Dogged At Daytona When It Comes To The Daytona 500, The ‘Intimidator’ Has Intimidated No One

Darrell Waltrip needed 17 years to do it. Dale Earnhardt still hasn’t done it.

Winning the Daytona 500 is something special on a NASCAR driver’s resume.

When Waltrip won, he danced from foot to foot in Victory Circle and looked into the television lens and screamed, “I just won the Daytona 500!”

Earnhardt, the seven-time Winston Cup champion and winner of 70 races, will try for his initial Daytona 500 victory on Sunday in his 20th attempt on the historic 2-1/2-mile oval.

It gnaws at Earnhardt that he hasn’t won the biggest stock car race of them all, especially since he leads all drivers with 29 other victories at Daytona International Speedway.

Earnhardt has become accustomed at Daytona to walking into a room and stating in a loud voice, “I still ain’t won the Daytona 500,” just to get the whole matter out of the way and make his case that losing isn’t really all that bad.

But it must be particularly galling to the 46-year-old “Intimidator” that 26-year-old Jeff Gordon, now the biggest star in the NASCAR firmament, is the defending Daytona 500 winner.

“It don’t eat at me or anything,” Earnhardt says of his 0-for-19 Daytona 500 streak, which includes 10 top-five and three runner-up finishes. “I want to win the race; I want to win it real bad. But if I end my career without winning the Daytona 500, it won’t mean I’ve failed or anything.

“I’ve won a few other races and those championships, and I’m not done, yet. But I don’t want Waltrip sitting in a rocking chair ribbing me about his Daytona 500 win and me not having won one.”

Indeed, Earnhardt is primed to go after a record eighth series title, and he is determined to end a 59-race winless string, the longest in his career, as soon as possible.

Winning the Daytona 500 would take care of two of his goals.

Gordon, who will be driving in his sixth Daytona 500, understands how fortunate he is to have won the biggest race so early in his career.

“It’s a big sigh of relief to get a big one like this in the record books so early in your career,” the defending series champion said. “It was the greatest moment of ‘97.”

But Gordon, who has won all of NASCAR’s major races, except the Winston 500 at Talladega, at least once, is still young enough that the real significance of his Daytona win hasn’t hit him.

“If you look at a career like Earnhardt’s and Rusty (Wallace) and even Terry (Labonte), and they haven’t won the Daytona 500, you go, ‘Man, look how important it is to those guys,”’ Gordon said. “Those guys are thinking about different things than I’m thinking about right now.

“I can tell you that if I look at a list of the biggest races on the circuit, those are the ones I want to win. The Daytona 500 is at the top of that list, but there are other important races, too.”

Practice and time trials for the Winston Cup drivers continued Monday, with more of the same today. The next serious business for the top competitors will be Thursday in the Twin 125-mile qualifying races.

Heralded rookie Steve Park, driving for a new team owned by Earnhardt, led second-round qualifying Monday with a lap of 189.498 mph, which would have been good for 16th on the list if he had run it on Saturday in the opening round of time trials. Park was 24th that day.