Racing

Dale Earnhardt has had a very bad and troubling year. He was unable to win any race and has admittied that this is his second worst season of his career. But that doesn’t mean that he still won’t be walking away without an award.

Dale Earnhardt was awarded the Chex Most Popular Driver Award, which is more about fan appeal and loyalty than on-track performance, but Earnhardt still made the effort to pick up his fifth consecutive MPDA. Dressed in a natty-looking suit – not a firesuit, mind you, but a nice button-down blue-grey outfit with an accompanying shirt and tie – Earnhardt was on hand to accept the MPDA. But after doing that, Earnhardt unloaded on everything from his step-mother to leaving his teammate at Dale Earnhardt Inc. to his frustrating 2007 campaign.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with the racing star:

On his relationship with step-mother Teresa Earnhardt: “The last time me and Teresa talked, we were still in contract negotiations at DEI. We had a meeting at the office with Max (Siegel) and my sister (Kelley Earnhardt-Elledge) talking about one of their proposals and that was the last time we talked.”

Did you surprise your team members when you decided to leave DEI?: “I don’t think anybody ever thought I would truly leave, but … they knew I was unhappy and some of them knew why I was unhappy. They probably knew before I even had to explain it to them why I was leaving, and they couldn’t fault me.”

Are you going to be more corporate, in a sense, because that seems to be the philosophy at Hendrick Motorsports?: “Nah, I ain’t trying that hard. I like to have fun and I love to race cars. Rick’s a lot like me. He’s been from the bottom to the top. He can appreciate the type of person I am, just like he can appreciate the person Jeff and Jimmie are, as well as Casey. I don’t think he’s going to ask me to do anything like that and I don’t think I’m going to need to do anything like that. I hopefully will get better at handling myself in front of the media.”

Reflecting back upon 2007: “I don’t feel like I ran well enough. I don’t want to sit here and the only memory I have is how badly we ran last year. I want to get out there and get a top-five and feel like that’s where I belong. … I’m ticked off we didn’t win a race. That’s going to bother me for a while. That bothers me every day. I think about it every day. Otherwise, I was proud of my performance and my team’s performance. I was proud of their work ethic, but not winning still bothers me.”

More specifically on how he handled all the disappointment, drama and frustration in 2007: “I felt like it was a hard year. I was proud of how I handled it. Me, Mike Davis (JR Motorsports publicity director), my people, the group that I put together, we did those press conferences, we set it up, we knocked it down, we put the puzzle together ourselves. It could have been a disaster and stupid and ugly and everything, but it went as good as it could have went. So, I’m proud of that because for the most part, we were in a tough position but handled it well for as little experience we had handling those types of things.”