CIA Stock Photo, Inc.
Yet Dale Earnhardt Jr. is tucked away inside his private garage, which on this day has been darkened for a GoDaddy.com commercial shoot, one of the sponsors that will be on his Chevrolet during the 2009 season.
The garage is nestled away in the Iredell County countryside, behind iron gates and beyond a sign on the driveway that says “Dirty Mo’ Acres.” Off to the right is a high-banked go-kart track that would be the envy of any kid growing up. And still under construction is a huge mansion that will soon be home to NASCAR’s most popular driver.
“I’m real excited about getting my house done,” Earnhardt says. “I’ve never really built a house before, so this has been an interesting experience. It’s going to be fun when it is done. There are a lot of cool things that I’ve added. The basement will be a lot of fun, with a pool table and a poker room and a music room. That’s going to be a lot of fun down there.”
On this day he sits in front of a film crew of 30. Earlier in the day, he and his young driving protégé, Brad Keselowski, shot a commercial featuring Candice Michelle of World Wrestling Entertainment working under the hood of one of the GoDaddy.com-sponsored Chevrolets. In another commercial, every time Keselowski goes to speak, he is cut off by Earnhardt, who describes the advantages to GoDaddy.com and finally tells the frustrated second fiddle, “Brad, you’ve got to be a lot faster.”
“My expectations for Brad are to have the same season he had last year,” Earnhardt said. “It’s going to be hard to beat the Cup guys, but if he can win some races and be up there battling with them and making a case for himself, I’d be happy as Hell.”
Earnhardt would also be happy if less were expected of drivers. Case in point. At a recent round-table discussion involving the track promoters of Speedway Motorsports Inc. (SMI), several stressed that they’d like to see drivers do more to help the fans and the tracks in order to sell more tickets at those facilities.
“The race track owners want drivers to do more? Yeah, right. They need to go back to work,” he said. “They forgot what it’s like to sell tickets. That’s their problem. They ain’t had to sell tickets for a long time and none of them remember how or knew how or ever learned how.
“They need to get back to working hard and doing their promotions and putting packages together for race fans. They don’t want to cut the ticket price but they probably should and get these hotels to quit gouging these people. They can dump that responsibility on drivers all they want but the responsibility really lies in their hands to sell race tickets and they have to get creative in doing it. We already do a lot. We do [bleeping] plenty and they are full of [bleep].”
“There are a lot of great guys in this sport,” Earnhardt said. “We do what we do, man. We race as hard as we can race. I don’t know what else we can do. I’m not going to be a part of no circus. I’m out there going to race and that is what we do. The cars drive the way they drive and we are driving them as hard as we can and get side-by-side and make it a show. We’re driving our butts off.
“I’ve just got to get it done this year and make it happen.”
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