The Dale Jr. Download - 340 – Andy Petree (Part 2): The Earnhardt Years

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

In Part 2 of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s conversation with championship winning crew chief Andy Petree, they dive into Petree’s time at Richard Childress Racing and his relationship with Dale Earnhardt. Before that, Dale Jr. and co-host Mike Davis cover a lot from Dale’s busy week. Dale took a long-awaited pilgrimage to Dawsonville, Georgia to interview the Elliott family. After Chase Elliott’s appearance on the Download in 2019, Dale and Mike took heat for comments made about Dawsonville. Dale clears the air, shares details about his trip and explains why he visited.It was not a happy morning in the Earnhardt household. Find out what big problems Dale came across in his home that have him stressed. He then discusses his weekend working on restoring a Nova Wagon that he posted about on social media. Find out where he got it from and what his plans are for it. Dale also made a trip to Nazareth, Pennsylvania last week to speak with Marco Andretti. Hear about his time with Marco and what peculiar passion Dale reveals. Then, a hint at what is coming soon on Lost Speedways season two.Part two of Dale and Mike’s conversation with Andy Petree picks up with Petree discussing leaving Leo Jackson and Harry Gant’s team. Hear his reason for departing, why it was one of the most difficult things he has ever had to do and what Gant revealed to him years later.Petree goes into detail about his transition to taking the ‘premiere crew chief job in the sport’ for Dale Earnhardt at Richard Childress Racing. Find out how the first meeting with Dale and Childress went and the buzzword that motivated the trio. Once at RCR, Andy shares the reaction from the team seeing him walk in and the resistance he initially faced.Early on, a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting between Dale, Richard and Andy forced the driver and crew chief to bond. Hear why they needed that and what happened later in the season when Andy brought the first car built under his direction to the race track.In 1994, Andy got to race Dale Sr.’s Busch Series car at Martinsville Speedway. Find out how the deal came together and the rival crew chief who performed the role for Petree.Both Dale Jr. and Andy were present at a test at Talladega Superspeedway in the mid-90s and both got time behind the wheel. Hear the advice Dale Sr. gave both of them and how Dale Jr. took it literally.Petree ultimately made the decision to leave the No. 3 team three years into his tenure as crew chief. Listen as he explains the one time offer he had to contemplate, the risk he was taking by leaving and if he regrets the choice he made.In his role as owner, Andy explains the challenges he faced and what ultimately happened to the organization. Then, he discusses leaving the sport for a handful of years before returning as a broadcaster. Hear how he got the opportunity and, what it was like jumping back into a competition role at Richard Childress Racing after ESPN left the sport.In Ask Jr. Presented by Xfinity, Dale shares an interesting Next Gen car analogy, talks about the deep thought he put behind joining Twitter and tells us why he wasn’t always a fan of in-car cameras. 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. The Dell Jr. Download. Hey, everybody, it's Dale Jr. back again for another episode of the Dale Jr. Download. With me as usual is Mike Davis, my co-host. How you doing, Mike? Doing great, buddy. Leah is in the house. Jason is here. And we've got part two of Andy Petrie coming up. Part one. Yeah, part one was amazing.

A lot of a great story. We don't plan to split these into two, right? They just sometimes we get going and the guys having a great time, having a great conversation. in the chair and we go really long and the stuff's good enough that we just can't fit it into one. And we don't want to cut it out. No. It feels like it's stuff that people need to hear and so we're going to make it two-partner. Absolutely.

So this episode of the download, part two of Andy Petrie. But first, let's go to open topic, man. We've got a lot to discuss. I guess I'm scarred, permanently scarred because of how I turned into the big pool room basher. Oh. When I wasn't. Uh-oh, what happened? Oh, well, you were a bit of a part of the swaying public opinion.

Hold on. If we're going to talk about Dawsonville, I want to have that come up. Hopefully you're recording. Now, we're recording. Are you ready? You want to just die right into this? Yeah, I do. Because I'm a little nervous.

Why are you nervous? I don't know. Did they give you a hard time? No. Okay. All right. So, I go to Dawsonville to interview Chase Elliott for a documentary that's being made about him. You know, I go and I go to the pool room.

I told, we get there, I told Chase, we'll talk about everything that happened in a minute, but I told Chase, I said, I want to go to the pool room and I want to get a burger. He wasn't wanting to eat there, so we didn't eat there. But I'll get a burger another time. The owner was in there and the employees, as soon as I walked in, everybody was nice, had a smile on their face. They weren't like, oh, here comes Dale Jr. And I had a great experience.

I shared that. I went, I shared on social media that I went there and people said a lot of people said, I'm surprised they let you in. I'm surprised they didn't throw you out. I'm surprised, even after the digs that you gave them, right? I mean, I'm thinking, wow, what did I say that left this impression that I didn't like Georgia, Dawsonville, the Elliot's, the pool room, and anything else involved and connected to them? Well, I remember. remember we were at this table and I was asking Chase Elliott all right so chase gets a job racing here wins exfinity series championship gets a job at Hendrick motorsports he is now a career race car driver

for NASCAR and the hub or most of the job most of the people that work in NASCAR live around this area the shops are up here Hendricks up here I just assumed that chase would probably end up moving here at a convenience, not because it's better. And he did try that. He did. He got an apartment and he was like, nope, not for me. I got a pilot's license. It's just simple as me to fly up to the meetings and all the things. So I'm going to live where I live. I wanted to know, hey, that is a unique choice that I didn't see coming. I thought you would end up here. Why did you want to stay there? What is it about that area, right? Tell me. And immediately, you, helped. I did.

The conversation steer toward, oh, you're bashing them. You don't like old Georgia. Yeah. Okay. What's wrong with George, Del? And now, yeah, so everybody thinks that I was bashing on the pool room and all the other things. No, it is something that I have heard about my entire life. It was a bucket list, check a box kind of thing to go there. I still haven't had the burger. It looks like a great place to hang out.

Okay. So when you say that, I'm starting to recall all that conversation. I remember I didn't gaslight the conversation. I didn't gaslight this stigma that you're bashing, but I did add a little amusing fuel starter for it. I just was just kind of sprinkling a little fuel starter just to kind of get the little kind of get the little kindling going. And hey, I guess I couldn't control the brush fire that happened afterwards.

But of course, who can on Twitter, right? Who can? Yeah, so that, I'm glad that I got to go. Everybody there was really super cool. I didn't expect anything else. Chase made the comment where in the car he said, man, this place hasn't changed in 30, 40 years. They built, they sort of built at a big four-way intersection.

They kind of built out or built up a lot of newer shops and, you know, the targets and the Walmarts and the Honeybeaked Ham and all the chain restaurants and stores are kind of like 10 minutes down the road at this big intersection. and he's like since that happened nothing really happened in town as far as growth everything's happening over here on this highway

and I was like man I'm gonna be honest with you I wouldn't want anything to change around here in this on this in the town limits of the city limits or whatever of Dawsonville that little two or three four block space I was like I wouldn't want this to change it's like going you know this is like

why would you want this to change it's so it's so it's Americana right you know it's old school and it has this great a real nostalgic feel to it. So much so that it beats the convenience of being here. Does it make more sense to you now that you've been there? Why Chase you want to stay?

It's where he grew up and he just loves it. Like you love your hometown. Like you love your home team. Like he feels connected to it. He feels supported by it. He talked about when he drove his car through town after he won the championship. They brought a show car in and they said, all right man we want you to get in his show car and drive into town and he's like he had no idea

what to expect and he said the turnout floored him blew him you know and so that and how they embrace him he wants to be he wants to be close to that he's there's some loyalty i think and he wants to be close to his mother and his dad he wants to have that physical connection to them physical closeness to them he lives just across the way from them not too far away in a very modest home that that It's got some family connection. He's super into family. It's not about, you know, the big glorious house on the lake or even his father's home is quite modest, to be honest. Yeah.

And it has some family connection, you know. They're not, you know, Bill probably went through that phase in his life where he was building a new home and, you know, thousands of square feet and all the things and a big pool in the backyard and all that. and they kind of are quite sensible in how they live, and he likes to keep it that way. And I think, man, it's beautiful country. South Carolina, North Carolina, I mean, Tennessee, all those areas, there's so much beauty in the countryside of this part of the country. You know, I don't really travel west or north too often.

I'm sure it's just as good up there. I don't offend anybody, and please, Mike, don't steer us in that direction. Why are you banging on the West Coast? Please don't do that. Why are you doing? What's wrong with them? But anyhow, it was really important. I really loved it.

I see why he wants to be there. I got you. No, wait a second, though. Can I ask another question? Don't get mad at me for asking this. So did the Twitter backlash affect you? Did you, were you upset about that? I wasn't upset about it.

I just think it was an, it didn't have to happen because it wasn't, I wasn't never. We were obviously kidding the whole time. I don't know. Maybe everybody on Twitter's kidding. So my point is, is that you are the one that preaches to me and it's always helpful for me. Like, you say, quit, quit. and what people say to you on Twitter. You're the one that walks me off that legs.

I know. Yeah. I guess I need to be reminded myself, not to... Don't worry about them. Not to worry about it so much. Right, let's do that for each other. Right. Screw them.

Screw those Twitter people. Oh, now I'm on my side. Oh, Lord. All right, let's take a pause real quick. The Wood Brothers are... Well, the Wood Brothers got a helmet that they're taken around to get all the Hall of Famers to sign. And a guy out there has a helmet if he can bring it in.

And so I guess this is for the Wood Brothers to, and I'm the only one left to sign it. Me and Red Farmer. So I'm going to sign this helmet. Live on the show. Hey, guys. Narrate his autograph of signing. Dale Jr. takes the pen. A lot of Hall of Famers, I guess.

God, is awesome. I think we'll glossing past the fact that the coolness of the fact that Dale Jr. just got to say, you know, all the Hall of Famers are signing a helmet. And so he needs to sign a helmet. I mean, just the sound of that's kind of neat, right? So this morning I had to go find a shower that worked because my house is having some water issues. My water, a water pipe busted in the master bathroom. I got water coming out of the cans, lights up in the ceiling. But we're getting it fixed.

It's going to be expensive. He ain't lying. No. Oh, buddy. Me and sunny. Oh, funny things. So I've got some corrosion in my. the water system. It's about 14, 15 years old. We work real hard and we're on a schedule to make

sure we're putting everything in the system to make sure that this doesn't happen. It's a long story and there's a lot more to it. Anyhow, we're upstairs. Called a plumber yesterday to come figure out, all right, where's our leak at? Find a leak. He goes up there and finds a leak and he finds a bunch of problems. And so he's like, we need to fix all this stuff if you want this to be right. And I said, I want it to be right. I don't want any problems. So he leaves and he's going to start this morning. Well, last night, my property manager, Sunny, he's at his house just up the street. And I still got water leaking out of the ceiling.

So I called Sunny. I said, man, you know, the guy came and he didn't fix anything. He said he's going to start in the morning. He didn't seem too worried about us using the water, but it's still leaking out of the ceiling. It's just staying right. And he goes, no, we got to go up there and check it out. I said, yeah, let's go up there and get curious. So we dug around in the attic, found the elbow that's, that's, that's,

corroded and busted. It's just drip, drip, drip, drip, that kind of a flow. And we're going to turn the water off. All right. So Sonny reaches over at the, underneath one of the water heaters upstairs in the attic and starts to try to turn a valve to shut the water off coming out of that heater.

And the valve broke. Oh, wow. Yeah. So now we got full pressure water coming into the attic. Oh, wow. And so Sonny's holding his hand over this space, right? keep the water from flow going everywhere. And he's like, oh, we got big problems.

We got big problems. And Sonny never says that. So I'm getting nervous. And I'm like, well, what are you going to do? And he goes, you got to go downstairs, shut the water off of the house. So we should have did that from the start. But anyways, I run downstairs, shut off the water, turn on all the faucets. So it'll pump the water out of the house and go back upstairs.

And Sunny's like, yeah, we probably need to do what the guy said and replace all this stuff because it's all corroded from the inside out. So I had to go down to a guest house that I got on the property to take a shower this morning. And it took me a while to get some hot water going down there because we never use it. It's been one of the mornings. Two days, I think we're going to be without water for a couple days. And hopefully it would get tuned up. And it's pretty stressful.

Yeah. That ain't a lot, man. Water damage or any of that stuff, that's not cheap. It's crazy, man. I got a ton of insulation upstairs in my attic because I have. had a lot of condensation issues in my bedroom. And we worked really hard to figure out why that was happening. And we ended up fixing it with a couple, putting in a couple returns.

And sealing, not caulking, sorry, sealing up the baseboards. We had somebody come in and vacuum the house, put a vacuum on it, and sealed up to all the baseboards. So we'd stop. We had some heat loss. We had some air conditioning, seep through the baseboards. All this is kind of boring. Well, no, I mean, this is where you.

you go and tell, listen, if I had those problems, I'm bringing it to the podcast. So I'm a little stressed out today. Yeah. I posted some pictures on social media. I'm also really sore, Mike, all over, head and toe, sore. What'd you do? All right? Other than crawling through your ceiling.

I've been working on the Noval Wagon. So I got this Noval Wagon, right? 66 Nobel Wagon. I bought it from a friend of mine. He didn't tell me it was rusted out badly, right? He's got some bad rust. Big, big, brus problems. He didn't tell me that, but I am stubborn.

When I bought it, I dug into the car a little bit, saw all the problems that I've got with Russ that are pretty severe, and stayed stubborn, and I'm headlong into trying to figure out whether I can turn this car around and fix it. I spent this past two or three days, basically stripping the car apart, taking the doors off, the front fenders. Now, on a 66 Chevy Nova, the front clip bolts on. the whole front of the car bolts on. All right, I'm going to Google it because I want to see a visual here.

Well, look, I'll send you some pictures. Okay, because I want to see the noble wagon. Well, the people listening. Can't listen. That's true. Paint the picture for them. Paint the picture for us. Here's a picture of the front clip that I took off by myself now.

Nobody's helping me. So you unbolt the whole front end and it just comes off in one piece. How about that, huh? It's kind of like going, I guess it's like the new gen's next gen. Right, right. The next gen car. You just take the front clip off. Unbolted.

Yep. I pulled the motor myself, pulled the drive shaft, pulled the rear in housing, pulled all the rear suspension off of it, pulled all the interior out of it, took the dash out of it. I've almost got this thing down to time to sandblast. So we're going to take it, I'm going to take it and get the cab sandblasted and then try to fix all the rust issues. There's rust everywhere. It's a little rusty. When did you buy this?

I bought it about three years ago from a buddy of mine. All right. So it's been a project that you've been just, it's been waiting on you. Yeah, I hadn't been able to work on it. I want to take it and turn it into, it's not going to be high end. I'm not going to, I'm not going to make it perfect. I'm going to fix the rust. I'm going to rhino line, like bedliner, the interior, and the bottle, a whole cab, except for the exterior paint.

I'm going to bedline the interior so that, you know, it won't rust anymore because this is going to be, I'm going to take this car to a sea beach sandy environment. I got you. All right. Yes, I'm going to make it tough. Get a beach ready. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's just going to run. We'll make sure it runs and doesn't look awful. Right. Right. That's cool. So you're not bringing in the Robert G's on this Nova. You're not bringing in all these other people. This is a family vehicle that you take to the beach.

I like it. Yeah. But I shared some photos on social media over the weekend about doing some work on that. It was a lot of fun. But, man, I'm beat up. Yeah. Yeah, things start to hurt a little bit more in these years. What year is that?

66. Last week, I went to, we went to interview Chase Elliott in Dawsonville. I went up to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, to interview Marco Andretti, doing a little work for NBC. I'm sorry. I'm just looking at these. Those are cool, huh? Those are cool looking wagons there. It's going to be a great little family grocery getter.

Yeah, that's neat. For the vacation home. Yeah. Marco Andretty. Yeah, I went to, well, we talked about, I went to Dawsonville to interview Chase Elliott, tons of fun and I think we you know from what I from what everybody said it was there we got great content documentary coming out for for Chase in near future I got to see the bill Elliott complex this you know he built his I don't know where to start so I got to see the shop

in the space where they ran their race team out of all those years they built them powerhouse motors yeah Ernie Elliott yeah in the 80s that said it you know set on a poll at talladagan set the record for two 14 mile and out of it. iron qualifying and all that. So I got to see where all that happened, which was really cool, checked a box, bucket list item kind of thing. Bill and Chase both are heavy into aviation. Bill's always been a part of that, and that's been a part of his life, I guess. And he built his own airstrip, runway, airport, right behind the shop. It's pretty cool. Is it? I was going to say, what is that like? It's pretty cool. It's a throwback because he built it a while back, but they,

you know, they still use it. He has other people that use the space and land planes. there and fly out of there. And I was just really, it was just really cool to walk through the shop and see some of the, I saw Bill, he was in there working. Bill works every day over there. Oh, really?

Yeah, I was surprised. You know, you think he'd be hanging out, taking it easy, cruising on through the rest of his life, but he can't stop working, hustling, grinding. He was dirty, work shirt. Just like we would want Bill Elliott to be. I mean, that's awesome. Yeah.

Did you talk to him much? Yeah, a little bit. I interviewed Bill. Okay. Yep, and Cindy. It's fun conversation. They led us into their house and did the interview there, and Chase took me out on a boat, Lake Lanier, beautiful lake.

Yeah, it is nice. We had a great conversation, a lot of fun. So Chase was great to spend the day with us. He doesn't have that much time to be devoting to things like that, but he gave us a lot of time. The next day, we went to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, to interview Marco Andretti. I've always wanted to talk to Marco. me and him have similar lives as far as our fathers and grandfathers and and and their

racing history. Marco just is a really, just seems like a really super nice, easygoing guy. He's reached out to me and we've had conversations over social media and through text and so forth over the last several years, but we've never spent time personally together in the same space. So he invited me to his house, sat down in his living room and interviewed him, asking him all the questions that I wanted to ask him about, you know, growing up in that family and what that must have been like for him and how that worked out and where he is today.

He's not running full-time Indy anymore, but he's preparing for the Indy 500. Is this going to be on the Indy-500 pre-race? I think it will be in the pre-race of the Indy-500, but there's some other evergreen stuff they'll put out on social media that'll work anytime, any day. But he was gracious, man. He was, he showed me his entire house, like, We weren't there to tour his house, but he took me around and showed me everything that he's got going on there. What was it like?

What was his house like? The house that he lives in is a family home that he grew up in. His dad's in Indianapolis now, but he's kind of taken over that house, and it's really got some nostalgic appeal to it, some 90s sort of architecture and stuff that's still there that I like. I'm for some reason I'm super nostalgic now and kind of into old houses and I even follow a couple counts on Instagram about old houses. I know it's weird. I don't know why, but I just love the nostalgia and decor of some of the stuff that was going

on in the 90s and the 80s. And the fact that some people still keep it pristine and some houses still look that way is pretty interesting. There's some parts of his home that are definitely like that. I don't want to go into detail, but too much detail. but because it's his home. It's his home. It's private residence.

But it sounds like it's modest. Yeah. I mean, it's nice. It's nice in what you might expect from 90s Michael Andretti. Right. So this would be in Pennsylvania, right? You may have said that already. He's very close to his grandfather physically.

They live near each other. So, you know, they get to spend time together, Mario. So that's pretty cool. Mario just hanging out in Nazareth, man. Just doing Mario. That's cool. Yeah, he's the man. One day it's Bill Elliott hanging out, just, you know, getting in the next day it's Mario.

I mean, are you kidding? What a week. I had an awesome week. This is freaking racing legends. Yeah, it's fun. It's neat, right? But we're getting ready. The fact that we're going and doing these things gives me the feeling that we're

cranking up and getting ready to, our NBC job and requirements, responsibilities, and things are starting to ramp up, meaning that it won't be long, we'll be going back to the racetrack. You ready? And doing some booth work. Our first race is the Nashville Super Speedway. And, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it. Me and the guys, my boothmates, Rick and Steve and Jeff Burton are already starting to get together

and have lunches. And we're going to sit down and watch a couple races that we did last year and just figure out if there's anything we want to change or, you know, It's also good just to kind of recall about what your job is and what you're trying to accomplish in the booth. So we'll be ready, man. It's going to be a lot of fun. Try to take a little bit of time off in June and get with the family a little bit before we get to working too hard. Yeah, once the season starts, you're off and running, man.

The schedule just amplifies. I will say this, and we can end on this, I just want to remind everybody that since we're talking about NBC and all the stuff that's got me thinking that Lost Speedways, don't forget it's coming out, man. we are in the final weeks of delivering that project. I don't want to get too deep in that, but we're feeling good about it. Yeah. So Lost Speedway, season two is coming out very soon.

We, you know, what I've learned from people when they saw this show the first time is a lot of people thought, man, you know, I guess they assumed we picked the best eight tracks to feature last year. And that wasn't really the case. I mean, we just picked the tracks that made the most sense to get to. considering the pandemic and all the things that was going on. And I think the tracks that we have for this season are as big or maybe bigger in some cases, recognizable names and so forth, but also the stories got better somehow. You know, I have to tell you, like there's enough racetracks out there to do

100 seasons of lost speedways, and there's enough stories out there to certainly do many, many more seasons of lost speedways. We just have to find the stories. You've got to get out there and literally look for what's happened at these racetracks and see if there's anything compelling. And when we find something compelling, a story, we put it on a whiteboard and say, here's a track with a great story. We did that about it, I don't know, maybe 10 months ago, a year ago, it seems like, for season two.

We put a bunch of tracks on a whiteboard. We narrowed them down. We had a big list of tracks that we wanted to go to. and we got some great, great stuff. I've seen some of the episodes that you guys are working on and almost finalized, and it's, I don't know, I have a hard time not being honest and telling you, it's better than last year. Yeah.

It is. Yeah. And we've gotten better. Yeah. Our editing, our shots, our storytelling as a group, as a production group, has gotten way better, I think, as we now know what this thing needs to be. to be what the vision of the project is. Last year we were kind of learning as we go.

Right. Our guys, you can feel the confidence in our producer and director as the shows being made and being filmed and we're working. And there's some great backstories on a lot of the shows that we'll talk about and some extra content that we can put together for the people when they see this season. There's a lot that was going on in the background. but I'm loving what we're seeing. Can't wait for people to be able to watch it

and can't wait for that feedback to come. We had a really good year last year with season one and a lot of great feedback, and I think we surprised a lot of people with the product that we made, and I think this season's better. I agree. I agree. Look forward to that.

All right, guys, it's time for Andy Petrie. Part two, all right? But first, let's get a recap of part one. My uncle took me to Hickory Speedway when I was 11, 12 years old. And I got there and I heard those cars running from the parking lot. I'm like, holy cow. And I went running up that ramp in front.

Just running. I didn't pay ticket, nothing. I ran on top of that. And I looked down at those cars that were practicing. And I knew right then that was it. I was done. I'm telling you, nothing else in the world mattered. We get the car ready to go to the first race.

And I've got it sitting in this little garage we had Newton and Ned comes by. And he says, all right. And I had it all kind of just sitting and making it look. look right and, you know, he said, how much wedge you got that thing? And I'm like, holy cow, what is that? What is the wedge? Yeah, I mean, really? I mean, I was 17 years.

Sure. I'm like, I thought it meant how much tilt, you know, from left or right. I said inch and a half. He goes, perfect. We show up the track. We ain't got a clue. I mean, you know, crossways have no idea, right? I really wanted to be in racing.

I wanted to work on, you know, in a cup team. That's where I wanted to wind up. And he went out on a limb for me. He went out and talked to a good friend of his junior Johnson. and told Junior that I was this great tire changer. Right? I got, he,

Junior needed a rear tire changer. And so he put it in this, you know, big push for me. Keep in mind, I'd never changed the tire. And so Junior's jacket, caution comes out,

he goes, four tires. Here it goes. I'm telling us, here we go. So we went out there and changed those tires. Phil, Phil's great.

I won my first race as a crew chief with Phil in the Cup series. Yeah. At Talladega. So we got some good memories. About that race. What year? That was 88. Yeah. What about that, right?

How did he win that? Like, to go... What do you mean that? Go back? He had the fastest cars, right? No, I know. But what was in that car? Okay. Statute limitations hadn't run out on that one. No, it's run out.

No, I don't think so. We had a few tricks back. Back then, it was, you know, it wasn't so much... If you built a car by the rule book, you want to know where they went. Oh, yeah. So the way you raced is how you race to the enforcement. I still think we just try to... to pry out what was so good about that 1988

Talladega. Okay, good. All right, listen. They're going to let go, listen, your statute of limitations may not be up. Ours passed a long time ago. You don't have to say. I can't believe I'm going to do this, but I'm going to go ahead and tell you what it is. All right. Let's hear it.

Okay, so we run the Daytona 500 in 88. I suspected they were sucking air under the restrictive plate. Back then there was. Bobby won the Daytona 500 that year, I think. Yeah, he sure did. And I was suspecting this. And so I went, told Leo Jackson, he was going to be really mad when he said. But I went and talked to Leo about, you know, if we want to compete, then we got to do

what they're doing. I said, we got to figure out a way. They're finding a way to get air around that restrictor plate. We have got to figure it out. So he got mad, went to work, fixed a manifold. It's one of the most amazing pieces of art you've ever seen. I mean, cut it in pieces, made it, put these holes in it. So we put that thing on there. And Leo did it right. I mean, it was worth a pretty good advantage. Yeah. And we ended up winning. Give us some context about Leo Jackson.

You've mentioned his name several times. So, like, who was he and what did he do? Okay. Leo Jackson was, you know, back in the 70s, you know, Bob Presley drove and won all those races. A ton of races in that red number four. That was, that was? That was? Oh, yeah.

They built that. Well, I didn't know that. I thought that that was their family car. No, no, that was Leo and Richard Jackson. I got so many pictures of that car. And they won over half the races all over the country. Yeah. I mean, crazy how good they were.

They were ahead of their time. And so he ends up going cup racing with Dave Marcus a little bit. And I was working for Johnny Hayes. And he went with that 55 team. We're just kind of getting that thing off the ground with Denny. And he goes and gets Leo to come over and kind of be the crew chief. And kind of abandoned what he was doing with his, because he was going crazy trying to do his own cup deal. He said, yeah, I'll let somebody else pay for it.

I'll go to do that. And that ended up becoming Leo Jackson Motorsports a few years later when Harry Gant came from Travis Carter over to drive our car, and we still had to 33. Wow. So that's Leo Jackson Motorsports, and we called it Skull Bandit Racing back then. And that was the team that I ended up buying after I won the titles with your dad. Harry Gant. So you talked about Harry setting up that car in his shop, and so you've been around Harry for a while.

How do you end up crew chiefing for him? Like, how does, why did you move from Fields deal? Like, how did all that happen? Well, like I said, I worked on Benny's Cup team, and Leo Jackson was, you know, the crew chief, then the owner of that car. And when we won in 88, Leo was the owner. And then in 1989 is when we kind of split that up with a 55 became Richard Jackson's team. And then we formed this new team that was, you know, Leo Jackson Motorsports. Asheville for Harry Gant.

And he, you know, Leo had already made me the crew chief of the car that Phil was driving, but so he wouldn't know if I'd move up there and build this team. Let's transition. You have to leave. You have to tell Leo, Harry, and all them you're going to leave. That was tough, man. How'd you do it? You catch on to the things that really matter.

But I'll tell you, that was one of the toughest things I've ever done in my life. Because Leo Jackson was and he is to this day, like a father to me. I mean, he is, I don't have more respect for anybody on earth than he. him. I didn't really want to leave. You know, I wasn't looking to leave, but Kirk Shelmerdine had retired. So here's, you know, the premier crew chief job in the sport is available. I didn't go looking for it. You remember Terry Satchel? He was an engineer back at GM that I used early on. I was one of the first ones in the garage to really embrace engineering and I had him working with me. And then he ended up kind of transition to all of the GM teams

working with everybody. And he was telling me, you need to go over there and, you know, I think you could help them a lot, man. I think you could. You need to go over there. get that job. I'm, you know, we just won, you know, we're winning races over with Harry. Everything's going to good. But Harry is 52 years old now. Yeah. I won't win championship.

And I know, it's, you know, I actually tried to get Leo to hire Jeff Gordon. And he wouldn't do it. And so I'm kind of able to dead in on that. Jeff was just driving in the Bush series. And then, so this happens that, that Terry Satchel said something to Richard. And then Richard ends up calling me one day. I'm like, okay, man, I guess I got to go, I just got to go see. Yeah.

You know, so I take my two boys, they were young at the time and my wife, and we go drive down there on Sunday. This is after the season's over in 92. And I go and pull up in the parking lot, and there's two cars in the lot. And so I walk into the, what's now the museum, but that was the main shop. And I walk over into Richard's office, and there sits Richard and your dad. He shows up on Sunday to meet me. And that right there was like, that meant a lot, right?

You know, the best driver in sport wants me to come there. And enough to show up on Sunday. Yeah. So we, you know, we sat there and we talked and talked and talked about it. By the time, you know, I left the room, I decided to take it. And so, but I was, I said, I really do need to talk to my family about it before I make the final decision. But I'll let you know. I feel good about it.

So I get out the legal of this. I get out the car and start talking to the kids. we're driving a little bit. I said, I just, you know, make sure that we're making the right decision here. I said, what do you guys, what do y'all really want me to do? And my son, Joey, he says, I don't care, long as it's Earnhardt. You know, he wanted. That's pretty awesome.

Yeah, that's what he wanted. What was their best recruiting pitch? They were all about winning the championship. I mean, that's all that team was geared towards. They didn't talk about winning races as much as the championship. It came up, I mean, multiple, multiple times. And that was my goal. Oh, it was.

A trigger word for you, yeah. Because that's what I won. That was on my list. I really wanted to win. And I knew it was my best chance, right? And so this is really cool. So how much you need to make? Sitting around this round table in Richard's office.

And at the time, I think I was making $70,000, $65,000 a year working for him. Yeah. But Leo knew we'd been winning races, and he knew that he was going to have to pay me more to keep me because, and so he said, I would probably be able to make about $100,000 or something, you know, the next year. So I kind of throw that number out there. They go, oh yeah, I saw them look at each other. And they go, I said, oh, yeah, we can do that.

And I'm like, dang it, I shot too much. Should have asked for more. And so I recovered real well, though. I said, but if we win the championship, it's going to be double. And they're like, choked a minute. I said, that's what we've been talking about, right, is winning championship. So it worked out the first two years. That sounded a good deal.

Yeah, yeah, it did. So you go back to your shop. How do you tell all those guys there? Okay, so that was a tough part. Yeah. So, you know, go talk to Leo. He somewhat understood, but he was really disappointed, man, because I basically ran the whole company. Right.

You know, I was, he didn't even to make budget decisions, you know, if we could afford it, you know, I made the decision on what we could buy, what we could do. I mean, it was, you know, so it was going to change the way that whole team was operated. And I just couldn't, I had to go, you know. And it hurt me. I mean, it hurt bad. I mean, it was painful to do that. Even Harry, it was just a huge. year or two ago. Harry tells me, I talked to him on the phone, and he said, you know, it really

hurt me when you live. And I said, really? I said, you know, and I was like, dang, I didn't. He said, I would have paid you. I'd have paid the difference myself to keep you. Did they try to keep you or did they know that this is too good of an opportunity for? I think they knew that it was already decided. I don't, I don't remember us talking about it. Big difference in performance for that team after the fact. And it wasn't but a couple more years, Hill, Harry, retired. He retired, I think, 94. I think was his last year. No, 94 was the last year. Yeah. Yeah, so a couple years. So your instincts were right about, you know, his career and how much more he had left in a tank.

But do you think about, like, what might have happened if you'd stayed? No, I don't have any regrets. I never really looked back on it. Because I just don't think that we, I know we couldn't have won it. We couldn't have competed against Sternhardt in back in that time with what we had. So you go to RCR. One thing that I remember. is jumping ahead of the head of it a little bit. But I remember winning the championship, or dad went in the championship,

y'all went in the championship, and being at the banquet. Yeah. And I don't think I'd spent much time around you because I think I was peddling with racing myself, so I wasn't really going as much anymore, but I remember seeing you at the banquet. Yep.

After the banquet, running upstairs somewhere. We're going after. Well, you don't know this part, but so we stayed actually the presidential suite at the Waldorfis story is like a big, I mean, apartment. I mean, got to be two, three thousand square feet, multiple bedrooms. And so, you know, Dale, he convinces me and Patty to come up there. Come on up here, you know, come up early.

Come, y'all stay with us in our room before you, you know, this is earlier in the week. So we can stay at the presidential suite with them, which is kind of cool. And we did. But then we had to move out because junior was coming up. Yeah. Moved me. Move me out. Kelly, too.

Not just me. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's nice to know that I didn't get shoved in some room and down the hall. You were piddling around with late models, I guess, back then. Yeah. And it might have been one of those.

It's right in that time frame. I would run a late model race or two. Yeah. You know, when we'd have an off weekend. You did. I show up at Hickory. I think it's the only time we ever race against each other. Was that either, I think it was 100 lap or 200 lap or 200 lap or Hickory on a Sunday afternoon.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, you'll like this, Mike. So I sit on the pole and finish second. me and Pete Silver had like identical cars and ran for the lead the whole race and he ended up beat me a little bit, but we lapped him. And so he, you hadn't been running Hickory long. Like, you've been running other places.

And so I remember seeing him later, he says, he wanted a rematch. When are you coming back up there? He won a rematch. He's like, did I laugh you? No, but he was, he'd gotten good and started winning. Oh, so he wanted to rematch. Yeah, for sure. You got late models now, right?

Yes. We won the national championship last year. Congratulations. Thank you. Hey, you got two of them? Yeah. We got three cars. Oh, I see where you're going on this.

I see where you go on this. So, hey, if you go back, all right, so when you go to RCR, what is the culture change from what you're used to? Larry McReynolds talked about this as his experience, so I was wondering what your experience was. So I'll walk in the building and, you know, you got banners hanging all over the walls. I'll look at it in your shop. I'm trying to find your winning banner. I don't know where you hang them. but the championship banners are hanging.

There they're there. I see them now. But they have these, you know, all over the building. And it's like walking into the Boston Garden or something, you know. And it's a little bit overwhelming. And now you've got, you know, Will Lynn, David Smith, you know, all these guys that. Flying aces. They've been there for years and years and years.

And I'm coming in there by myself. I'm not bringing any of my people. I'm coming in to lead these guys. And they are looking at me like, I don't know. who this guy is. You know, they're not, they're kind of reluctant to, to really move in the direction that I want to move when I get there. And, but there's a lot of things that need to be happening. There were things that they had really got behind on. Like what? Everything. I mean, just the way the cars were built and packaged, how heavy they were. Heavy. Holy smokes.

They were super heavy. Dude, you look at Dad's cars and. Hey, you know, you don't know how good, so you love this part. Terry, Terry Satchell, the guy told you about, that helped me, you know, get the interview with Richard. He comes in a few weeks later, after I'd been there, maybe two or three weeks. He comes walking in his little clipboard. He says, well, what do you think? I was like, oh, man. Kind of rub my head and think, what am I'm going to say here?

He says, he said, something's good, didn't he? That explains everything. I couldn't explain it any better. That's so funny. What were you about to say about when you reacting to that? Well, they put any kind of mount, right, where there's a hood, pin. That ain't falling off.

Oh, yeah. He ain't gonna bend that. So that's what I'm fighting there. And so we ended up fixing a few of the cars just, you know, as much as I could work on, change or whatever existing fleet, because it was just a few weeks before we did the first race. We do. And, you know, we get all these, you know, cars kind of as good as we can get on. We go and run pretty good. You know, we almost won the Daytona 500, won the Bush Clash, won the qualifying race.

He won six-fendi race. come within just a little win 500. Dale Jarrett beats us. So it starts out pretty good. And then we go to Rockingham. I tell you this is a funny thing, too. You'll get a kick out of this. So the whole week at Daytona, he's trying to get in his lingo.

You know, he's trying to learn each other. And he keeps saying, the car's neutral. See this, neutral, I'm like, okay, so I think, well, it must be pretty good. So I don't really adjust on it much. Well, then we get to Rockingham, you're standing on the truck. You can see the cars, right? You can kind of see him. He comes through three and four and come watching him.

He comes in. He says, how's the car? He said, it's pretty neutral. And I'm like, all right, man. I said, dang, that thing looked loose to me. But all right. So he goes back out there again and that thing's sliding through. I mean, it's smoking right rear.

And finally comes out. I said, what's that car? He said, I think he looks really loose. He said, I told you it was neutral. And I'm like, neutral means lose. That's what he meant. I mean, seriously, you knew. I did not know that.

Finally, I got his head a little bit. what neutral meant was like he has no no no he's not turn the wheel. Ah. That's what he meant. So neutral to me was not tight, not loose. Nothing. Yeah. Of course.

Good. So I said, okay, now we're on the same page. So we tied him up, you know, we, you know, end up finishing good there too. Oh my gosh. I told you it was neutral. Like that's something that's like dad, you know, you would think that dad was, uh, dad being as good as he was, he was everything a race car driver is, but better. But he wouldn't have like backward.

terminology or it was just something he'd been used to say and I'm sure Kurt Shelmerdine understood it well but I did of course yeah yeah but who else uses the word neutral to describe a loose race or no one like nobody does that right okay so how was the relationship like that's not good it's not good we're butting heads with Earnhardt yeah we are we're really we were a lot of like and you know I was pretty headstrong on what I want to do and and he he was really headstrong and and kind of He was a real dominant figure, you can imagine. And it wasn't the way I was used to.

I was used to kind of steering this team the way I wanted to go. And he just wasn't. So let's step back to Harry again. So when I worked with Gary Hargett, who worked with Harry, and I drove Ed Whitaker's car, who worked with Harry. And the thing that I learned from both of those guys was that, you know, and this is maybe an exaggeration, but, you know, Harry was, pretty indifferent about the balance of the car for say he would if it was if it'd get through the

corner pretty good he was good with it he just wanted to adjust to the car i mean he would he would he'd figure out a way he'd figure out how to drive the car the way it run he wasn't as quite as particular about man it's it's it's a it's a too tight you got to fix that too right he'd just run it he'd be like that's not too bad right yeah you worked with him we were yeah we won darlington in 91 we go to richmond and we're fighting fight and fighting you know could never get the car really driving right finally he just put this lock get the rear end locked in I'll figure out how to make it turn wow so put two

200s or whatever it was in the back he was really good about calling out what he wanted in the car nine times out ten if you did that it worked so what's dad dad's more he didn't have a clue if I could guess he didn't have a clue about what was it didn't care about he was in the car he's basically his saying was you load the wagon I'll drive it

really and so he didn't want to know any of that stuff but he was pretty particular about like I heard that he was really headstrong about castor Negative caster in the left front, things like that. So go to Daytona, the very first race, and the setup that they had, I'm like, God, darn, that's got like a degree and a half negative caster in the left front.

I've never heard of that. And I'm looking, I said, is that right? And that's what he liked. That's what he liked. So, you know, I said, that's the first thing we're going to try. So we go testing at Daytona, and, you know, I put the regular type caster in it that we've been running.

He's like, nope, get it out of there, get it. What he went, it was funny about Harry, Harry was one of those guys that when he was, you know, when he was on the straightaway, he kind of wanted to let go of the wheel, so it didn't have any tug in it. And Dale was the opposite. He wanted to be in the corner and not do it. He didn't mind holding it back on the straightaway.

He just wanted to be where he wasn't having to put any input in the corner. So it was just a feel thing, and it worked for him. Was there any drawback to running negative left front castor in the front? Not really. It was common, more common, I guess, in the rear steer car. The reason it ever even came about is because before power steering, you had to have that, but to be able to turn to it. The driver could even stay in the car for 500 miles if you didn't have it

because it basically kind of just let itself in the corner, so you didn't have to tug on the wheel. So why are y'all but in heads? If he's not being, hey, man, I want this spring. I know, I want you to change. I can't remember exactly what it was. So a lot of it was on, like, pit calls and stuff. He was, like, trying to, you know,

bull me around a little bit on pit calls and this and that. And, you know, so Richard, I can't remember all the things, but Richard calls both of us in after about the fourth race. and he said look man you guys got to go on the same page and it was one of those come Jesus meetings with him and he said he told Dale did Richard have

sorry to interrupt you and you're doing a great job but did Richard have that kind of control over dad too? Oh yeah like when they sit down in the room dad's a little bit he had as much control over your dad as your dad would give him right

but another words run but he knew your dad was smart enough to know that just matter you know and so what he's trying to say is that if you guys cannot figure out a way to communicate, and what his term was bond. Y'all got to bond. How did you bond?

Okay, this is this way it works. So we're sitting, me and Dale are sitting beside each other and then, you know, another end of Richard's desk. And he goes from, reach over and grabs him, all right, he said, we're going to, we're going to bond this weekend. We're going to Darlington, we're going to bond. You said, we got this, Richard. So we walk outside.

He says, we're going to dinner. Me and Tracer are going to be going to dinner on Saturday night or Friday night, whatever it was at Darlington. and, you know, I've got some guys, I want you to go, you're going to sit right with me. We're going to bond. But, I said, all right. It's not going to work.

It actually did, you know, it was we're at Darlington. And at that time, we had a tire, right-side tire that was really, you know, marginal at best. It was, you know, you could fail it easily with too much camber and everything. So it was real delicate. And so I told Dale that we were going to go. I told him at that dinner, it was on, I guess, a Friday night. So Saturday was a practice session. I told him, we're going to run that tire.

until it fails because it gave you a good warning. And he's like, what? I said, we're going to see how many laps we can go. And then we're going to keep changing the car until we get extended and try to extend it. But you need it to fail. Right. We need to know where it was, where the lap number was. Yeah, that is a little bit of serious.

But it was risky, but I had him on, he bought into it. He didn't, he's skeptical at first. But, you know, so it gave pretty good warning. It would give you a good little bit of warning before it failed. And then you could see it, you know, where it was failing on the corner. So he brings it in after 30. or 30 laps and sure enough it's failed so we take some camber out we adjust the chassis a little bit for the balance and we go back out and run another run and extend it about five laps and we do this and we come through about three sets of tires until we really have changed the car quite a bit and still pretty fast but a lot better on the tires well you end up winning and uh because we could go longer than anybody on tires and i remember going up in the in victory lane and i look at it he got an old grid i said that's how you bond right there

our first win. Win and fixes all that stuff, doesn't it? I'm curious, though, like, if you go to dinner, did you guys plan to talk setups and stuff? And, I mean, I kind of imagine, what is Teresa thinking at that time? She wasn't all that. Yeah, a big fan of it, but. Because y'all was. Well, because they had all big.

It was a group of people. There was a lot of friends or whatever. So me and Dillers sitting there talking about it. And so I basically just wanted to tell him what my strategy was. Sure. I didn't tell him what we were actually going to be doing on the car, but this is, but he's like, I don't know, all right. I'll try it.

That's impressive. It is. You know, I mean, I go back and I think Larry Mack was talking about how he had to, you had set the precedent. Yeah, he came after me. Because he came after you. And so a lot of the similarities of, you know, he's going from Yates to RCR. And so the culture change is so different. And he's like, you know, everybody was used to, you know, Andy Petrie was one of the guys. And, you know, Shalmerdine, one of the guys. But it doesn't sound like that's the way it was certainly at the beginning. No. As a matter of fact, the beginning was so bad. The first car that I got to build that was mine that I built, I mean, from the ground up, we used the Hopkins chassis, but everything, I mean, every single system on the car was different. Everything. It was way lighter.

It was, you know, had a lot of innovative things in it. And so we take it to, it was a road course car for Sonoma. And we didn't get to test it or anything, you know, you just got to load it in the car. And I mean, that was like pushing a rope. Everything I want to do in that car. They were like, that's not going to work. Not the way we do it. But this way we're going to do this one.

Everything. I mean, this went on for months building that car. This is your first car. First car that's built that I built like I want. Right, got it. Okay, so we get to Sonoma with this car that's radically different than anything's ever come out of there. And I know my career's on the line, you know, so we get, we're a little bit late getting through tech. I think there might have been a few little tech issues, but so we weren't on the track right, right when the practice started.

And Richard was up on the truck clocking cars and finally get it out on the track and, you know, goes out of sight and you know how they come down through there. of see them and I've got to watch I'm clock and you know start before he goes into turn 11 comes around there and I'm watching them go up there and look that it look pretty good you know and I look down to my watch my hands are sitting there shaking because I think if this doesn't work I'm out of

yeah and I mean not just out of RCR I'm out of the sport probably and so it comes around there and I click the for the first lap I click it and I was like and then I realize I don't even know what a good time is you know we look at there once a year I look over at Richard I think I'm about in tears I'm like is that is that

good? He goes, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. So we ended up sitting on the pole for Sonoma.

Yeah. And then we should have won. We got banged up by some lap car the way it worked out on one of the cautions where people stayed out and we led most of the race

but ended up finishing the top five or six. Yeah. Bang. You're going back to innovating. You're the first to have a track bar adjuster? Yep, yep.

That was in 93, four. 93. Yep. What happened was back then you used to have just a bolt that you would serrated thing

that you could just loosen up and move the track bar on the right side. And the garage. But yeah, in the garage when you're making changes

but there was no way of adjusting it during the race. It was just a four jack screws that you could adjust in the race. But we go to

Wilkesboro and have just a horrible race. I couldn't adjust a car for anything. It was nothing would, you know, none of our stuff would work.

Air pressure and wet, nothing did. I really wanted to adjust the track bar but you can't do it. And so Brad, Francis was a real innovative kind of wizard that we had working on special projects and had

a little room in the back because you kind of had to segregate him from the rest of the team. And I came back and told Brad, I said, look, I want a way to adjust that trackbar height on the right side with a wedge wrench. I said, I've got to be able to adjust that. He goes off in his little room and smoking his little cigarettes. He comes out about two days later and he's got this thing in his hand. That's basically you can weld on the car. It shows me how it works.

I'm like, it looks good to me. He says, well, how do you want to test it? I said, put it on the car going to loud. We're going to race it. We went to the track. It was a real fine threaded thing, so it didn't, it became more, you know, mature later. So we, again, we're terrible. And Ricky Rudd was leading.

He laughed. I came right to our back bumper lap us and caution comes out. And so we come down pit road. And I said, run that track bar up. two inches at that time i think it took like 24 rounds to get the thing up that high and so the guy goes out there just wind and winding wind and i remember watching it back in bitty parsons in the booth he says wow that is a lot of wedge he thinks they're putting wedge yeah it's raising that track bar we ended up coming back and finishing second so it really held

wow it really mattered uh they weren't very impressed to naskar people because they didn't know it was on there right until they saw that and they called me up in the hauler and rake me over the coals about it And I made a good case, though. I said, look, it makes for better competition. It's not a safety issue. And there's no cost really involved. So that was the three kind of criteria you used. And so they ended up calling me next week, so they'd keep running it.

Dang. Just like that. Yeah. Was Gary Nelson still the competition director? I think he was then, maybe. Is it true that Gary Nelson was one of the most notorious innovators in his time? And that's why NASCAR had hired him. And so, like, you know, I'm thinking that as you were telling the story about the deck lid and

the spoiler and everything, but like, and how maybe if it was anybody else, I mean, they probably don't even tell you to go, you know, take that spoiler back a little bit. But like here, here's, here's like the evil genius that is. And I dropped that on him first day on job. Did you really? Yeah, that was his first day. That is interesting for sure. Yeah. So y'all win the championship in 1994. Yep. How's the relationship at this point? Oh, it's great, man. Yeah, we were really, I mean, really about mid-season of 90s. we were really, really clicking, everything. I mean, there's times, and I got really frustrated because he was getting so much attention,

so many other things, you know, souvenirs, and all these things that just pulling him away from what we're trying to do. But he was just so good on a racetrack. And, you know, it wasn't very good qualifier. We didn't qualify good, but it didn't matter. We'd figure out a way to be in the top five every week or win, and it was going really good. Y'all, you drove Bushcar for Dad at Martinsville. No, yeah.

That was in 94. Yeah. So you've raced, you know, we talked about your... I drove for DEI before you did. Yeah. We talked about your driving career and how you said it kind of disappeared when Dale Jarrett came in your garage and decided he was going to drive the car when you were 18. But you did have a career in driving.

I mean, there's this picture that keeps popping up on my social media timeline of that yellow five car, that late model stock. Yeah. And Jimmy Hensley was driving the Bush version of that. What team was that? Okay. So we had advanced auto parts on our car back in, that was probably 87-ish. And somebody that owned my, I guess the guy that owned my team had a relationship

with somebody at Advanced Auto Parts up in Runoff. And it was actually a decent sponsor for us for a late model. And we had it before Hensley and Sam Ard's team had it. Okay. And I don't know how that transitioned. But that was Sam Ard's car? That was Sam Mard's car. Yep.

And so that was one of those double races at Hickory. So we put them out there to do that picture. So you're working in the Cup Series but also racing all? Every now and then. Every now and then. Yeah. I never ran more than maybe seven to ten races a year, ever in my life. So why in 1994 do you want to go race in the Xfinity series at Martinsville?

Okay. This is how that happens. So we take a brand new car, RCR, up to Martinsville for a test. and we had broken a gear up there the year before, and so we had come up with a different system of how we break in the gears. They'd break them in on a machine now, the ring and pinion sets,

but back then we didn't have that, so we had to do it at the track. And it was meticulous to do it, you know. And, you know, your dad had been out there running, and, you know, I said, okay, we're going to start breaking these gears in, and I knew he wouldn't like that. He hated that stuff, you know.

But I said, we've got to do it. We have to get this done. Let's go ahead and knock it out. And he goes, I don't want to do it. You just drive the thing. I don't know. You know how to do it.

You just do it. I'm going to go fishing. Had that pond over there. You remember that pond that used to be outside at Martensville? There used to be a pond right there as you come in. He said, I'm just going to go over and go fishing. You just do it. Oh, yeah, the duck pond.

Yeah, the duck pond. He said, just, I went in there and put my pit crew uniform on, you know, not get in the car. Put the thing. And the procedure was, you go out there and run it slow for seven, eight or ten laps. It was, you know, kind of a pain. But you do that. And then you let it sit for a minute. and then you go out there and run 10 laps hard and then take it out.

You know, so it was kind of broke in. Yeah. And so I did the first one. We did the first slow runs on two gears and then we put them back in and we did the, you know, the fast run. So the first fast run we did, I put it in there. Your dad had been running about 21 flat, basically. And so I get in there and I go run it and I run it about 22 flat. Like he might have never even drove a cup car before.

Right. Yeah. And so he goes, he goes, what's wrong with you made? You're afraid to mash it? Why don't you go? You know, just aggravating a heck out of it. He said, I thought he was fishing, right? But no, he's right there at the window as soon as I run.

And so I said, all right. So I got to go back out. So first laugh, I go back out with the next one. I hit the chip coming down the front stretch first time, ran 2110 first lap. Nice. So, you know, I mean, I did it's out of, I was like, check with it. I didn't want to wreck a new car, you know.

That's what I try to him. Look, I'm just taking easy so, you know, it's a brand new car. But after that, I said, screw it. I'm going to go as hard as I can go. He challenged you. Yeah. And so after that, he's like, you know, I realized I actually could drive at Martinsville.

And I said, you need to let me run up here in your bush car sometime. Well, it turns out he ended up missing a race at Richmond, a short track race. Yeah. At Richmond. And he owed one? And he owed one back to him, the Good Ranch. And I conned up this scheme to see if Goodrich would actually sign off on me driving the car at that Martinsville race, which was an off weekend for us in the fall.

And so they agreed and Earnhardt said, I'll tell you what, If we got a good point lead in the Cup series after Charlotte, which is the last race before the off weekend, then I'll let you drive that car. So Rusty, I think, is who we were running for the championship for. He has problems. We end up gaining a bunch of points. And I mean, before the White Flag came out, I'm running to the hauler,

because you know how he is. He's gone. I get in the haul right when he comes in there. And I said, I'm coming to get that car in the morning. He said, all right, come get it. So I go to the deerhead shop. I think he had a truck and trailer. Maybe I brought one.

I can't remember. And the car is there. It's the car. he missed the race at Richmond. I'm taking to Martinsville. The one at Dale Earnhardt didn't qualify with it. But it was an opportunity, and I'm going to go. You know, and so we get up there, and it was a weekend off for his guys.

He didn't want his main guys doing it either, right? So I take it back to RCR. I get a handful of guys to take our weekend off. We take the cup hauler up there, and, you know, everybody goes with me. And I don't have anybody to help me on Saturday for qualifying, so I get Ray Overnham to go with me. Dang. Sure it did. So I've got Ray up there as kind of my crew chief.

Your dad wouldn't let me change. I was going to change the seat. It had a banjo seat in it. Nope, you can't change the seat or he ain't going to drive it? Going to drive it in that seat. I'm like, all right. And he wouldn't even let me put brake ducks in it. He was not going to let me cut the nose and put brake ducks in it until I made the field.

He said, you ain't going to make the field anyway, so don't even put, don't cut my front end up. I said, all right. So I'd go up and then Ray's helping me get qualified. And I'm really, really loose, you know. This is a funny story. But he says, how loose are you? We're on pit road working on it, and I said, it's pretty loose, man. And he says, and I look at my mirror, and this guy backs in the wall,

boom, hits the wall right behind me. I said, turn around, Ray. And he said, oh, I said, that's going to be us if we don't tighten it up. He said, oh, okay, I get it now. But we got it, you know, decent enough to make the field. I think we qualified to mid-high-20 or something, but made the field and cut the brake ducts in there, you know. I think we finish 16.

Yeah. When you say you, you know, convinced good, wrench to let you do it. I mean, like, how did that happen? Because it's like their alternative is, Dale Earnhardt owes them a race. You can have the, you know, greatest race car driver to ever hold a wheel or his crew chief run at Martinsville. I think that they, you know, Dale had so much clout with him. That was his weekend off. He was in the Bahamas. He didn't even, he wasn't anywhere around. He just wanted it to weekend off. And so. Okay. That's all you had to say. That's all you had to say. I mean, because he didn't want to give up his weekends off. So I knew you were a driver after all.

that. I didn't know much about, I didn't know you'd really run any races. I mean, thinking back to 1994, 95 or whatever, I didn't think, I didn't know that you had drove a car and then you go race dad's bush car. So then it's starting to dawn on me. Maybe you, you were probably mad. You probably want to drive it. No. So I'm running like a late model or, I'm running a streetstock or something. Yeah. Dad calls me, I'm changing all the dealership. My brother Kerry is just a few feet away at the service manager's desk. He's a service writer. He said, hey, get your helmet and your uniform come up to the airport tomorrow morning and don't tell your brother i said all i remember this what am i going to do so i got my little late model stock uniform sun drop uniform and i'm

get on the king air and if we fly out of talladega and i'm starting to get it right i'm going to do something at taledga this is going to be amazing so they're testing the new v8 for the bus series yeah they had v6s they had one of the r char motors in it for that test yeah and dad and dad and dave mark has been driving the car a little bit. Mainly Dave Marcus was driving that car and your dad was driving a cut car. It was a pretty full test for us there. Gotcha. So he lets me go out in the bush car and I matched Marcus's time.

I was pumped. Dave's giving me tips about why lap was good or lap was bad, like how you make a difference as a driver. And I'm feeling pretty good. And then right at the end of the day, here comes Andy Peters. You'd be bopping out of the truck. trailer in his uniform. Your dad says, you want to drive it?

I said, yeah. He said, go get a uniform. I'll just you drive. I was like, damn, I want to drive it. More, right?

There's like only 30 minutes left for the tracks closing. He goes out there and matched our lap times. And I'm like, you know why, though, right? So I go and get in the car,

and I know your dad says, no, you can't run a thing part throttle now because you'll mess up Richard's motor. Dude. You got to make sure you don't run part throttle. Same thing.

Okay, so it's, it preaches to me. And I'm like, God, I might, man. Caledega. Yeah. You know? Hold that thing

wide open. So, all right. I can pull off pit road and I'll get wide open coming off turn two. And I'm looking at that straight away. I'm like, God, turn them poles. I'm going to wob, blah, blah, blah. I'm seeing that.

In that turn, it looks nice and broad from up above. But you're looking at it down in the straight. That thing looks like it's dead left. I said, man, I'm holding that throttle wide. I know he's got a stopwatch, right? So if I don't hold it wide up, he's going to know. And I said, man, I said, man, sure would he likes to know how far to turn it. you know, so I just like, you know, I held it wide open first lap.

God. It took my breath. Did you hold it wide up the first lap? Oh, yeah. So, Dad told me the same thing. We're in there. Did you have that same feeling going in that first time? Well, he says to me, he's like, now you can't lift.

If you lift, you're going to burn a pistol. That's exactly what he told me. Exactly. I know, but listen to how he interpreted this. And I'm listening to Dad, and I'm like, he's only, he's full of. No, he was serious. He's, in my mind, I'm thinking he's full of shit. just telling me this so I don't go out there and embarrass him, right, and go out there and lift.

And, because lifting, in hindsight, would have been silly because it's such a, you know, it's such a big track and easy to run wide open. But he's like, now if you live, you run part throttle with burn a pissing, I'm thinking in my head, how am I going to get through the pits wide of it? Yeah. So I'm, he pulled out of the garage. Like, just to move out of the garage. the stall into the garage and out on the pit rail.

I'm like, pop! Oh, that's funny stuff. I didn't take him quite that little. I didn't take it literal, boy. I mean literal. I can just see it. Oh, my God. And then you're right.

You're pull out on the track. You're going down the back straightaway and you're thinking, no way it's going to fly out of this place. I mean, yeah, you're looking at this turn. It's a dead left-hand turn at the end of the straight-wheel. and you're going 190. You're going to fly out of here. But once you do it, it's like, uh, yeah, it's okay.

It's like so much grip. It was. It took my breath, though, first time. So I go out there and you're freaking out, right? You're going to hold this steering wheel. And I go out there and I ran just as fast as Dave, maybe a couple of tents. Like, I was right there with him. And I was like, oh, oh, man, wait until I go get out there again.

I'm going to run. And this next time, I'm going to light it up. Then you didn't get it next time. I got to do it. No. I got back out there and I let the wheel do whatever it wanted to do. I was relaxed and then I let it feed up off the corner and out, you know. How much you pick up?

A second slower. What? I come in. I'm like, dad comes over. What the hell? I was like, I don't know. You know, I kind of let the wheel move around. Don't do that.

Hold it. Don't let the wheel move at all. I was like, well, you know, kind of. It was that much slower doing that. And I was like, I kind of let it come up off the corner. And he's like, what? Don't do that? And Dave Marcus is standing there.

And he's like, yeah, you're just adding feet to the lap. Yeah. He's like, man, you got to stay tight. I was like, man, I just, everywhere of the racetrack we go to, we come out and go out to the fence. He's like, he probably added 5,000 feet to this whole lap. He's like, no wonder to slower. I got a chance to get back in there. And I mean, I'm holding the wheel.

I'm like locked my elbows into my legs so the steering wheel wouldn't turn in the corner. Because in a corner, it's like the wheel's trying to do this. If you let go of it, it's going to just start going crazy. The track was really rough back then. You used to jump around a lot. It was. And I tied it off the bottom, real awkward. Feels like it's bogging it down.

But it was faster. So when you see him come popping out of the hollow of the driver suit, what was your feeling? I wanted to run one. I was like, I might get another run. I might get another lap. When he come running out there, I was like, no. Everybody gets to drive today. No.

I knew the deal, and I was like, all right. And then he went out there and he was running as fast as I run. And I was like, damn, I thought I'd done something special. But it was like, hell, anybody here could get. The old mechanic gets in there and do this. It'd have been awesome if you'd have been like, you know, this is for taking my room at the presidential street. Yeah, right.

Get out of the car, kid. So at Martin's Hill race out, I got to run in his ex-unity car. So I hit Terry Labani, like, hard. going in to turn three on one of the restarts. The brake pedalers went completely to the floor. And I didn't, and I ran all over. I don't know how he didn't wreck. That proved to me how good he was.

Well, the next week, you know, Terry is. He's real quiet. See him at the next race, I think it was rocking him. He comes up, me and Dale were standing there and he said, hey, Dale. Yeah, it says, next time you want to do something for Andy, he said, take him hunting. That's awesome. So you run that race. I mean, like, I know you've, I'm looking at your, uh, your, your,

statistics here you've had five exfinity races seven truck races uh two arcan mnard starts a modified start why do you do that random one-off run i just like doing it just when you find an opportunity i mean i still love to drive you do too you do the same thing you know you just go never get over it i mean it's just it's something i you know i've never had a full season of doing it but i always enjoy going and running a one-off like when we ran the late model race at hickory that was just a one-off that year I hadn't driven in years and did it there. And then, you know, Schrader's one that kind of taught me into doing this whole thing

with the truck. We, you know, he goes and runs all these Archer races. He's driving for me, and he's got all, he's just all over the place. And I told him one time, so I'm going to come show up one of them Archer races and outrun you, you know, just kidding around with him. And so about a month later comes, hey, I got a good idea on that Arka deal. I said, what? He said, come to DuCoy, Illinois. I'm like, what? That's a dirt track.

And he said, no, man, you'll be fine. It'll be fun. It's a Labor Day of Money. day. Great event. You got to just take one of your cup cars. I'll give you the setup. You know, you'll be fine. It'll be fine. I'm like, all right. If it sounds like something fun, but I know it's not going to work good. Show up up there at DuCoyne. There's like 45, six cars there. Shraders there. It's Tony Stewart, all these, you know, Kimmel, all those guys. And I don't have a clue. I look at this track. It's a one mile dirt track. And it's, you know, they water it. They've done it. You've seen it now in Bristol. It's just, I don't even know what I'm doing.

and so get ready to qualify I go out there and I say I'm just going to drive as hard as I can you know end up qualifying fourth out of all these guys and I said I was telling somebody the other day I'm thinking I'm a real dirt racer now right race starts turn one or turn two

I turn around backwards and then looking at all of them so it was a little harder than I end up finishing night so I was respectable but it was not I wasn't as good as I thought it was but anyway so we get a rematch he wants a rematch or straighter out qualified And he'd go off up like 12 and he's mad and he won't even talk to me. And I'm like, dang, you know, man.

One of my best friends won't even say anything. And so he's parked right beside me. Finally I'd go up to him. I said, hey, Kenny. I said, I know you're mad, you know. But I said, if it makes you feel any better, I got 20 minutes practice before. Even though it's my first time on dirt, I got 20 minutes practice and it makes you feel better. He gets so mad.

He said, you wait to let Ray starts. So you were with dad for what, two years, three years? Three, 93, four, and five. You said by the end of the 94 when y'all had the championship, things were good. Why did you make a change? Why did y'all? Well, what was happening? We were on a roll, and it was not the right time to move on,

but it was the only time this opportunity was going to come up for me. Leo Jackson had come and asked me he wanted to retire. He wanted me to come back and buy the team, and he was going to make it possible for me to do that. I mean, how many opportunities am I going to get? or somebody like me that can make that happen. And it was hard decision. You know, I've got the best job in the sport.

You know, crew chief for Dale Earnhardt, we're winning race as champion. You know, we came really close to winning in 95. And, but I had kind of checked the box, right? I won a championship as a crew chief. And this is here, and it's now. And so I took it. I mean, it was real risky because I had to get sponsorship lined up too, and there was a lot of risk involved.

Right. But I thought if I'm ever going to do it, this is the only time. When I saw you at the banquet after 94, there was a, I think about that moment. I don't know why, but there was something about you where something like that wasn't, that wasn't too big of a moment for you to become a team owner, right? To, like you say, go find that sponsorship. Man, I mean, I think about moving our Xfinity program to Cup, and it's almost an impossibility. how?

You know, but you bite, you bite a chunk out of that sandwich like there's nothing to it, you know, or you're willing to go for it. Yeah. I look back on it now and think, wow, that was bold to even think you could pull it off. Yeah. Because, you know, Skull had been there for quite a few years, but they were kind of wanting to wind it out and not, you know, return. And so I had to go and convince them to sponsor me. And we were going to do these things.

we're going to change the team. You know, Robert Presley was driving. You know, I promised him that we would find a top 10 caliber driver put in there. And it's just no slight to Robert. We're good friends today. But it wasn't going good then. Yeah. And so they were, you know, I was lucky enough that they bought in.

You know, so we had a two-year deal starting in 97, 98, and I got somehow convinced Schrader to leave Hendrick and come drive for me. So how did you tell dad? Okay. So I told him early in 95. I gave him plenty of notice and told, you know, your dad probably first. So you gave him the whole year to try to talk you out of it? No, it was a few months. It was quite a few months.

And he tried hard. And we went to, you know, I went to the boat and the Bahamas spent with him. And he always had drawings of DE. He was trying to say, you know, come be a partner with me. You know, just kind of, you know, give you a part of this. And, you know, you can be over here and do this instead of that. And I said, yeah, that's tempting. it is.

I said, but I said, nobody's a partner with you. I said, I'd be working for you. I said, I want to be my own, man, I want to go out here and do this.

And he understood, at that point, he understood. Yeah. And so we go on and we have a really good success even after I told them. We win Martinstale,

I think it was one of the races. And we're in victory lane. He said, I'll come up in here and get you a pitcher. He said, probably going to be the last time for a while or something like that.

And I said, well, about next week? Because we weren't finished of the season. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. And we end up winning actually another. We won the last race of the year. Atlanta.

He won Atlanta there for. Man, he was so good there. I remember they gave away skiing altiques to the winter, and he has a pile of. Had a building full of them, I bet. And he would, it's very stingy with those. Very stingy. I don't know how to put this into words, because I got so much respect for everybody that came after you. I guess I always felt like that you were the last person.

that dad had on the pit box that blend meshed well with him. Yeah, I'll say I don't have any regrets about the decision of moving and doing my own thing, but I do have that regret that I know, I know we could have won another one. Oh, yeah. And I look back on it thinking, man, I just, I feel like I shortchanged him some on that because, you know, it did, it upset everything that was going on when I left, but I had to do this. And so, you know, being a team owner was a dream of mine, too, and I was able to do that for seven or eight years. I wouldn't have done that any other way.

And that time was now, you know, or then. So, I mean, it was a regret, though, for sure. Y'all's had the split, right? And apparently it sounds like it was a reasonable, everybody was respectable. So much so that y'all form the RAD program. And a lot of people today don't really know what RAD was. certainly everybody that everybody that had to compete against

RAD knew what RAD was so talk about how RAD and what RAD is and how that developed Okay so Richard Childers comes to me at one of the races and You know we're all spending money On Arrow Development and went on time

And trying to use all the resources that GM provides and but it's all These you know parallel programs And it was his idea Richard Childers to bring all three of our organizations together and just do it collectively. We'd have more resources. We could go hire somebody to kind of run it for us. I think he even came up with the, you know, as Richard, Andy, and Dale is what Rad meant. Right. And so we put that LLC together. And we kind of, you know,

forced all of the arrow people and all three teams to work together. Boy, they didn't like it either. They didn't. They didn't want to do. I can imagine. Oh, they didn't. It was very reluctant buy-in from all the teams. And I was like, man, this is, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, we got to figure this out. We got to make it work. And I told my people, we are going to do this. We're going to share every single thing. Don't hold anything back.

And I said, we're going to move the needle on this. And so as they finally started buying in, it was real quick. It's like a wildfire. It just called up. And it was like, okay. So we were making big time gains. And the creativity of three different organizations piled into one was super successful. What was the first race where you guys knew that Rad was something,

it was a force to deal with. I don't even remember. I mean, to be clear, this was like a restrictor plate because of the arrow. This is a restricting plate thing, right? It was all of them. It was down force, too. Yeah, we did. We shoot it all. And obviously, it was really

evident at the super speedways, right? Okay. You know, the DEI cars, you guys were winning everything. We actually won a couple, one race with APR at Talladega during that time. Oh, with Bobby Hamilton? Yep, that was part of that. Yep.

So it showed up a lot at those tracks, but it also showed up at the other ones. Yeah. We made a lot more down force, too. I remember that. Bobby Hamilton was like laying on the ground after, in Victory Lane. It never had a caution. It was a hot day and they went green the whole way, 500 miles. It was tough.

I had to pick him up just for his victory lane. I got a picture of Joe Nimichick who's driving my other car in that race. I think he finished in the top five or six, and he comes to Victory Lane to congratulate Bobby, and they're both just sitting down by the car. Right. Just like exhausted. stand up. Right, right. So yeah, you guys had them covered at the restrictor plates. I mean, my goodness, I don't even know, was there a streak of wins? Probably. Yeah, I would say there had to look back.

I mean, between all the ones you won and I guess Michael and. How long did that last? Did Seat Park win any of those Super Speedway races? No, but. So it's between you and Michael and but he won others. I mean, what made, what, when did Rad go away? After I, so in 2003, after the 2002 season, And I lost one of my sponsors. Actually, both Cups sponsors and ended up going and doing an Xfinity thing with Paul Menard and Menards for just a short time. So, I mean, I financially couldn't participate anymore.

So I had to bow out, and it kind of, after that, just fell apart. Yeah. So what was that like? I mean, you, you, so in 96, 7, you know, late 90s your cup team's, you know, performing, functioning, then the sponsor stuff, that stuff got harder, harder to find.

At what point are you, like, starting to realize you've got to make a change? Yeah. So it was 2001, was our last season, running two cars. We had Joe Nemichick and Bobby Hamilton. And like I said, Bobby won my first race

as an owner, I guess it was in April. And then we know that we're going to lose, we're not losing Square D, we're going to have them another year. So Bobby was going to run in 2002, but Joe, we couldn't find a sponsor for the 33. And so we were looking everywhere. This is right after 9-11, and things were just really in turmoil. We go to Rockingham next to the last race of the year, I think it was,

and we ended up winning there with Joe. And so you're thinking, you're doing everything possible, right? We were on the brink, really at APR, we were on the brink of really making that step to being, you know, to being on make it. And so we just weren't able to get over that hurdle. So I had to shut that team down going into 2002. So we only had one team. And that's just, it's really hard, man.

When you're shrinking and, you know, your good people are finding other jobs, and it's just hard to hold it together. So you, so what did you do? Well, we did the deal with Balminard and an X-Finity, kind of a combination. Under your banner? Yeah, in your shop. Yep. We did all the engines and did the cars.

We ran a handful of races. We won an Arca race with him at Talladega. and then did a few of those, Arka, Bush, and then did a couple of cup races. And then in 2004, we signed a deal with Menards to run the full season. Actually, I think it was a five-year deal we signed. And it just wasn't going well. You know, John Menard's a great guy loving, but he was making me spend a lot of money on things I didn't really want to spend money on, and it was kind of telling me how to run the team,

and it was probably going to be the first year as an owner. I was going to lose money. And I found out I got wind through about half the year that, that he was going to take that and go to DEI, you know, even though we had a five-year deal. Wow. I would, like I said, if I finished the year, I was going to lose money for the first year ever. So I was like, okay, this is my sign to, I need to shut it down and just, you know, do something else. Because I didn't want to, I'd made money every year.

I just didn't want to put it all back into the time. How hard is it to dismantle a program? It's hard. It really is. I mean, it was, you know, it was just something in my life. At that time, everything, I tried everything to keep it going, right? I kept running into dead ends everywhere. You know, my wife tells me one day, she says, well, yeah, maybe God doesn't want you doing that anymore.

Yeah. You know, maybe he's got something else for you. So he finally had to hit me over the head with the two before. I got it. And I went ahead and just, you know, auctioned everything off, sold everything. And what year was that? That was in 2004, the middle of the season. So for two and a half years, I basically was retired.

I did that retirement thing backwards, right? I did it in 2004 and five and even six. And, you know, my daughter was playing softball. She's, you know, it's great. I mean, I had some of the best years of my life doing that. So you're good into broadcasting. So I'm out there on a tractor one day and come up to get something to drink. And the guy that, you know, the suspension rigs, you've got to, I think you guys have one or two here.

Yeah. So you're building those. That's right. So you were building a pull-down rig when you were the only one. Well, we invented it. Yeah. You invented a pull-down rig so that basically teams can take the car and put it in their max travel like you'll only be able to produce out on the racetrack.

This was really, really amazing creative stuff. When teams are coil binding or not wanting to coil bind, trying to create more travel, this was such a great way to figure out how to do that and to be able to do that so that you could hit the ground running when you got to the racetrack. And so you developed this machine. Did you make money doing that? I probably made, I mean, it ended up that we sold 33 of those units. Almost every major team has one.

Yeah. And so I had guys building that in the shop. And yeah, I made, I mean, I did well. It was accidental. I really didn't want to get into it. It just kind of took off. And so I kept a couple of guys working on it. It's kind of doing weird, odd stuff like that.

Yeah. So I come, I was like on a tractor. Come up there to get a Gatorade and walk up in there. Jeff Swan working for me. He said, hey, here's a note. Some lady called from ESPN. I don't know if she's selling magazines. I don't know what it.

Hands it to me with the number. And I was stuck in my pocket and went back to work. End up calling the number later. and it was Jill Frederickson, which was a coordinating producer at ESPN. You know, she was a big wheel and wanted to know if I wanted a shot at this. I'm like, wow, I nearly thought of it. Yeah. Had you ever done any TV radio?

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not one race. Nope. Nothing. What do you do? How do you go practice? How do you go to practice? They had me come to Charlotte for an audition.

I think the first one I did was with Dave Burns. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe it was Alan Bestwick. I can't remember who it was. we did a couple there and you're an analyst so you know it's just a little easier

to be an analyst than to be a real TV guy that's doing you know that's hard but for what we do we're just talking about what we know and just you know

let your personality show you do a really good job at I love watching you so we did one of those there and then did another one in Bristol Connecticut with I think it's Marty Reed maybe some other people

and so they offered me the job you know I remember thinking the money he was decent yeah he was pretty good but I thought, man, I got to go back now and go to work. But I think I really want to do this. And so my wife said, well, don't let the money worry you.

You know, just go do it. So I did it. Did you find it, you know, putting you back in the racetrack? Was that fulfilling to you? I mean, is that something you realized that you were missing? Yeah, it is. I mean, it's definitely, it's better, you know, you haven't experienced the time where you just don't even had,

because you kind of went out of the car, into the booth, kind of all that, but I had that time where I wasn't anywhere near the track. Yeah. So, yeah, it does help. Quite a change. It's going back and going in the garage and meeting and talking to the people, keeping up with the technology. Sure.

You know, it was, I enjoyed all that a lot. You're good at it too. Well, thank you. Did people, I mean, did you feel like that? I mean, I got some good feedback. I mean, apparently I wasn't good enough that somebody wanted to keep me out of it. Well, yeah, I don't think they pinned it, you know, them getting out of the sport altogether on you.

No, I'm not talking about ESB, and I'm talking about after that. I think that the other networks went through them. Oh, I got you. Yeah. Like I say, I still do some work at, on the race-up show at Fox, so still dabble in it. Yeah. So I'm surprised because you've already been there and you've done that,

and you know the commitment and the grind. I mean, for the role that you have at RCR, there's a ton of responsibility. You got your hands involved in everything. You've got a bunch of people coming to you for answers. Why did you want to put yourself in that position again when you didn't have to? Well, you know, I'm just super competitive. I'm still young enough to want to go out there and do it.

I don't want to just sit over here and go fishing every day or play golf, which is fine. I like having time off too, but I felt like I have something to offer, and I wanted to see if I could move the needle any, you know. I feel like maybe we have some, so it still gets me up in the morning. It keeps me thinking about what's next?

What can we work on to move, you know, to move it this week? Yeah. What's in your future? Well, Richard and I have a two-year agreement this year next year. And then after that, I don't know. We'll see. Yeah. See how it goes.

I'll be part of the next gen rollout and see what's next. What's that? What are your thoughts on this? RCR's played a big role in development of the next gen car and it's testing and so forth. And so how, where's your optimism? I think it's going to be fine. There's a few little issues that we've had to work through, the steering and some of the heat issues with the exhaust. It runs through the rockers.

but, you know, everybody's done an amazing job on the design side and the production, you know, we built, like I said, we built the chassis there at RCR from the Dilar design and NASCAR design. Yeah. And it's actually been pretty good. I mean, the car's performed just exactly the way they hoped it would. Do you like the car? Yeah.

Much, I mean, how different than what we've seen? Way different. That thing we're running now is just like a blob. That's what they call it, I think. Oh, yeah. The real cars have character. They look good. That's interesting.

I can't wait. Yeah. Is there anything about the package of the car that you think you would like to see? What do you mean now? You're talking about it? So let me ask you this, since you're great guy to ask this. Let's forget the next gen car. So I feel like that they should take the spoilers off the car.

Or at least, remember? Take them off. Right. What would happen if you took a spoiler off? It would change the game. a lot and we would have to make some major, major adjustments with setup. The drivers would be out of hand. You couldn't even talk to them.

I don't even know how we would handle that. But it would, you can obviously take a car and make it go around the track without a spoiler. It's just going to be a disaster. You've seen some of the stuff on rain, rain, you know, water on the track and dirt, some of the dirt track. It's going to be worse than that. I mean, it's going to be bad. It'll be bad. But like, what do you mean by that?

I think it would be entertaining. Don't get me wrong. I'd love to watch the guys go out there and do it. I'd slow down, lift. Yeah. I mean, but like that's kind of... They could physically do it. Look, we know how we could take that car today.

We've got enough technology and we could make it drive pretty good. Dave Marcus was sitting in here one day and he, I know this is not related. This is apples and oranges, but he's like, yeah, we had the 76 K&K Dodge was Harry Hyde. So Dave is driving it. They're at Taledega, and they're about fourth fastest. They need a tenth on the Pearson or somebody. They had a slotted wickers, all it was. And, I mean, Harry had like a quarter of an inch wicker on the back of that thing,

and Dave was like, take it off all the way. And so they took it off and went out and qualified, and he qualified on the pole. And I'm like, man, I wonder if they could figure out a way to run the cars without the spoilers on them. Like everywhere, right? So you're talking about real low down force. Very low. None.

Lift. Yeah. See, back in 81, those notchback rear windows and stuff, we had cars in the tunnel that had rear lift, not downforce. Right. That's what we need some lift. Wow. Boy, that would be. Faster you go, the looser it is.

There you go. But your whole point is that it makes the racing so much better. And nobody thinks that the drivers wouldn't complain about it, but they would figure it out. Some of it would probably like it. I think Tyler Riddick would love it. I bet he would. Yeah, he likes it sliding around.

Yeah. Well, man, it's been a great conversation. I have looked forward to this, a chance to talk to you. I mean, I've known you forever. A lot like a lot of these guests that we get in here, I've known you forever, but I don't know you. And this is such an amazing opportunity for us, and everyone else that listens to this show.

I love this show. I learned so much, too, from these guys you've had on here, and I think it's an honor to be on it, so thank you for asking. It's an honor to have you here, Appreciate your time. I mean, just a great, great conversation. Great, great stuff. So look forward to seeing what else you can do.

I know that you'll credit a lot of other people, but I think that you guys are steering in the right direction at RCR. As far as just looking at the performance on the track, things have gotten so much better for that program and that organization. I think they're in a person involved in the sport, fans alike, that want to see success at RCR. And so you guys seem to be steering things in a good way. look forward to seeing what happens for you guys later this year as the season goes on.

And yeah, I'm anxious to see what decision you make when that contract to your deal runs out. Where you go next or what you do. So, again, thanks for coming. Thanks again for having me, guys. Yes, sir. Andy Petrie on the Dale Jr. Download. It's time to hear from our sponsor, Valvene. All right, guys, let me tell you about this new high mileage product Valvaline has.

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To learn more, visit high mileage oil.com. All right, we are live. Well, we finally made it to my favorite part of the show, guys. Ask Junior, brought to you by Xfinity. Let's hear some of the questions sent to at Xfinity Racing on Twitter. Hey, everybody, it's Dale Jr. for the Dale Jr. download. This is the Ask Junior portion of the show, and appreciate everybody for tuning in. Got a great couple weeks of guests.

I don't even know what we can tell you and what we can't tell you about our guests, Mike. Do you? Is it all clear in your head? It's clear in my head. I think we'd tell them whatever we want. We'll tell them what you want. Well, Ty Norse is going to be here next week. Ty Norse is going to be here next week. Yeah.

Ty Norris is GM at DEI. He was hired by dad in the mid-90s to help build DEI to what it became. And I think his last year was 2004. So he's going to have a lot to say. And a lot of it's going to be pretty mind-blowing. So I expect that to be great. Who else? Well, should we go ahead and tell them the –

Tell them what you want. You're the one that can break this news. We've got Chipper Jones, the baseball player coming up. He's on deck. See what I did there? Oh, very good. And then, at long last, due to popular demand, Jimmy, Mr. Excitement, Spencer. Oh, you're going to tell him?

You're telling them? Coming into the studio. Oh, my gosh. It's coming into the studio. Yeah. Gonna be big. Boy. You excited?

Yeah, I'm ready. Ready to talk to old Jimmy Spencer. We got a lot to say with Jimmy. We do. That'll be fun. So we, yeah, do we got a line up. I mean, they got the Petri stuff finishing up this week. We got Ty, Chipper, Jimmy.

Oh, my God. I mean, come on. That's all you can tell them? That's enough. They just need to marinate in that three. There's a couple more I thought you might share, but. No, let's not. So let's get to the questions, Leah.

All right. Our first question coming from Noah Frizzle. with NASCAR heading to Kota for the inaugural race of the track, what are your expectations for how the racing will be like at this new circuit, new to NASCAR circuit? Yeah, you know, there'll be a lot of mistakes. It'll be entertaining because I believe there'll be a lot of, you know, offline and guys missing corners and trying to get a little bit too much

and trying to be a little too aggressive. Something like we might have, you know, somewhat of what we saw at Daytona in the road course there. I think that track at Daytona is a little easier. less technical and we still saw quite a few mistakes and you know I think we'll see a ton of them at kota because that track's got a lot of turns and it's just i drove it on i racing and it's really really hard so the other thing about that is a lot of guys have been racing at kota in transam and other types of motorsports so there's some guys that do have some track time and that will be they'll be

quite good right out of the gate so that'll be interesting to see how effective that is throughout the race. So, you know, guys like Reddick and a few other people that have raced on the track versus the people who have not. It'll be interesting to see if they, you know, if those guys that haven't been there don't have the experience can close the gap on the ones that have and whether that will even matter. I doubt it will by the end of the race. So just a lot to pay attention to. How do you set your fantasy lineup? I have no clue. There's rain in the forecast. Do you see that? No. So there's rain in the forecast too. So add that in there. But I, I'm kicking some but in the NBC fantasy league.

I'm in the top 100. Maybe I think I'm in the top 50 overall out of like 10,000 people. And so I had a miscue this week, so mad. But anyways, I don't even know how to set my lineup. I don't know who's going to be good. Chase Elliott. Okay. Well, I definitely going to put Chase in there.

I've saved him for the roadcourses. Him and Martin will be good. True, yeah. But beyond that, you just don't know. Maybe Kurt Bush. Eight top tens in the last 10 road course races, I think. It feels like you do know how to set. line of it.

You'd think I was a broadcasting. It kept up with this stuff. Next question coming from, Dale Wright. We didn't hear your thoughts on the next gen car last week on the podcast. What are the things you love? Is there anything you don't like about the car? Well, the car looks like a duck a little bit because of the big splitter. Did you say a duck?

A duck. A bill. Oh, okay. So like a big hat, bill. The splitter is a little bit too big for me. I wish the splitter wasn't as big. The spoiler's too big. Those are the two things that I probably don't like about it.

Everything else I like. I like the shape. I like that it's a little... I don't know. It looks sporty. It looks... The character lines. There is some good brand identity that's key.

Like the noses of the cars are even more recognizable, I think, than what we have currently. You know, the back of the car, all of those... All the cars really look similar in the back. and I wish there was a little more difference between the models from the middle of the door back. There's not a lot of variance there. But, you know, when you start doing that to the cars, that changes the properties and the downforce and drag, and you don't want to give somebody too clear of an advantage. But, yeah, I'm pretty excited about it.

I'm just ready for them to start racing. And the bigger tire, I don't know how that's going to work out. You know, the bigger tire and wider tire and independent rear suspension and rack steering and the way they're going to adjust on this car and make it handle the things they can change versus that, you know, the things that they can change suspension-wise that weren't even part of the current car, it's going to be a big learning process for all of us, right? You know, just wanting to be able to understand the car as much as I can so I can do a good job in the booth. Next question coming from Jesse Rose.

If you hadn't have won the 2014 Daytona 500, would you have still joined Twitter? Because that was her first tweet. Eventually, I guess, yeah. Maybe the next time I want to race. I needed a reason, right? We would get invited to late-night TV shows just because we were coming to Fontana.

Remember that? Anytime we were going like to Phoenix, Fontana, PR, whether it's our own PR or NASCAR, we'd be like, hey, man, they want you on this, this late-night TV show. And I'm like, well, why? And it was because you're going to be in town.

I'm like, but we didn't do anything. Like, people that go on those shows are either releasing a new movie, writing a book. They've won some big sporting event, right? They don't just show up to hang out. And I was like, I don't want to go on any of those shows unless I've accomplished something, right? And that was the kind of the same way I felt about Twitter.

I wasn't just going to pop on Twitter on a regular, on a normal Wednesday night and be like, hey, guess what? I'm going to join Twitter tonight. You know, it just would make no sense. So I needed a reason. Does that make sense? Not really. I mean, that esteemed list of Twitter users.

Yeah, I could see how you would feel compelled to want to accomplish something in your life before you go on such a platform where... I just didn't want to do it out of the clear blue sky. Had needed a purpose. Grand entrance. Yes. I suppose. All right.

Next question from Jonathan Evans. Are the in-car cameras installed by the teams or by the TV networks at the track? How do they do that? It's a bit of a joint effort, but the TV networks do a lot of the work. And when I think about this, I think about this funny little story. Way back when DirecTV was part of the TV package, they had these dedicated channels to each driver, right? So I would have my own channel and four other drivers would have their own channel, and you could buy those. You bought them in a package, then you got to watch that.

If you're a favorite driver, you know, you would watch his in-car. You would watch a split screen of the actual race action. And you had dedicated broadcasters calling the race about that particular driver. Phil Parsons and Rick Allen calling the Truck Series team, the broadcast team at that point, calling a race for me at Talladega somewhere, right? And it was really cool. It felt special. In my head, I'm thinking, they must be making a lot of money.

This is like pay-per-view boxing. There's millions of dollars on the line here. And I hadn't seen a contract. I hadn't heard, nobody's put anything across the desk in front of me. I'm not getting my cut. And so I got in the car knowing, I think it was a Talladega race, I got in the car and intentionally removed the camera from the interior of the car. And rebellious, some sort of, you know, it was a real jerk thing to do, I know.

But yeah, I took that camera. Right when I got in the car, as the race was getting ready to start, I took the camera and removed it because I was mad. Yeah. That's when that idea went away, by the way. I thought you were about to tell another in-car story. Didn't something happen? This was before I started working with you, but Pops at Sonoma,

something happened with your in-car camera, and it was before people were really using in-car cameras, and the TV network put it on your car, and I think it either burnt a cable or something. Yeah, we had a failure. You had a failure or something, and it was attributed to the camera. And Pop said, never again. Yeah.

We put in these dang cameras on our car. So, also, the other thing that happens quite often with the cameras is they, you get in the car at the shop, you get the mirror the way you want it so you can see everything, that corner of the car and that much of the thing. You get the mirror. It's, you get it perfect, right? Because that's your only way to really tell what's going on around you. They come in, the TV guys come in. and we'll mount that roof cam at the racetrack and move your mirror. And you'll get in there for the race because they mount the cameras the day

the day before the race. So you practice without them and all that. And then you get in there and you're like, Who touched my mirror? You're so mad. And then you're on the starting grid, like get in your mirror where you want it. And that always tick me off. So anytime we were going to have a camera, I'm like, I'm talking to my interior.

I'm like, don't let them move the mirror. Don't let them move it. And I'll get in there and it'll be moved. Like, I told you. And he's like, well, they couldn't get it in. Andy Jeffers does a nice job. He does. We should just say that Andy, all this stuff is up.

Now that I'm in broadcasting, I've got to know the people that do the work, and it's pretty cool. And they're great people. I stopped running the in-car cameras of the road courses, though, because they affected the balance of the car. Whoa. Really? We had a little run there at Watkins Glen where we were. were a top five car.

Yeah. And we came back one weekend and the car was really fast in Friday practice. And then in Saturday practice, they'd put the camera in. And the car wasn't as good. We went from like being a sixth place car to about a 12th place car. And I told Tony Jr. Sen, I said, it's the camera. It's all that weight that's now because they had to, when they put all the camera in,

they got to take the weight out of the car somewhere, right? So it comes out of the frame rails. So now all that weights moved from the low, low to the ground up high wherever the cameras and stuff's mounted. I was like, you've got to get this stuff out of here. Please. And so we had to go to the sponsor and beg them. Like, please let us take this out.

You've paid all this money for it, but we feel like we're not handling as well. And so we took it out, and the car went back to going fast. But we had to convince Budweiser, I think, to let us take it out. So there you go, a little car camera stuff. One more?

Yeah, we do one more. Todd Burke has Ila said her first bad word. Well, it's on what you think of bad word is. she hasn't said a cuss word yet, but she'll say darn, dang, things like that, which her mama would prefer her not to be saying just yet. But I mean, it's coming, so I don't care. There's a point when you'll prefer those words all day long, when she knows what her options are.

I'm of the mind that it's going to happen eventually, so I don't really worry about it if it's happening now. I don't want her saying cuss words. I'm going to be disappointed when that happens, but darn and dang and stuff like that. that don't really bother me now as much as it bothers Amy. Amy would prefer to push it off as far as she can. Right. And I'm like, she's going to get there eventually. So what's the point? All right. That's all for today. All right, everybody. Appreciate it. Ask Junior was great. A lot of good

questions. I had fun. Hope you guys did too. Mike told you about the guests we got coming up. We got a lot of steam coming for this podcast over the next couple of weeks. But appreciate you guys supporting us. Send it in these awesome questions. Well, that brings us to an end of Asch Jr. It always seems to end way too quickly. That's true. It always does seem to go quickly, but not nearly as fast as Xfinity X-Fi. Well, X-Fi is fast, but it's more than that.

It's also reliable and powerful, meaning that everyone can do more of what they love with faster Internet. Listen, everybody, with Xfinity X-Fi, you can do more of what you love with faster Internet. Exactly what Dale Jr. just said. You and your crew can stay connected with Wi-Fi coverage that the delivery. delivers the speed your devices need. And remember, send your Asked Junior questions to At Xfinity Racing on Twitter. Thanks to Xfinity, proud premier partner of NASCAR.

All right, it's last call. Thanks Andy Petrie for joining us and giving us so much great content. We could split this thing into two and give you two parts. It also gives us a week off. When are we going to take our vacation day, man? It's coming up. All right. You've got two in a row.

So, yeah, that is the bonus. So, you know, we sit down and do these podcasts. We just start having a conversation, and then I think once we get up from the table, we go, that's definitely something we've got to split into two parts. And it rarely happens. It doesn't happen every week. That also would afford us opportunity to take a vacation and do something where our wives are like, oh, you get a Tuesday off? That's nice.

That's right. They like that. But hey, here's the thing. Next week, we are, we should go ahead. Should we go ahead and say who is going to be our guest on the show because it's Ty Norris at DEI? Oh, my gosh. And yes, we got a show for you. Oh my gosh. Yes, we do.

Yeah, you're not going to want to miss that. Ty was a – Ty was kind of the GM at DEI when throughout all the early years of the Bud team and the whole development of DEI. He was there actually from the mid-90s helping Dad build that team. He goes into some pretty incredible stories. I can't wait to hear it. We've got a lot of great things to discuss. So you're not going to want to miss that for sure.

That one's going to sneak up on you. Trust me. It's going to sneak up on you even if you. if you're expecting it. He doesn't leave anything off the table. He brings it all. Okay, okay, they get it. What I want to talk about is tie.

Tie has a lot to say. All right. He should finish last call, but we'll wrap it up by talking about tie some more. Probably a good idea. Tie the shit up and get on with it. I did an interview, I did an interview for the artist and athlete.

It's a great podcast. It's been out this year. And lucky for me, I was able to team up with Darius Rucker. I was a huge fan of Hootie and the Blowfish and gotten to become even a bigger fan, I think, after they split up. They came back and played a concert tour about a year or two ago. I was lucky enough to go see that, and it was amazing. And I've also become a fan of Darius's solo career.

So there's a lot of, he's, you know, been around. seen him for years, right, hanging out with Michael Waltrip and at Jimmy Johnson's functions and so forth. So I've met him before, but I've just never been able to sit down and talk to him. And it was, it's an opportunity to do that. So the artist and athlete podcast is a great, I took a trip to Nashville to do that. So you can go listen to that artist and the athlete podcast now. This Friday, I'm going to Amelia Island in Florida for a Chevrolet appearance. I'll be on the Chevy Thunder panel along with Ray Evanham. Certainly looking forward to that.

Ray's called me, making sure that we're going to have a great conversation, and he's got all his questions in order. He's very buttoned up. So Ray's going to be leading that panel, and looking forward to doing that. Amelia Island sounds like an awesome place. Yeah, I think anywhere in Florida is pretty awesome, right, Mike? Amelia Island is very nice.

The Dell Jr. Download on NBCSN is Thursday at 5.30 Eastern Time. Thursday at 5.30. The Dale Jr. Download, the TV version. Make sure you listen to the entire podcast, though, where you're listening to it now. So you know that it's a little bit more thorough than our TV version.

Tell your friends. A new episode of Door Bumper Clear after Dover is out now. So when I read these in the last call each week, it's so weird that I think y'all refer to it as after Dover or after Pocono or after whatever race just happened. I mean, I don't think there's any logic to it. I think it's weird. Well, now we know.

A new episode. of door bumper clear after work. A new door, a new episode of door bumper clear after lunch. That's the next podcast. Door bumper clear after lunch. And all jokes aside, it's a great episode this week, but not because it's after Dover. A new episode of door bumper clear after I run to Target. Does it make sense?

I mean, it's, it's, what's funny is how much thought you're putting into this two words that really just are just throwaways. I think you're missing the bigger question. And the bigger question is, does door bumper clear promote our show on their podcast, Jason Schultz, the way we are doing for them? Oh, no, they just bash it. We talk about this, and he affirms that they bash it. It's T.J. You got to call it.

This is a producer. It's T.J. led, so we need to have a conversation with T.J. They, listen, they need our help. Do they? All right? We're big enough. We're solid enough and successful enough to lend a help to the little man. They need more than our help.

Does T.J. When he bashed us, does he at least go after Dover? They suck. They suck after Dover? Every week. They just say it every week. T.J. Brett and Freddie are joined by Chris Rice of Colliegracing. Chris is well respected in the garage area and has a long history in this sport.

I met Chris, or new, I don't know if I met him, but I saw Chris for the first time. He was crew chief in Elliott Sadler's late model car in 1995, or 1995. Oh, wow. He has been in a while. Yeah, he's been in a while. a long time. They get into the details about the next gen car. I'm sure Chris is learning all about that if colleagues are going racing

in the Cup series. They talk about Hendrick Motorsports domination on Sunday where they finish 1, 2, 3, and 4, and what Denny Hamlin said about the 23 team on the radio during the race. I wonder what he did say. Well, I don't know, I do know that Chris Rice had a lot of great things to say about Josh Barry. I thought that

was very cool, yeah. Door bumper clear, after my dentist appointment. Available on all major podcast platforms. All right, guys, hope you enjoy the show. We'll see you next week. This bit of bad assery was made by Badassery. It was made by Dirty Mo Media.

Dirty Mo!