Sunday, February 18, 2001, started out just like many other NASCAR race days for me. I was a twenty-seven-year-old single mother to a beautiful five-month-old baby girl named Karsyn. She and I were at Mamaw Earnhardt’s house to watch my dad and Dale compete in the race at Daytona International Speedway.
On the last lap, Dale and his teammate, Michael Waltrip, were in front of my dad, leading the race, when Dad’s car crashed into the wall. It was a sight we had seen before, so we weren’t overly concerned. We simply waited, watching for Dad to climb out of the car like he always did.
Time slowed to a crawl as we continued to stare at the television screen. We saw no sign of Dad—just a mangled number 3 car surrounded by the safety crew that was trying to extricate him. Within minutes, we knew in our hearts that this was no common racecar accident. It was serious.
Then the phone rang. My dad’s brother, Uncle Danny, who was at the race as a member of Dale’s racing team, gave my grandmother and me the news that my forty-nine-year-old dad had been killed in the crash.
We both shrieked in horror, then burst into tears and sobbed as we held each other. I quickly called Karsyn’s paternal grandparents and asked them to pick her up so I could focus my full attention on the horrendous tragedy that had just rocked us.
A crowd of family and friends soon filled my grandmother’s house. At some point, I spoke briefly with Dale by phone. Dale, Uncle Danny, and the rest of the team flew back to Charlotte as quickly as possible on the DEI plane and joined us at my grandmother’s. Television news stories about the crash filled the airwaves almost as soon as it happened, and around ten o’clock that night, news crews showed up outside her home in the next phase of what became a huge media event as shock and sadness reached around the world.
My memories of the week following my dad’s death are still blurry. Teresa didn’t want Dale, Kerry, or me to see his body at the funeral home, claiming that she wanted to preserve our memories of him as we knew him, not in a casket.
We held a private family service on Wednesday at our family church. On Thursday, we held a public service at a very large church in Charlotte, which holds about six thousand people. We also attended a brief employee gathering at DEI, where everyone was in shock at the loss. On Friday, Dale had to travel to Rockingham for the next race.
Sometimes people I’ve never met recognize me and say, “I sure do miss your dad.” Occasionally, they say it with such feeling that I can tell his death actually affected them emotionally. They talk about him the way other people talk about losing a beloved spouse or family member. To them, he was a favorite celebrity racecar driver, but to me, he was Dad. In their own way, these people do miss him, but his death did not leave them the memories, the longing, the love, the unanswered questions, and the unfulfilled hope it left in me. All those thoughts go through my mind when people tell me they miss him, but typically all I say is, “Yeah. I miss him too.” They couldn’t possibly know how emotionally loaded that statement is for me.
THE STORY THAT’S NEVER BEEN TOLD
People have no idea how much I miss my dad and how deeply I wish the two of us could have developed a closer relationship as we grew older. During the year or so before he passed away, I had the faintest glimmer of hope that the relationship between us might improve.
When I became pregnant in January 2000, I was worried about how my dad would react. My boyfriend worked on one of his race teams and, like many other people, viewed my dad as intimidating. He was literally sweating when the two of us broke the news to him. My dad took it surprisingly well and began to offer some fatherly advice. “Don’t be in a hurry to get married,” he told us. “Don’t make any crazy decisions.”
My dad didn’t know that I didn’t want to marry my baby’s father. In fact, we had been fighting for weeks. Soon, we stopped seeing each other completely. Before Karsyn was born, I began seeing someone else I had dated previously. My dad was very angry with me because he didn’t approve of the situation, and my relationship with him shut down altogether.
He did visit me in the hospital after Karsyn was born in September 2000, and he fell in love with her instantly. When she was about a month old, she and I attended a Halloween party at DEI. He carried her around, smiling and showing her off to everyone there. I wondered—and hoped—as I watched him dote on her, Is this the beginning of a whole new relationship for us? Will his love for my daughter open his heart to the love that his daughter has longed for all her life? I desperately wanted the answer to be yes. Maybe in time it would have been. But he was killed only three and a half months later.
Even though he was enamored with Karsyn, Dad and I had a strained relationship. After she came into our lives, we spoke more than we had spoken over the preceding months, but to say that we were truly on speaking terms wouldn’t be accurate. When he died, we hadn’t talked with each other in three weeks.
Part of what made my dad’s passing even more heartbreaking and traumatic was that it happened during the most difficult season of our father-daughter journey. I will always believe that just before that fateful Daytona race, we had reached the point where we wanted to rectify things between us, but time did not allow for that. The words of reconciliation that I longed to speak—and perhaps he did too—would remain forever silent.
I carried the weight and guilt of that for years.
WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
As everyone affected by Dad’s death struggled to find a new normal, Dale and I found ourselves uncertain about many aspects of our lives. But one thing we knew for sure was that Teresa would take charge of everything pertaining to my dad’s racing career, business interests, and personal affairs.
We also knew that Teresa would be in charge of Dale’s career, because at that time he was driving for DEI and enjoying unprecedented success on the racetrack. Because of Dale’s accomplishments, Dad had established JR Motorsports for him in 1999. It was simply a business entity, almost a façade. It was nothing more than an official address for Dale to receive payments for winnings, a tiny company in which one person answered fan mail, sent autographs on request, and paid bills. It also served as a legal name to put on his contracts.
DEI managed other aspects of Dale’s career, such as public relations, personal service endorsements, and various agreements. They handled his business without consulting him very much and made decisions on his behalf in their best interest, not his. However, as long as our dad was alive, he made sure Dale was not taken advantage of. Maybe everything was not as advantageous as it could have been for Dale, but Dad certainly ensured that he didn’t suffer.
Dale and I never thought working with Teresa would be easy because of our history of conflict and tension with her. Though he and I both hoped he could continue racing for DEI, we felt certain that his driving for Teresa’s organization would have its challenges. As Dale tried to work with DEI during the months following Dad’s death, I saw him struggling. For various reasons, he simply wasn’t getting the support he needed as a driver.
It was as if DEI went on autopilot after Dad’s accident. Teresa immediately turned her attention to fighting an intense legal battle over the release of the autopsy photos, and the managers at DEI were just keeping the company going. As I watched from a distance, I became increasingly convinced that the company wasn’t looking out for Dale and his interests—as my dad would have wanted—and I was losing hope that they would ever do so. Plus, in a matter of a few years, Dale had gone from making a few hundred dollars per week to making millions, which called for an entirely new level of management and business expertise.
Because I had no part in DEI, I was powerless to help Dale. I still worked at Action Performance and had become vice president of procurement, overseeing the purchase of all products from our vendors and suppliers. Though I was happy with my job and salary—at just twenty-eight years old I was already making six figures—I needed to leave. Action Performance understandably wanted to capitalize on merchandise and memorabilia related to my dad, but DEI wouldn’t allow it. The longer DEI delayed, the more awkward the situation became for me.
At the same time, I was growing increasingly concerned about Dale’s business relationship with DEI. All my life I had looked out for my brother. When he started racing, his relationship with Dad improved, and Dad made sure the business aspect of Dale’s career was handled properly. I trusted Dad in that regard and was happy to see him involved in Dale’s life that way. Once Dad was gone, I was certainly willing for someone else to manage Dale’s business, but in the context of DEI, he wasn’t surrounded by people we felt we could trust to do it well. He needed more than just a person to see that his contracts were signed and his winnings were properly accounted for. He needed an advocate, someone who was on his side, someone who really knew and understood him and who would look out for his best interests. I knew my brother would need me not only as the big sister and friend I had always been to him but as someone who could provide management and financial experience, which I had been gaining at Sports Image and Action Performance since 1995.
By August 2001, I knew what I had to do. I called Dale and simply said, “Dad’s gone, and no one at DEI is looking out for your best interests. This is not going to be good for you. You’re at a point where you really need someone to manage your finances and your business, someone to help you with everything that’s going on in your career.”
Dale knew exactly what I meant without my having to say it more plainly: I wanted to work with him, even though I was thriving in my current job and had worked hard to be in the position I held. He also knew it paid much better than he could pay me, so his immediate response was, “I can’t afford you.” He didn’t understand the scope of work I knew I needed to do for him. He felt I was worth more—and doing more—in my current role than he envisioned I could do for him.
I knew he would say that, so I had my answer ready: “I’ll take a 50 percent pay cut.” That’s how strongly I felt I needed to be involved with his business.
On August 26, 2001, I officially went to work for Dale. My goals when I started the job were clear: I wanted to look out for my brother in a whole new way, and I wanted to make business decisions that would benefit him. I knew my dad had always done that, and I thought I would do a better job than Teresa would. Dale doesn’t like conflict, so I also felt that to a certain extent he might be tempted to let people walk all over him. I didn’t want anyone taking advantage of Dale. I knew how to keep that from happening, and I was determined to do so.
My strategy was simple: I would begin to separate his business interests from DEI. I did that slowly and deliberately. First, I made sure I had a seat at the table anytime any discussion pertaining to Dale took place. For the seven months between our dad’s death and my joining JRM, not everyone involved in meetings or decisions that affected Dale prioritized him. I changed that immediately when I joined his team. Second, I worked to gain oversight of his assets. Pursing these two objectives required patience and diligence, because creating distance between Dale’s business interests and DEI was not well received at DEI. At the time, I didn’t intend for Dale and me to start our own company. He and I both simply wanted to see him less entangled with the organization.
In 2004, we won a big victory when Teresa agreed to release Dale’s naming rights and trademarks to JRM, which still operated under the DEI umbrella. Dale and I both viewed this as a significant positive development, and we thought it would be possible for Dale’s business interests to remain part of DEI. So I negotiated a new three-year contract between Dale and DEI, under which he would continue to drive for them until 2007.
But as the end of the contract drew near, the need to secure a new agreement for Dale weighed heavily on my mind. Throughout the latter half of 2006, I tried to negotiate a deal for him to continue to drive for DEI. I worked hard on it but found the process difficult and frustrating. Lack of communication, inadequate responses, missed meetings, and a refusal to compromise on matters that were important to Dale and me eventually caused me to realize a new agreement would not be possible.
At that point, Dale and I took a big step forward and offered to purchase DEI. The leadership there set the selling price so ridiculously high that we couldn’t possibly have afforded it—and as a businesswoman, I wasn’t willing to buy an overvalued company. Dale and I finally saw the truth: Teresa had no desire for the two of us to remain part of our dad’s organization.
As Dale once said, our relationship with Teresa “ain’t a bed of roses.”1 The animosity, resentment, and conflict that had characterized our relationship for years became so intense that we knew we could no longer work with DEI. From that moment, our priority became taking care of Dale, not staying with our late father’s business simply because of our last name. We were satisfied that we had done everything we could possibly do to stay, but the time had come for us to leave Dale Earnhardt Incorporated. It was drastic and risky, but in May 2007, we announced the decision.
By the time the 2008 racing season started, Dale had made big news in the NASCAR world by joining Hendrick Motorsports, owned by racing legend Rick Hendrick. This move seemed shocking on multiple levels: people without knowledge of our situation couldn’t believe we would leave our dad’s company, and people who were aware of it expected Dale to drive for Richard Childress Racing, where Dad had driven for so long.
If I had to summarize the three reasons we joined Hendrick, they would be relationship, trust, and flexibility. Rick Hendrick has been a family friend for many years, and Dale and I have known him all of our lives. He and my maternal grandfather, Robert Gee, an excellent racecar builder, were close friends and colleagues as far back as their days as young men in Virginia. In 1983, they even owned a winning racecar together, with my dad behind the wheel. In addition, my brother Dale was good friends with Mr. Hendrick’s son, Ricky.
When Grandfather Gee suffered a stroke and was unable to work, Mr. Hendrick remained a loyal friend to him. I was very involved in my grandfather’s care, so every time Mr. Hendrick visited him in the hospital or at home, I got to know him better. I was aware of Mr. Hendrick’s excellent reputation as a racing professional, but after my grandfather’s stroke, I quickly gained a sense of love and respect for him as a person, and I recognized him as someone Dale and I could trust. Before long, he became more than a friend to us. To this day, we think of him as family.
NASCAR fans know that one of the great tragedies in our sport took place in October 2004, when a Hendrick Motorsports plane carrying ten people crashed on the way to a race in Virginia. That day, Mr. Hendrick lost his son, his brother, two nieces, and some of the best people he had ever worked with. Dale and I had suffered our own NASCAR tragedy when our dad died, so we grieved for Mr. Hendrick in an intensely personal way.
Mr. Hendrick was one of the first people we spoke with when we started looking for a new home for Dale’s racing career, armed with a multipage document detailing what we needed in a new ownership relationship. We were open to other options and met with other owners, but we knew from the beginning that Mr. Hendrick would probably be a good place for Dale to land. Relationally, our trust in Mr. Hendrick was solid. Competitively, we believed Mr. Hendrick could deliver. But before we made the business arrangement official, we needed one final detail to fall into place—and we were asking for something unusual. To my knowledge, it was unprecedented in our sport.
I wanted to keep JRM as its own business entity that would maintain control of some key functions of Dale’s career—marketing and public relations, brand management and development, and other matters, which normally would have been controlled by the team. Although my desires didn’t reflect standard operating procedure in NASCAR, Mr. Hendrick was willing to negotiate each point to my satisfaction. I had been looking for that kind of flexibility and was thrilled to find it with a man we so respected and loved.
At the time, Hendrick Motorsports had only one Xfinity team (the second tier of NASCAR racing, similar to minor leagues in other sports), just like we did at JRM. We were surprised—but thrilled—that they were willing to merge that team with JRM. In 2008 Mr. Hendrick became a part owner with Dale of JRM, and I joined them in ownership in 2010.
While our relationship with Mr. Hendrick is professionally beneficial, it’s also personally redemptive for us both. The fact that we lost our dad and he lost his son has bonded us in a unique way. We will always honor the memories of our loved ones and wish we had had more time with them, but for Dale and me—and hopefully for Mr. Hendrick too—the pain, emptiness, and bitterness of our losses have been made sweeter because of the life and the love that we now share together.