked twice as hard, and we all worked well together and trusted each other and knew that. And we didn't want new guys in there, changing stuff around. And that was a lesson for a while, and as things developed, it kind of made it tougher to win. That's kind of where I sort of started fading out of the picture. But for the time period that it was, if you were going to win something or you wanted to be a contender for a championship or whatever, you had to beat us. and that was for six or eight years. You know, it was fun. You won back-to-back champions twice, 86, 87, 991.

92 was your last year, crew chief in the cup series with RCR. Yep. What were you thinking, what was the mindset for you going through that process of making the decision to step away? Really in the middle of y'all's peak, I know there's probably some things going on. The performance fell off in 92. Still a good season, but only one win versus four in nine. versus our other seasons. It was terrible.

We won one race, and it was a 600, and had it been 500 miles, we'd been like 10th or something. I think he just beat him that last 100 miles because it was him, and he was pissed off, and, like, I'm going to wear them out, and it stayed green for a long time, and, you know, whatever. But that was the only race we won, and kind of endurance our way into that one. We weren't fast enough.

I didn't, the cars weren't fast enough, I didn't think. And, I mean, you've got to have them beat before you. go to the track. You don't race. Racing is like for the just to run the laps out, but where you beat them at is before you ever show up. And my view of what that was going to take, and especially in coming years, it was getting to be a bigger and bigger undertaking, and you had to start planning stuff now for next year even. And that foundation, the way I just individually thought it needed to be, wasn't being laid out. I wouldn't going to be able to do my job increasingly more. it was going to get tougher for me to try to make us all look good

or for everybody to win like we'd been used to. You know, we had them killed a few years ago, and now we're, like, struggling to stay up. And I didn't see the things happening that I thought, and I'm just one part of it, but that I thought needed to happen. And nobody could even agree on what was wrong. We were kind of arguing about, well, this is going to make us faster and that's going to make it's faster.

And whether or not we had time to do that or how practical things were, We just couldn't agree on stuff, and I don't know, they wanted me to stick around, and, you know, they said, well, we're going to pay you more if you want or what's wrong, what's the deal. And I just, I couldn't do the job I'd been doing. I didn't have the tools I thought that I was going to need to be able to maintain a success we'd had. And I didn't really know exactly what I needed. We kind of figured out as we went in the past and ended up killing them, but then when that stopped, how are we going to keep killing them was lost on me, and I lost on all. of us, I think, and I just, I don't know, I was, maybe they needed somebody else in there and a lot of things, but, and you get burnout too. Everybody's, you and everybody's done it for a long time. It's,

it's not the easiest life. And I'm in my 30s. I was a new dad. I'd been underneath those cars and never even looked out for, since I was a teenager. There's a whole lot of other life out there, a lot of other things, and, you know, I was starting to wonder about that stuff. And just, I don't I was a war out. I mean, it was a hard, I guess. Again, 30 is a little early to retire, but we'd been at it a long time and more intensely than most, I think, all of us.

And a lot of things went into it. So I just quit. Going to another team was never in the equation? No, and I wouldn't have sold out like that. They says, well, who hired you? You know, Dale thought somebody else was taking you away taking me or something. I said, man, I don't want another job.

If I can't do this one, how am I going to do something else? I don't know anything about the team or whatever. Again, I was still, I was a little lost at what was going to be next. So that's how that went. So you go a couple years, you actually started driving. When, you know, you drove a few races ahead of Sportsman Series at Charlotte Merger Speedway, you picked that up around 1999 or 1989. Yeah, I'd been actually racing on what few off weekends we had.

Saturday nights at Bowman Gray Stadium was actually the first stock car race I'd ever done anything besides go-carts and actually won a couple of those in the six-eowner class. It was, you know, it was great, but it was hard to squeeze it into everything else. I mean, the race team consumed everything you could muster,

and I had crew guys, I had people that could sort of handle most of it, so I just kind of went and set the car up and drove it. It didn't take a lot of the, time but it took some of my attention but Dale and Richard were both behind it I mean both of them understand when you got that drive to do it that you need to you need to try it or get out of your system or one or the other you know you you can't just die not knowing and even when it it graduated into the sportsman class there in

Charlotte in some of those places super speedways is a huge step from short tracks no matter how good you are, just the wind, the air, the things that come with going at kind of a speed is a whole other world. Again, they backed me on it. It wasn't, I had a whole other shop, a whole other everybody to handle it. All I kind of had to do was show up, but still they could have said, no, man, we don't want you to take the risk, or we don't want you to do it, but I think he and Dale both thought it would be good for me to see some of the other side, what it is on the other side of the windshield, all the same stuff we knew.

but from another perspective can only make you better. Plus, I think they wanted me to get it out of my system, too. That first sportsman race, Dale was with Spotter. He sat up there in the condo on the radio, and I wish I could have had a way to record that. Oh, you and me both. He's telling me about the other drivers and what their cars are doing, and I'm seeing the inside of his mind for two hours the whole time.

He's talking and mumbling and stay in that gas, boy, don't you? And, like, what's his name? He's sideways, so what you got to do when you get to him is, I ended up running second. The guy that one race got thrown out, I got paid for second place on a completely cold turkey first time ever on a Super Speedway, and he was a big part of it, really.

But the winner got thrown out? Yeah, something was illegal on his car. So you're the winner. No, no, I was third or fourth, and one or two guys got thrown out. I think I finished third and ended up a second. Got you. Yeah, you eventually won that race.

But it impressed your dad. He was like, man, we just knew you're going to wreck about 10 laps soon as soon as you got tired. And Charlotte, and you know about the Charlotte track, about 20 laps into the race, he goes, how's your neck right now? And it was exactly the lap

before that I'd noticed, holy shit, my neck hurts. Charlotte's one of those tracks. It's tough on the G-forces, and he knew how long it would take. He said it at the damn lap that I felt it. How does he know what I'm thinking?

Because he knew. And so, I mean, I'm a car was pushing some and he'd tell me how to what to do about that in different situations and like stuff like I say that stuff was gold so yeah man I sort of got to thank him for getting that good to start I don't remember I think it was more he he wanted to be like trying to look out for me and just make sure that you know I didn't get killed but it just sort of you know don't worry about it I'm doing once once he made his mind up about something it wasn't a discussion it already had It happened most of it by the time he tells you, you know.

That's what I've always heard. Yeah, so you ran in the sports season series, won that race in 1991. You go into the Arka Series. You have 50 starts in the Arka Series, three wins. Your last race there in 2003, which you actually, you won it in James Hilton's car. Yeah. So, like, full circle here. It was.

How does that happen? I was just about done with the Arca Series. We didn't have our own car anymore, and actually, I think that was my cup car. I owned a car, but I hadn't run an ARCA in a while, and I forget what year this was, maybe about 2002 or three, something like that, you might have said, but we didn't have any points. We didn't have a car number. It was the only Arca race we'd run, and not even the season before, I don't think, and said, oh, man, let's go run this race.

I had some sponsor guys interested in it, and had an engine, some stuff left over, and a decent car. But we used James' car number, so he was, for that week, he was the official owner, and it was had the 48 on it, and that was just going to be his fun, nostalgic thing anyways. Kirk's finally driving to 48. That's what I moved to South Carolina for in the first place, and it never happened, you know. But here we are, one of the biggest tracks around, and even though it's an arc of race, it's like a prelim, but let's have, you know, let's have some fun. And the race was long enough where we had a pit stop at least once for gas and tires and stuff.

And so I had enough to make at the end, and there was another caution that came out, and I thought it was going to rain for some reason, the weather report, or maybe there'd been a drop or two of rain on the windshield, but anyway, I stayed out. I didn't get tires or anything. I just banked on it, rain. And we actually started back and ran about eight laps, and then it did rain.

And I'd kept a lead from just staying out under Yale. I was in about six or seven before that. So, I mean, kind of the gods were looking out on us, out for us that day. But it was great. I mean, it was James. I didn't know it at the time. It was his only win.

Yeah. He'd won one of the cup races way back in 72. I think he won a Tal'Dagga race. one time. And he was rookie of the year and second in the points in like 1965 or six. He was the only one done that except for your dad in 80 or whenever that was. Rookie of the year and second in the points at the same season. But I didn't know he never won a race. So this was this was huge and it ended up being a big day.

You ran two truck races, 13 Bush and National races, 26 cup races. You even drove for Jimmy Means, who was my favorite. So when you and dad were racing in the 80s and the 90s, I was a big Jimmy Means. fan. Yeah, I knew that. So, yeah, so you drove for Jimmy in 1994 at Daga. So why did you, racing in the Cup Series is nearly impossible for an independent team, particularly, you know, in this time.

They make it work. And you know that as well as anybody, how they make it work. Why do the independent, how does the independent guy push through the challenges financially, um, getting help? Why did you continue to do that? It's where my background came in. Learning a Ropes with Hilton and with Richard Childers also. Second nature, kind of.

Yeah, I mean, that was kind of my upbringing. And even though nobody had done it in 10 years, I don't think. I was the only one out there dumb enough to try it, I guess. But I'm in my 40s. I'm not going to get hired as a driver is. It's starting to be. A lot of kids come in and a lot of factories and money behind them and things. Whatever it was, I'm pretty much too old to get a job, especially in a Cups series.

And I was just not going to ever be any closer. I figured I had to do it however I could do it because it was just something I, it was a goal of mine. And, you know, we ended up pulling off a few things here and there and that nobody could do, I don't think, especially in the time frame that we did it. And with the stuff we had to work with and the cars, there's none of that really. I'm proud of because I mean I'm a car guy and if you saw the junk I was riding in you you know you should be ashamed of yourself dude you you know it's not really my claim to fame at all but it was all we had and I was either going to race or I

wouldn't and this was the only way I saw to do it yeah your racing career though started in 1981 I guess so yeah so you're on the stat books you're on the stat books you're on the stat books as having started at a race at college station, which is Texas World Speedway, oh yeah. In a car owned by Richard Childress. How did that happen? Again, we're doing the independent deal back at that point, and they made the West Coast races kind of together, so you could conceivably do it in one trip, even though nobody

had a hauler. It would haul two cars. But we took two trucks and trailers out there. We did the Texas race, and then people would swap cars and swap all the other stuff, take it home and then go on to California. So at the time, we were there in Texas with two cars. We had the road race car with us. The field wasn't full, so let's get those other cars and qualify them and go to it.

Your dad loan me in a driving suit. I just big bright yellow. Dad, long-in driving suit, too? Right yellow with one of those Austrian suits on. Wow. And gave it back to them. It didn't fit or something. I wore one of those good year ones.

There's little shiny things out there cooler. But I had number eight on it, and we made the three into an eight, and it had McDonald's on Richard had local McDonald's deal, just a franchise for the Riverside race, but it was already on the car. So here I was with number eight and a big time sponsor. And, you know, it was what was made like three laps. But that was kind of a little inkling of things to come, maybe. I didn't know it at the time.

Were you at all nervous, even though you knew you weren't going to finish that race, you were going to go out there and start it for the money? Oh, I had to be in uniform and back into pits before the first pit stop. To do your job? There was no, yeah, there was no talking about how long you're going to run. But were you nervous, though, just to pull out on the racetrack and start the race? God, I would have still been nervous even knowing. Oh, man.

But it was like, hey, you said you wanted to do this, so here you go. And you better go fast, too. You had a little bit different idea. There was two or three other guys doing the same thing with just the camber and everything's all backwards, you know. I think I beat one guy, so I'm like, hey, at least I wasn't the damn slowest. That's a bad, fast place. There you go. Yeah, that's not the first place.

It's not the best place to start out. Hey, Kirk, I've got a couple just random questions here, but, like, you know, you were talking, you were walking us through the 80s and Dale Earnhardt coming in. What was your first impression? How much did this guy start showing up? And what do you remember from him at the track? Was he ever in the way?

Was he not? There's always this, you know, the go-to, B-roll footage of Dale Jr.'s, sitting there in the garage with one of the cruise shirts on. The TV commercial, yeah. Right. So what was your recollections? He was young. Yeah, I was a kid.

So you can't. We didn't notice that much. I mean, he wasn't in the way. He was the hell's kid, you know, cool. But we had our thing to do and everybody had their job. And I don't have a lot of particular memories of any certain one day. I do remember him. He'd be there sometimes in his uniform.

them and looking back now that I've been a dad and I got two sons and I kind of know how little boys think and stuff I wish I'd have given him a job or hell yes you know it wouldn't have heard anything put him in charge of anything or let him roll tires or but I didn't know what his dad would say I didn't know you know if I should be telling him stuff to do or not I understand and we were all of us completely just focused on what we had to do and I couldn't let fun stuff be distraction maybe I'm not sure how looking back I regret that though I wish I had like

giving him something and said this is your you know give him a carburetor take a part or something that is exactly the way he describes it was exactly the way it was and I know he felt like let me do something he just wanted to be there he wanted to be part of the team he wanted to be with his dad he wanted to be I think he wanted to be

hang out with us more than his dad you know he got to hang out with his dad all the time and I just couldn't let myself see that I guess or just I didn't know enough about being a dad back then. That team was so laser focused and knew, like they were going to the racetrack and like he said, like they wouldn't allow themselves to be entertained by anything. There was nothing but what we had to do. And we were on top for a lot of that period and nobody wanted to be the one to let that slip, you know. That's a pretty astute observation

for you being that you were a kid and you could tell. I was so intimidated by dad. I was so intimidated by dad, I mean, obviously by dad, but by them, the team, him, the whole group together, the way they worked and the way they. And we had to keep that alive. I mean, we had to, the other people were, the other teams, some of them were, they didn't know what was going to happen next. And the more we could keep them on their heels like that, it was bullshit. But the more we could keep them thinking that, some of it.

Was it an act? We did anything we could to enhance that persona. Like I said, the, you know, you don't want to mess with it. those guys are, you know, like, you can't crack them or there's nothing you can do to rattle him, you might not even start, you know, Darrell would put things in the press and, you know, make articles and saying things about Dale. Hell, he'd cut the thing out and put it on the toolbox in front of everybody, you know. Really?

We weren't ashamed to any of it, and we had to stay in their face all the time. And I think that sort of backfired sometimes on our wives and families and kids, and they saw that side, too, and like it probably wouldn't the best. You know, it wouldn't have killed me to be nicer to Dale or let him, you know, let him hang out more. Or tell his dad, look, stop taking him off all time, let him hang out for a day or something. It wouldn't hurt anything.

But like I said, we had this shell that was us and we had to make it as bad as we could, I guess. No, that was the way it was. And it was, it was impressive. It was. In other words, we were f*** kids. They let me... We weren't as nice to the kids as we should have been.

They didn't... You know, when I was around, I would... I tried... I knew better than to get in the way. I mean, you was going to get lit up if you got in the way. But they let me hang around. They let me, you know,

sitting in the pits and they didn't run me out like a lot of kids in that time and day. You said when you were leaving, deciding to leave RCR, that you weren't going to another job, didn't want another job, but you did. Crew Chief in an Infinity Series

in 1996, how did you get kind of lured back? Or what was the decision to come back and do? You crew chief for David Green for one year, two wins, second points. More arm twisting. Really? Yeah. I had a shop actually back there behind Childress Complex. I was hanging bodies.

I was still just dabbling in it, but no direction. You know, I still, I was racing part-time, an arc of stuff, and the people with Caterpillar and Buzz McCawley. that owned that race team got with me and again said look you're you're too big of an asset to be sitting here let's we want to use you you know let's do something let's get your mind going again let's get your experience into this and we need somebody that we can like say we know what we're doing even though we're a new team here's this guy and here's you know you're going to be an asset for sure they're paying me a lot of money there's that too there's that too and you know I was just

kind of making what I could on the side and racing wasn't paying anything I mean it was covering my expenses about all. So, yeah, I tried that for a while. I was a consultant, and Bobby Allison told me what a consultant is. He said, that's a guy that borrows your watch and then tells you what time it is. It's kind of like I figured...

That's funny. And that's really all I put on my responsibility. I mean, it didn't seem to me... I did it for a while, but it didn't seem like I was creating anything or in charge of anything, really, or... I was helping, and I are a great helper. So were you a crew chief or

not. I wasn't the crew chief. He's listed online and raised some references as the crew chief on that car for that year. So I didn't know. But you're saying you were not. In my definition of it, I don't think so. Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think you're the kind of guy that appreciates titles. And that almost seems like you've been the crew chief title. I mean, you never saw yourself as a crew chief. Am I wrong? Probably not in the traditional sense. I mean, I try to change what that was. Back in the early days of the whatever mechanic, whoever was the crew chief was probably just the guy had been there the longest or maybe even the only guy like I was. But everybody did all the work on the cars from one end of the other.

Everybody would weld, would hang bodies, would do even drive the truck and whatever had to be done. Everybody did some of it. So I guess just the guy with the most of that jack of all trade experience could be the crew chief. And as we started building the cars, I mean, I was doing the design stuff and everything was my head pretty much. So I had my fingers on all of it. So then when I go to another big team and I'm just sort of advising all those guys that have their fingers on different things,

how they interacted like one department or the other, stuff like that I was sort of helping sort of be a liaison, but I wasn't the guy doing it all. So for me it wasn't the same feeling as being a crew chief was supposed to be. What is left in your life of your racing? pass trophies any mementos anything in the garage race cars i got no cars i got attic full of trophies and a lot of pictures and i brought a couple of them maybe embarrass you and your sister with but uh some me mehens a lot of trophies a lot of plaques and things most of the stuff doesn't mean

all that much to everybody but i mean it makes me when i go look some of that things after talking to you the other night i started i dug out some pictures and stuff just trying to kind of get my mind in the era again and how hard it was and how much stuff we did and what we pulled off my own driving stuff was impossible and back in the early 80s like you were talking about earlier with how we built a team was pretty impossible too and just how lucky we were for the opportunities and how lucky we got was got away with stuff and some stuff we didn't get away with but just some of the things we pulled off is what you can remind yourself of when you look at different things. things and somebody else looks at it and it's just a plaque, you know.

Yeah. The day that went with it is stuck in your mind. Yeah. So when I was thinking about doing this interview with you, I started looking around on social media and sort of brushing up on my history as well to be ready. And I learned something about you that I did not know. And that was that you have been playing poker professionally. And when I asked you about that on the phone, you said, well, I got to keep my creative,

you know, my creative mind needs a, needs a, need. Competitive mind needs something to do. So when did that start? I mean, have you always played poker? Has you always been interested in that? Around the racetrack, whenever it would rain out in the day and never wanted anything to do, some guys we'd sit in a truck and goof around playing poker.

I never really took it seriously till maybe about 2010. A buddy of mine had been to some of these bigger tournaments and sort of elbowed me into coming with him. And so it's just like the racing. And whenever, if you want to go to Daytona or Talladega and learn how to draft, you can't prepare, you can't learn that anywhere else. You want to go to Talladega and try to learn how to draft. The only way to do that is go there and try to learn it.

You got to jump in. So I kind of looked at poker like that, and he's, you know, at the professional level, I'm no pro. My record probably shows that. But to go play in that tall of grass or to, you know, to be at that level is fun for me. I mean, I kind of went from a kid that knows nothing right into the Cup series without any dirt track or anything in between. I didn't know what I was doing. So completely kind of cold turkey, it was the same kind of feeling for me that I hadn't been able to get that in a while with racing or with anything else, really.

But just to try to jump in there right with the big boys, even though you're not going to do that great, and I haven't. But to get there and do it, you know, a lot of other people can't say that. And it was kind of bringing some of that feeling back for me as far as competition goes. You're always looking for an outlet to put that content. I'm running out of things. Yeah. I've raised two batches of kids now. I've got some young kids again.

I had been married twice and so I'm kind of doing some stuff over that I've already done. And that's a lot of fun. But as far as new things and like you say, jumping in with the big boys and trying something else, I'm running out of ideas. Yeah. Yeah. So what is your future look like? You're going to continue playing poker? I'm hoping I can stumble into something just like I always did.

Yeah. Can I ask you something, Kurt? I started this interview. Before I met you today, I was already pissed off about the Hall of Fame thing, and you coming off the nomination list this year. And we had a conversation earlier about just Hall of Fame in general, and that maybe, like, you know, the disagreement or the debate, if you call it that, between Kyle Bush's 200 NASCAR wins and how people are trying to compare it or, you know,

to Richard Petty. And I made the point that there's just not a whole lot of people around right now that can, that can attest to, you know, the old days. So I start off this interview already pissed off. Now that I've heard your story, I'm even more pissed off, right? Am I wrong? About what in particular? There's not an advocate for you.

It didn't make me in the first year? There's no, no, no. There's not as many people seem to be advocates of your career with what I'm hearing is a lot of success stories. It's because half of them are dead. Well, that's my point. Is it so like, do I need to stop being offended about it or is there something that should be done? The way I look at is Clint Eastwood says, deserve got nothing to do with it, boy. You know, the list of names, if you look in the record books for, you know, crew chief stuff mostly,

My name's in there next to Smokey Unick and Junior Johnson. And, I mean, all these people that were heroes to me or were like, you know, just some bigger than life people. Racing was this whole dimension that you never thought a kid from Philadelphia's going to even be ever involved in, let alone do well. And here I am like next to that. All the big guys, my name's there already. You know, the Hall of Fame would just kind of sort of caps it off. And it was really a great feeling to be included on that.

list last year and you look at the people that are there and like holy smokes how could I be not only on the list but like way up at the list in some categories and it's that's a super honor already you know whether somebody officially recognizes or not ever that's up to them I already kind of know what I had to do to get there and how lucky I am to just be on that list and it'll happen sooner or later. They'll be running out of people for long. I agree with you, man. It'll happen. And there's only a couple guys that have won more championships than you have. You're one of the best crew chiefs that sports ever seen. And I was equally disappointed when I didn't see your name on the list this year. And I think a lot of people have voiced their opinions about that as well.

But it will happen one day. And I'll be there to watch you be nominated. And it'll be an honor and a pleasure. appreciate you coming here today. I know it was a little bit out of your way. No, man, it was fun. He got his kids to school, though. That was the important part of the... Yeah, sorry, I could have been here earlier, I guess. No, no, no, we would have wanted you to do nothing different.

You got to get your kids to school before you. Don't let us be the reason they didn't get to school. I have... To sit down and talk to you is something I've wanted to do for a really, really long time. Well, same here. And schedules and things, it's hard. It is. And you're in the mystery no more.

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Good to know. I am. I've had these for, I don't know, a couple months now. They've been through a few washes. And one of the things that I appreciate about them is they haven't changed. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you know how some, you know, especially the most, when you get real comfortable underwear, typically it kind of changes a little bit in size.

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Good to know. I'm not. So if you play a sport, you're not going to go to another one if you're sitting in a chair. Well, if I get, you know, I don't know. If I did get a little sweaty or go do something like that, I might try to put on another pair of McWeldons. Yeah, but you don't plan to work that hard today. No, I don't.

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So Kyle Busch won 200 finally Took him forever Yeah what's wrong with him Pick up the pace next time would you And you mentioned it last week Mike How disappointed Like when he gets out and does his interview On the frustrated way at Phoenix

He was talking about how he lost the races before That's the first thing on his mind First thing on his mind when he wins this weekend On the radio to his crew is Man if we had not lost those other races At Phoenix and so forth in Vegas We'd have I don't know how many races in a row I think it says to me, I always wondered, like, why is this guy such a poor loser?

How come he takes losing so badly that it makes you cringe? And that kind of answers that question right there because he is sitting here winning 200 races, this milestone that he's been looking forward to, they got the flag, they got the rolling out the big production after the race, celebrating this moment. They've carried this from racetrack, the racetrack to racetrack. And all he can think about is the races that he's just lost. over the last couple weeks. So that just, I mean, not to cut Kyle too much of a break,

but that tells you just how determined he is in winning and how much that he detests not winning. Yeah. And I don't know that I've ever known a race car driver that was like that. Well, the greats, and I'm talking about in athletics, I mean, like Michael Jordan, and the ones that are known for their wins, the losses seem to stick in their crawl a little bit more than the winds do. They can't get over it.

I bet that other drivers were like maybe dad and other drivers were that way. They just weren't as open and discussing it. Plus, they didn't have a microphone in their face all the time. They didn't have social media and things like that to go to. You know, it just makes me feel a little bit more comfortable, I guess, with the whole thing, knowing just how much that means to him. It really does mean a lot to him. So congratulations to Kyle.

there's been, you know, the funny thing, there's been a, it ain't a debate because it seems so one-sided, but there's been a lot of conversation on social media. And I try not to take too much stock in Twitter because it's a very small tip of the iceberg as far as, you know, the public in general. But it's a great place to go to complain. And a lot of people are saying, well, you know, it's not like Richard 200 wins. Well, I don't know that there is anybody saying it is. I haven't seen one person say, Thank you. This is just like Richards. There's just this whole demographic or large group of people saying defending this, you know, defending this thing that's not happening.

Nobody has said this is just like Richards 200. I haven't seen it. Have you? I have not seen that, although I did see the column that started trying to. I don't want to say take away from Richards 200, which felt like an aggressive approach to a hot take. Yeah. But, and I don't even know if you intend to get it. to that part of the conversation. But anyways, no, I have not seen people trying to compare the two.

If anything, I've seen people trying to reanalyze Richards 200. Yes. So that's the thing. All right. Nobody has said that I know of. That matters. Nobody that matters. I wouldn't want to. Nobody has said that they're the same. I don't know why everybody feels this defensive about it in protecting, you know, the difference between the two are, you know, debating the difference between the two. Richards is 200 cup wins. Kyle is a mixture of wins in different series. Still a very incredible feat.

The guy has just won a ton of races. And I'll be honest. Anybody that ever, if anybody did that, they would celebrate it. You think that people are going to, you know, if anybody else out there debating this or thinking this in the big deal, if this happened to you, your ass is going to be waving a flag. Oh, yeah. And, you know, I would too.

I would be like, hell yeah, man, props to me. I put a lot into this. And 200 wins across all three series. I'm proud of it. So good job for Kyle Bush. And he's, what, 33 years old, he's got a lot more racing left. It'd be interesting to follow and see what else he does. But you touched on it, Mike.

There's a column on Jeff Gluck, I think. had a guest column on his site about sort of picking through Richard's wins and sort of and analyzing which ones maybe weren't legitimate or I don't know if that's the right word. It's not the right word, no. Yeah, they're all legitimate. He's basically saying that they were pre-modern era. Right. It's in that original era. And so if you eliminated those from the equation that, you know, those numbers between Kyle and Richard look a lot more similar. But, but, but, but, but, but, I take a bit of an exception to that even approach to Richards 200. Because I don't think anybody is, I don't think anybody is disagreeing that there's two different errors.

Nobody actually is confused over the fact that Richard's 200s came during a time when there were probably fewer cars and there was also midweek races. I don't know anybody that confuses that, right? So don't go eliminate Richards wins. They were still wins. You know that he was the benefit of a, of racing. at a time when there was the pre-modern era and the modern era, right? Whatever you call the first era. And that's that.

The thing I took exception, I agreed with the guy on a lot of his points, but then here's where I split. He says, if I were at NASCAR, I would create a statistic called era-adjusted career wins. That would help fans better compare past drivers with a bit more realism. That's where you lost me. You don't need to go creating asterisks and stuff like that to go modify history. Don't go modify history. and NASCAR kind of has already done that by making a modern era.

What else is that than just saying that the 1972 on is a modern era? I don't think that that's a conflated issue. So I don't know. I think you took defense to it. Did you not, or you got a little defensive about it based off of people pecking at Richard Petty's 200 wins. Yeah, of course. I think that that's sacred and you just don't go there. Richard Petty has hung his hat on 200.

It's as synonymous with him as his number and his sponsor, STP and 43. I was there that day when he won that race. And I remember that, you know, that celebration and that landmark, you know, milestone that he had accomplished. And I just, I think it's crazy to even discuss whether that's a realistic number or not or whether some wins maybe weren't important or justified. Right.

And so we weren't there. We can't go back and try to legitimize history if we weren't there to experience it. You can't, I don't want to hear or read somebody saying, well, it was against such and such competition. And it was against gas station owners and factory fords and Chevroletes right off the parking lot. You weren't there. Right. I wasn't there. How do you really know how tough the competition was that day or what Richard Petty went through to get there, to go through the process of getting into that race and competing in that race?

And just because of the link, you know, there was a conversation about the lengths of the races being short, being on dirt tracks and the field being small. I mean, it just blows my mind that we would take something so sacred and try to, especially in the face of Richard Petty. I mean, he is at the track, involved in the sport. He's there every week. It's disgusting. It's insulting. Yeah. And to what end? Where does it end if we are now going to do asterix on things? Think about this. If you're okay with doing that on Richard Petty, in a hundred years, then you're okay with us doing that to Kyle Bush and whatever amount of wins he ends up with.

You know what I'm saying? I mean, it's like, well, Kyle Bush, you know, in a hundred years, NASCAR cars have wings on it. And Kyle Bush didn't have wings on his car. So you can't, you had to actually X out some of these things. things. You know, that's when they, that's that day when they, those days when they ran gasoline in their car. Kyle Bush ran gasoline in his car. Now we run it on solar power NASCAR. I mean, in a hundred years, you're going to be able to scrutinize everything.

Are you going to take away Kyle Bush's wins? No. Don't take away Richards. Don't take away Kyle's. There's incredible feats. Yeah. I mean, there was, there's Xfinity races where there were 17 to 20 cup drivers in the field. And then there's Xfinity or infinity races where.

where there's not any cup drivers in the field. You don't look at those two races is any different. No matter, you know, when you win the E to one, they go in the stat book and it counts. It was a start and a finish and somebody had to win it. Yeah. Yeah. What's up?

I'll tell you this. I was listening to both you. I think your sacred part of it hits the nail right on the damn head, and I haven't heard anybody say it like that. The asterisk point, not having an asterisk, is the absolute truth. And it got me thinking my buddy, Bloomer texted me, and I just pulled it up. and he's a funny cat.

And he said, Tonight I'm going back in time in my DeLorean that's in my driveway. I'm going to invent the Bush series in 1959 and the truck series as well. I'm going to change the course of history in Level Cross where the Petty Shop is so that Richard will race cup, bush, and trucks. When I get back to 2019, he'll have 550 wins. That's why you don't put an asterisk next to that bit of history, because it is that. It's history. It's sacred.

Yeah, I just get a little worried that it's just like the Hall of Fame. Like, you know, it's challenging sometimes because there's so many guys that belong in that Hall of Fame. And there's not a lot of people that are around today that were experiencing their career and their impact on the sport. And as we get further, this is just something I'm concerned with with the history of the sport as a whole. As we get further removed from it, do we forget just.

how important these guys were and just how difficult it was for them and how challenging times were for them how hard it was to trudge through those particular decades in the sport and i feel like that you know this is touching on that a little bit it's not appreciating exactly how challenging that might have been and uh because none of you know like i say none of us were there we got to always try to appreciate the history of the sport and the guys that created uh created the sport yeah you know and and damn man I mean, Richard is, you know, he's heard this. Yeah.

You know, and it's got to annoy the hell out of Kyle and everyone else involved that's celebrated Richard for all these years. And I know that the article and the whole point wasn't to insult King, you know, the King. It's right. That's true. It wasn't. But it could easily if the conversation were to expand and if people start, I mean, if we have this conversation out there, for it to get taken seriously is what I'm a little worried about. You know, the thought just occurred to me. It's like, this is not to disparage our current media,

certainly not to disparage Jeff Gluck or the fellow that wrote that column. But, you know, I wonder if we're sort of experiencing a little bit of the after effects of the way the media and the coverage of the sport has changed so much. And that a lot of those old-timers and those historian-type journalists are no longer in the media center. Yeah. You know, you're Rick Minters, your Jim Pedley's, you know, obviously a lot of these guys that not only know the history, of the sport, but we're friends with a lot of the people that we're talking about and maybe some of the people. And now that they're not in the media center, they're not covering our

sport, like maybe we're feeling a little bit more of the after effects and not having those old school guys. And again, that's not to disparage of current media. They do a fantastic job, but, you know, having those wily old veterans matter, especially in the NASCAR hall votes, especially, you know, we don't have a whole lot of them anymore. They, you know, they lost their jobs a good many of them did and not knocking you know Kyle because that accomplishment is sick but you know you look at what mike joy said you know it's kind of a cool line where he's like he may not be the best of all time but he's the best of his time but i was listening to that and the first thing i thought was like jimmy johnson sitting there going like hey i'm still here yeah i'm still here jimmy has all those

wins and championships seven championships more more wins in those you know that the first 16 years that then Kyle has had in Cup. So, you know, it's interesting. It is. It is. I mean, Kyle is an amazing driver. No doubt about it. God, I feel like that we could have done all this without ever dragging the king into it.

Right. It's true. And just celebrate what's happening, man. The final round of qualifying. So it's kind of, you know, it's been a few days. And a lot of times we don't, once information or news gets a little dated, we sort of move on. but the cars, nobody, you know, everybody that watched all that the cars in the final round didn't get to the finish line in time to be able to make a lap.

And so nobody recorded a time. And then Austin Dillon won the poll by default because he had the quicker time in round two of the three rounds. So NASCAR is going to have to make a change to qualifying to, you know, sort of make it entertaining and get everybody out there on the racetrack. I just kind of think that it would be fun to talk about what everybody's a opinion about what they should do is. We know what happened. We know there needs to be a change made. We know that they're probably going to be making some sort of a change. It will be interesting to

see how creative they get with that. They do not apparently want to go back to single car qualifying, which was NASCAR's format for years and years. So does anybody have really an idea? Mike, go ahead. Heat races. Mike, why do you think heat race is going to work? Well, it checks the box. One, to me, I feel like it's a good way to set the field. I mean, I think that that's what a lot of racing series do. And two, you don't deprive NASCAR of its show. Yeah. And I think that that's an important point

and why they don't want to go back to single car qualifying. And even though I know that that's a very pure and the purest part of me would like to see single car qualifying, I get their point. It's not as entertaining and they have to make shows. And I think that heat races would be a good way. And listen, go ahead, shoot holes through it. People that are not, you know, shoot holes.

There are things that would have to be worked out. You're going to have crashes. You're going to have sponsors. You're going to have to tell it. I get it. But at the end of the day, when you peel back all the layers, it's a show and it sets your field. And that's really what we're trying to do, right? Trying to set the field for the A main, right?

But we're also trying to create entertainment. And it is an entertainment business. All right, your thoughts. What is your idea? You know, I don't hate that idea of running heat races as a, I'm thinking about from my perspective of being in the booth as a broadcaster, that would be really entertaining to determine the starting grid by a couple heat races. Honestly, man, I mean, unpopular opinion here.

I'd go back to single car qualifying. I really would. I would go back to single car qualifying and leave it in the hands of the broadcast to help people understand how entertainment. that can be. We've seen some impressive, if you go back and look in the history of the sport, we've seen some very awesome moments in qualifying, in single car qualifying. When records get broken or a car, you know, goes out there and dominates, runs an incredible app. He's, the focus is that driver in that moment. Whereas in group qualifying, you know, it's a, you juggle all the cars

that are on the racetrack. When you're trying to broadcast what's happening in single car or in group qualifying, you're sort of juggling as you're watching cars go out on the track. You're like, well, we need to show this guy. Okay, this guy's got to pop this guy on the screen. He's got a good lap going. And a lot of times you hardly see the entire lap. You just kind of catch this, okay, here's the car coming across the finish line.

Great lap. He's on the pole. In single car qualifying, the focus is on that driver during his entire run. And it adds a sense of pressure. And I was never more nervous in my driving career than for qualifying. Wow. That's a point. All right.

Wow. I hated how on the spot you were. And so, like, man, you're next in line. There's a guy out on the track. He's running. When he goes by, they're going to send you. All eyes are on you. Oh, my guy.

What if I screw up? My team's depending on me, and I'm the only guy on track. Everybody's watching. And so you're just vulnerable. And I never felt those type of nerves when the race was coming around, because it's a long race. You know, it's going to play out. We're going to find our groove and work into it. Qualifying is, boy, it's hot lap.

Go out there and run as hard as you can in that moment. When we went to group qualifying, I lost a lot of that nervousness. and worry and concern because I wasn't the only guy on the track. And if I screwed up, I was kind of lost into fog. You know, there's so much happening that it wasn't quite as vulnerable, and it wasn't quite as intense, and the nerves weren't quite, the pressure wasn't quite as severe. So for me, I'm more entertained, I guess, by single car qualifying.

Yes, it takes longer. It takes more time in the day to do it, which is, you know, a new, a totally different challenge for the sport to try to find ways to fit that into the schedule as we try to squeeze the schedule and make a little simpler. But for me, I would prefer single car qualifying. Dillner, you know, you got an opinion? Yeah, to me, I look at it twofold. A, it's the point of view from the fan.

Right. And, you know, so that's why the heat races would work. But I also look at it, you know, from a fan, it looks like a practice. Okay, it just visually appeals. No, no, no, the group qualifying we currently have. looks like a practice. From the TV side, the few times I'd be at home, maybe not at the track, I loved watching the throttle and the tracking of where that driver was compared to the pole speed and is he in the yellow, is he in the green? And the other thing that I always think of is, I always think

about the little guy. Okay, you got Jimmy Means' team out there, or Jeremy Clements or, you know, this guy or that guy and say the Xfinity series. Sometimes they may not be shown because of, it's nothing that TV is doing wrong in this new format. Whereas when they had their single lap or their two laps to do it, they had their time on TV. And there's a value to that for those little guys. Yeah, I think with technology today for the networks, we are getting to where we had the technology to put a ghost car on the screen

so you can see, you know, we used to just be able to have like a bar or some sort of a green number. Yeah. Where you can, you know, as technology gets better, that single car qualifying can become more entertaining for the casual fan to be able to see if he's gaining or out, you know, beating the car that's on the pole. We'll see. I mean, there won't be any changes going into Martinsville. The next race where that will probably have an effect is at Texas where drafting will be important for qualifying. So I believe the change will be announced soon, but it won't take an effect until we go to Texas in a couple weeks.

This weekend, Adam Limpke with J.R. Motorsports, we're going to talk about a little grassroots racing. Adam's a new driver for us at Junior Motorsports in the Late Model Stock Series, and he won his first start, her first official start, we'll say, at Hickr Motor Speedway this weekend. Congratulations to Adam and Josh Barry and that whole team. Josh did not run. Josh takes a few of those weekends off to focus on Adam, the young driver and our guy were trying to school up. Josh has become not only our premier late model driver and winning a ton of races, but also a bit of a teacher and someone to mold these younger drivers that we're bringing into what we want out of them as far as race car drivers goes. Matthew, you went to Myrtle Beach Speedway.

What all did you see there? Man, I saw the Whelamodified Tour kickoff at season. Great short track eats up tires like it's, you know, whatever crazy as grit sandpaper there is, man. And had a good time. Drove back at night. I was falling asleep behind the wheel What'd you do down there? Did you work?

I worked. Yeah, I worked a little camera for just one day kind of side deal and on the way back I was falling asleep kind of doing the bobbingeve and I looked and I'm like 12 miles outside of the rock.

Yeah. So I decided, let's pull into Rockingham that's going to be my rest area so I slept in, I cranked the seat back, reclined it, caught some Zs, woke up, watch the sunrise over Rockingham Speedway.

Where exactly did you park your car? I parked it literally outside of the windshield. The trajectory of my parking spot was just so I could see the Grandstands, the Rockingham Speedway sign, and the Big Rock. He positioned his car. Exactly.

This man's ate up with it. And then I put on Facebook that I was at a motor inn, and my mother took it literally and was like, I thought you stayed at a hotel room. I'm like, Mom, it was a joke. That's funny. Wow. So Rockingham still looks good. You know, we were just talking about the place a week or so. I couldn't get in.

Like, there used to be some holes and stuff where you could get in and all that stuff. They got that place locked down. Like I took a walk and I was like an ice cube when I got back to my car. So you were trying to sneak. You were going to get in as far as you could go. Oh, yeah. No doubt. That seems smart.

That needs to be in a segment next week sneaking into racetracks. Because I know a few of us here are guilty. Oh, yeah. A few of, I know one of us is me that has not done it. So that means that leaves you and Matthew. You snuck into some tracks? Oh, yeah. You don't have to say which ones, but how recently?

Uh, 1999. Okay, so it's been a while. So it's been a while. Statue of limitations fast. You're good. All right. We're talking about some grassroots short track racing. Carson Ellage did not race.

She was scheduled a race out west this weekend but did not compete. Junior Motorsports had a reasonable day at Fontana. They took a little gamble on strategy there at the end of the race and stayed out and trying to hope to get a late caution and have one extra set of tires to be able to dominate the race at the end, but didn't get that caution. Had some good speed. Michael Annette, another great weekend very fast. Noah Gregson had a very competitive weekend up swing for him. Another thing I saw on social media before we wrap up this segment, Eric Church did a quick tribute on dad during a recent concert. That's been all over my social media.

Everybody's been like, hey, do you see this? Yeah, I mean, those things are always nice to see. And it was not as much as that Eric Church did it, but the reaction that that number three and the name Dale Earnhardt still gets. Hell yeah. Some two decades later. I have to say, makes you feel great. It's something else.

It is. That people are still moved to, when they see that number or when they hear that name, that is something else. Yeah. Yeah, that was special. Yeah, I feel the same way about Richard and his 200 wins. All right. Well, let's get to Ask Junior.

Whatever the lowest type of memory storage is on it. I had to back up phone. stuff. I thought you had ordered a new one. No, no, no. So that's just, I got some. I just need something. I don't even care what version it is, as long as it's got more storage than this. Yeah, yeah.

I can't even get my email. I got all my own. All my own are the big storage. We're live. We're live. Hey, everybody. All right, hey, sorry, we were talking about cell phones. Mike.

Mike got a new phone, well, he's got a temporary phone because his other phone fell out of his pocket, and he ran over with his tractor. Got to be careful when you're on a tractor. This is the Ask Junior Live segment on YouTube. at Dirtymo Media. Presented by Nationwide. Presented by Nationwide. Thanks everybody for tuning in.

Let's get right to it. All right. Our first question coming in from Megan Nielsen wants to know, is there a current NASCAR driver or an up-and-comer that reminds you of your younger self, either off the tracker on? No, I mean, that's weird. Like for me to sit there and go, man, that guy reminds me of me. I just can't. I don't have that happen to me.

What do you think about that? I'm thinking. Now, I don't think it's as, I can see how it's weird for you. Yeah. I don't think it's a bad question. Who in this room reminds you yourself, Mike? No, no, no, I get it. No, I get your point.

None of y'all do. But I could take a stab at it. I could take a stab at it. Okay, yeah, yeah. By all means, someone else take a stab at this. Blaney. Okay, Ryan Blaney. I mean, again.

How so? How so? Single as hell. You know, no prospect. You know, like, you know, No prospects of that changing anytime soon. That was the way you were. I don't think he has as much of that rebellious kind of thing you had going on.

I mean, he ain't wearing bandanas. He ain't bleaching his hair blonde. He does grow it long. But he does do other things. Right. Now, from a driving style standpoint, I wouldn't be able to really assign a similarity to it. I have a hard time comparing styles of drivers because I look into it so. a driver's style for me is a perfect reflection of their personality and no two drivers are the same in personality in my opinion.

I mean, everybody is different and their choices and decisions on the racetracks are their own. And I never really see somebody who reminds me of any other driver, you know. I don't see, like Jimmy Johnson, I don't know who to hell to compare him to. It depends on the day in the race or Kyle Bush or any, or Harvard. I don't really see comparisons. They're all their individual self and unique in their own way. And that's been tough for me for a long time. So to compare myself to someone else, be hard for me to do.

Matt wants to know, how is that Class D license on the dirt progressing? Well, I've had my hands full, so I ain't had a chance to race anymore when I racing over the last couple weeks. But I did get my D. So you start as a rookie, Mike, and then you race like three or four or five races. You try not to wreck and you have a safety rating that gets higher as you wreck less.

And because you can win races and if you're crashing a lot and getting a lot of hitting the wall even or other competitive other cars, your safety rating will not go up. So the only way to graduate is to run a certain amount of races and bring that safety rating up. So I got a D license, which is the next level. And then I'll go to C eventually if I race enough. What I'm driving now, I think, is a crate late model and a fixed setup. so I don't have to worry about the setup. It's all done for me, and I just jump in there anytime I want and just go racing.

But I've been real busy and hadn't had a chance to get on there. I try to dedicate at least two hours a week to playing video games of some sort. That's impressive that you can get that. I try. Me and Amy over the last month started to try to create a calendar where, you know, this is what we're going to do this day. It's not the Bible. It's just an encouraging, let's take out of the lunch every Monday. let's have date night every Tuesday, stuff like that.

It's good stuff. Droids 13 wants to know. Would you consider doing a charity race where all eligible Earnhardt would race? That would be fun. That would be fun. We'd have to do it at a go-car track or something. I mean, that would be the only way to really do it, and it'd be fun and not, you know, cost a ton of money. Denny Hamlin has a showdown.

I think it's happening again this year. No, it's not. I thought it was because it's on our schedule. Yeah, I think I thought it was canceled. It's canceled. Well, anyways, Denny Hamlin has had this showdown that he puts on, which is an incredible event, late model cars, but it seems it's a big undertaking. And so that'd be tough for us to do.

Can I do a quick roll call and try to figure out who are all the eligible Earnhardt? So it'd be me, Carrie Kelly, Jeffrey. Bobby Dale? Sure, Bobby Dale can run. Taylor would probably come out and race. She drove Dad's car at Goodwill. Um, can we bring Aunt Kathy back? Yeah, Aunt Kathy.

And Kathy raced a lot in a 70s. Mamma used to run the powder puffs. That was Kathy. Yeah. No, Mamaw. No, she did. She told us the story. Oh, really?

Did she? Absolutely. Yeah, Ralph put her in a car. Ralph put her in a car with no practice, no practice. She was so mad at him and she wrecked it. Oh, yeah, that's a great story. Okay, we need to hear that one. Yeah.

I haven't heard that. Yeah. But that would be enough, but I mean, you've had more people in the race. we could have my uncle Danny we'll fill it out Yeah yeah That's one of them old Richard Petty fields From back in the pre-modern area

Some people might have You know Some problems with the field size But it still have a good time It counts a win Aaron Vassar has a non-racing question He wants to know What pointers do you have for being a first-time dad

For somebody who's about to be a dad Oh good Lord Well there's a lot You know the But I'll say No matter what I say or anyone else tells you, nothing's going to prepare you for that whole experience. You know, everybody always told me to get a lot of rest.

And that's great advice. So when the baby goes to sleep and takes naps during the day, a lot of times you don't want to take a nap. You want to do whatever you're finally got your hands free. The baby's down. You want to go do something or do stuff. Try your best to try to go to sleep. take naps.

And because you're not going to get a lot of sleep at night. I don't have advice that I think could help anybody because all the advice that I heard did not really work for me or sink in. It wasn't bad advice. You got to live it yourself. You got to live it. Yeah. Here's one.

Give your wife opportunities to pull away from being a mother. Of course. And to be honest with you, like really try to go at lengths to give her time to do that. And she's not going to want to. She's not going to want to. and that's fine. Don't like kick her out the door and say, see you in two hours.

But find ways to give your wife and especially a new mother opportunities to just not be responsible for a living human being right there all the time because that can be taxing. So, yeah. So for in the middle of the night, get up, take care of the baby on some nights when the baby wakes up in the middle of night, get the baby up in the morning and some mornings, change diapers during the day, make bottles, wash bottles. You know, do those things that you see her doing and try to give her a little bit of a break because she's working hard. Yeah.

Working way harder than you are. So trying to do some of the heavy lifting around there is helpful. Hey, just to clarify for anybody who's listening to this live, speed51.com report, I just pulled it up. Danny Hamlin Showdown will not be held in 2019, but the foundation, Danny Hamlin Foundation, saying they're trying to bring back the event at a future date. I saw it on our schedule earlier this year, but. Didn't know it was canceled. All right, Carolina is 24.

Wants to know, would you be brave enough to have Ken Schrader on your show? Yeah, of course. We haven't even thought to have him. Like, Ken Schrader is not. Not true. Not true. Let me look in our guest list. He's on there.

He's on there. Is he? Oh, yeah. Oh, really? I love Schrader. And we've already talked to Schrader. If he could just stop racing for two seconds. Yeah.

I've been texting with him. He's running that dirt car. Oh, no. Shrader's a definite. I don't know. Matthew, did you give Deliard. Did you give Dale a different list? I know.

No, I thought I put it on there. I know I've been texting with them. We have a list, folks, in the notes of our iPhones, that we're all a part of them. Everybody's here, and he's not on it. There's a lot of other people on the list. I'm going to go at it right now. So that's a great thing that I think a lot of our listeners can do

is try to give us some advice on who you'd like to see on the show. And Schrader would be awesome because me and him has some great history. And he obviously was a great friend of my dad. a great friend of mine. So that would be a lot of fun for me. Keep those ideas coming. All right. Matthew Hacker wants to know.

What's your favorite TV show? I don't know. You know, I'm not really watching a show right now. I guess the office was my favorite TV show. And I watch a lot of documentaries. Love documentaries. And that's just kind of, I just scroll to the Internet and see what people are talking about and which ones I need to watch and what documentaries are cool right now. And then I'll try to watch it.

Me and Amy will sit down and watch them together. All right, that'll be it today. All right. Thanks for tuning in to Dirty Mo Media's YouTube channel at Ask Junior Live. Presented by Nationwide. Presented by Nationwide. And Ralph. Perfect.

Trying to remember what brought this up. But me and my wife were hanging out the other day. And we're talking about some of the dumb things that we did as kids that got us hurt injuries that we had. And so we thought, I thought, you know, we're always trying to, yeah so something we were talking about batteries or something with a battery an issue with a battery and i told amy i said man that reminds me of when i was a little boy and i had these little tanka uh excavator you know uh things and little tractors and stuff and the i had worn out the excavator's arm so it wouldn't stay where i wanted it to be and the way i figured out how to get

this arm to do what i wanted it to i could pinch a double a battery in the hinge of the arm What? And it would hold the arm in place, so my tractor would do what I wanted it. And one time I was twisting the arm and squeezing that battery, and it shot something in my eye. Oh, right. And so I had to have my eye flushed out, and I was, like, really close to doing some real damage there.

But it got me thinking, man, this is a great segment for the show, is to see if our listeners would give us some ideas on some of the dumb things they did as kids that might be similar to that. And we had a real good turnout, wouldn't you say, Leah? We had a ton of responses. I think I spent all day, Friday, just laughing. Right. We went out to lunch, and that's all we kept on doing was laughing about it.

Do you have a favorite? I have a few favorites. There was a couple that I was trying to read to Dillard that I couldn't even get them out because I couldn't stop laughing. Probably Travis Plank, sled riding downhill backwards, and hit a tree, spread eagle, spent the night in the hospital with two crushed vertebrae, and talked like Mickey Mouse for a couple days. I guarantee it.

I guarantee it. Oh, that's not good. Mike, do you got a story as doing something as a kid that ended up resulted in an injury? I've done more dumb things as an adult, unfortunately. But I remember in school, this was actually in middle school, but you know the pipe cleaner, the little wire cleaner, the wire stuff that bends. I don't know. It's got the little fuzzy stuff, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah.

There was a power outlet now. to me and I got that pipe cleaner and the power out that's a hole and I got this cleaner and I stuck it in there and come boom and you know I don't know in your school but like every one of the classrooms had the television ours didn't work for the rest of the year like it it was done it fried it by me sticking it you know it wasn't even plugged in did you get electrocutted no but it scared the crap out of me and everybody looked at me when they realized I was And then there's that moment when you're safe and everybody knows you're fine and it just turns, you idiot. Like, you know, like now it's concerned for your safety to you're the stupidest guy ever.

And that was really dumb. And that was something that I could have got hurt a lot worse. Sure. Or could have been hurt at all? That's not one of my prouder moments. I fell off a train, broke my butt, broke my tailbone in fourth grade. What were you doing on it? Like, was it moving?

I was supposed to be on it. No, no, it was, uh, I lived in. Chattanooga, they got this big train museum, old depot called the Chattanooga Choochoo. And there's a train that says, do not walk. It says, do not go on this thing. I was on it. It was on it. And I fell off and landed straight on my butt, right?

Good sit. Yeah. There's nothing more mortifying than having to wear a cushion. One of those, they called them donuts. And it looked like a, it's like a fluffy toilet seat. And you had to wear it in school, in class. outside the pants or in it. For a month.

No, outside it was sticking my pants. No. Duct tape it on there? No, you've clearly never broken your tail going before. But I did that. That was dumb. Two dumb things. I've given you two dumb things.

Oh my goodness. One of our listeners, Swans Bob. Six years old, goofing around on the stairs with his brother, went down and chipped his front tooth. Ten years old, playing tag, tripped in the sand, face first, into a steel slide, chipped an adult front tooth. 16 years old, in the rain on my 10-speed, sharp corner, face plant, chipped another adult tooth.

Yeah. His nickname is Chip. Chip. Swung Bob. Billner, what you got? What? As far as me, dumb moments? I don't do anything stupid.

Come on. Okay, come on. I know you find that. Actually, as a kid, I didn't. I was probably, I was living down here, so I was in my 20s, and we were having some beers playing. I think it was NASCAR Bill Elliott Challenge, you know, where you press that button to keep it on the bottle of Talladega.

And we had such a close finish. It was going, like, and it gave us the result. And we were like, ah! And I won. And I was like, yeah. And I celebrated. and I kind of leaned over and I tore my MCL. What?

You told your MCL. Playing a video game. Celebrating a billy, NASCAR challenge. My goodness. Win. God of mine. I like to win. Treadmill or something.

Getting better shape. I was in good shape back then. How do you run a, how do you ever tear an MCL for video games? I'm an idiot. That is. What other ones do you see on there that are funny? Shaggy Pup said when he threw a water balloons out of a tree, one of the cars that ended up getting hit was an off-duty policeman.

The injury that he received was an ass whooping when he got home. Yeah, I guarantee you. What about Derek? Do you see the one with Derek? Yeah, I once tried to jump off the top of a slide using a plastic grocery bag as a parachute. And he learned a lot about graphics or gravity and physics. I blended the two together, gravity and physics. He learned a lot about graphics.

I saw a lot of people that tried to jump out of windows making their own parachutes and things like that. Oh, really? We had a lot of those, yeah. I think every kid's probably tried to build their own wings. or, you know, fly like a bird and all those type of things. But I don't know that I would... Slide down the staircase and a mattress, one person's... Yeah, I don't know that I would have...

Jumping off a slide, that doesn't seem that high when you're a kid. No. No. You know, doing stuff on your bike. I mean, like, you eventually get that point where you're like, okay, I can go down the stairs with my bike, you know, or I can do this with my bike, and then you always realize there's a threshold of what you can and cannot do on your bike. Yeah, Matt Wood had a similar idea when he was five or six,

had built a parachute out of no... book, paper, and packing tape. I can't imagine why that didn't work. He watched McGuiver. He climbed to a second-story window overlooking the front of their house and took a leap of faith. Oh, my gosh. See, that would be the one that I would have a hard time doing because I know that I could, you know, even as a, I don't know, five or six years old, that's high. Yeah.

Wouldn't you be scared? Not everybody's that smart, I guess. I mean, jumping off the top of the slides, one thing, the second floor or another. Leah, do you have any? No, I was the perfect. child. I've never broken any bones. I've never been stitched up. Everybody in that room over there,

they're not willing to tell their story. I don't have any. They have a story. I literally, I did get a black eye once, but that wasn't my fault. That was because my dad and my brother were playing catch, and my dad hit me in the face. That's a good story. But I don't remember it.

I was like, I think I like just started walking. Oh my. You've never done anything stupid. I've never broken. I know. I'm not asking Andrew. I'm saying, have you ever done anything stupid? Not injury.

Dumb. Just dumb. You've never done anything. Oh, come on. She's blocked it out of her mind. I remember internally at Gateway. You've probably done some goofy things. I don't know what it would be, though.

Not like, I'm kind of a scared cat. I'm kind of a security cat. I don't put myself in dangerous situations. I know. I'm boring. I'm boring. It's true. Mark Allen said when he was growing up,

they had a clubhouse in the bank of a creek. That sounds freaking cool. I want to hang out with him. We had an oil. can full of used oil, diesel fuel mixed, and they used it to start campfires, and one day his brother was starting the fire, and the can

caught on fire itself, and then he threw the can into the creek, and the creek caught fire because it just spreads across the top of the water. Whole creek's on fire. That's a good one. That's a good one. But a clubhouse in the bank of a creek, that's pretty cool. Yeah, right. Yeah. That'll be our next

social media survey. Like, what have you done that's so cool? The dumbest thing, I think on my in my memory that I did was I stabbed myself and I was at church when this happened, which makes it even more odd. But I had, we were doing the lanterns. We were cutting the top of the milk jugs out to do light candle lanterns or whatever you call those on the street of the church, entering the church, you know.

And so there's a, in Sunday school class, there's a lot of us cutting the tops off of these jugs of milk. And I had my pocket knife. Oh boy, I'm going to be smart. I'm going to get this knife out. I'm going to cut a lot of lanterns open with this thing. I ain't doing this scissors or whatever else. Everybody else is doing.

I'm going to do it my knife. And in five seconds, I had that knife in my thigh. Oh, gosh. Because I was trying to cut the jug, and it slipped and went right into my leg. And I basically got my sister or somebody. I don't think I was driving at this time. I think this was like 12, 13 years old. But I did not tell my dad.

or anybody. I went right into the bathroom, pull my pants down to see what was the damage. All right, I got this hole in my leg, and I put butterfly bandades on it until it healed up. I still have a scar.

But it should have had probably four or five stitches there. I would have thought you wouldn't have to tell your dad. It would have been obvious because I think that would leave... A lot of blood and stuff like that. Yeah, it did not bleed. It was weird.

What? I mean, it didn't bleed so much that it bled out. Are you a sort of cyborg or something? I don't want to get too graphic, but I mean, it just, it was something that I could hide, and I did. I hit it, and I put butterfly band-aids on it, hoping to God that it was going to heal up. Well, you're in the right place if you were hoping for God. Oh, my God.

It's a miracle. He didn't believe. I mean, don't they usually bring people in to see that sort of stuff? I don't believe moan, bud. Good Lord. Well, all right. Okay. Would you have gotten big trouble?

I think so. I think I would have gotten my knife taken away. I would have been embarrassed. My dad would have thought I was an idiot. So I was trying to avoid all of those things. All of those things still seem better than bleeding to death or cutting yourself. It seemed like it was like this hole in my leg was, three quarters of an inch, maybe half inch long.

That's still pretty soon. I know. It was a very small, you know, fold open. It didn't even, when the night, it was one of those nice that didn't even stay open. Like, it didn't have a, it didn't have a catch to hold it open. It would kind of fold up easily. It was super dangerous, stupid. I'm embarrassed.

Yeah, this is the dumb, this is the dumb segment. Dumb things you're dumb, and that's, it's a good thing. It's a therapy thing. You should try it sometime, Leah. See how this works? Dumb and injured. All right, Mike, time for the white flag. Let's send it home.

White flag, bud. White flag right there. White flag. White flag, white flag. It's a big week this week, you guys. Anybody want to take a stab why? I mean, you know, there's that thing. There's that thing you do.

That thing, yeah. Dirty Mo Media's newest video original series, you guys. Oh! The Drop. Man, I'm excited about this. It's debuting Wednesday. This stars Bubba Wallace. in ways that you may have never seen Bubba Wallace before, hopefully.

Now look, and I'm going to already tell you, it ain't for everybody. It ain't for everybody. It's going to be that one person who's going to sit there like, I don't get it. Well, that's because it's not for you, but it is for others. So I'm excited about this. It's very new for us. The drop, it'll debut Wednesday. Is that right, guys?

I mean, is that what we're talking about? This is the part of the white flag that I tell you to watch the deal with your download television show every Tuesday on NBC Sports Network. Now that we've done five or six episodes, do we like the hour? or TV show or do you miss the old 30 minute show? You like the hour? What? I love it.

Yeah. I didn't want the hour and now I like it. When are we going to be two? Oh, Brian. I'll be hearing until two in the morning. Hey, we aim to continue to grow to take over. Mike, I'm really excited about that bubble of wild stuff, man. Man, I'm glad to hear it.

Dirtymo Media. That's right. We're expanding. Regional content. We're expanding like RCR back in the 80s, early 80s. We don't know how we're doing, but we're just doing it. That's right. That's right. Listen, last week I was talking to a former NASCAR driver.

Mike's knocking down things. You know, that driver you asked me to talk to that was writing his own book, I was talking to him, and he was seeking advice for us because of the success of racing to the finish. And it got me thinking that, you know, this racing to the finish is every bit as important today as it was the day it dropped back in October. So I wanted to make sure I put it in this week. week racing to the finish. You can still find it. You may know somebody that needs to see it. There's still people out there that need it. And you can go to Dalejutor.com slash book to purchase your copy. And that's it for White Flag today.

Appreciate it. Thanks. Good job on the White Flag. Here's some odd history for you. Rusty Wallace was Black Flag for jumping a restart at Martinsville Speedway in October 97. That's not the weird part. He did give the win to Jeff Burton. But after the race, Wallace cursed on a radio interview and was fined five grand by NASCAR. So, you know, fans talk about, you know, or drivers complain about getting fined for saying things. Well, it happened back then too. Good.

At Charlotte, the next week, Wallace brought an armored truck carrying 500,000 pennies to the track and delivered them to Bill France to pay his fine. That's awesome. I had never heard the context of that. I heard he had done that, but I didn't know why. Now I do. That's the most gangster way to pay your fine ever. Of course, NASCAR wouldn't accept any of eventual.

actually had to write a check instead of the pennies, but his point was made. And you know what? We will be able to ask him about that next week. He is our next guest. Next week's guest, Rusty Wallace. That's all for today's show. Thanks for everybody on tuning in. We hope you enjoyed Kirk Shelmerdine, future Hall of Famer.

Dang straight. We'll see you next week. Check out Dirty Mo Media on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Dirty Mo.