He’s Still Got Second Down, Goal To Go After Another Runner-Up Finish In The Daytona 500, Dominant Earnhardt Talks About Winning It Next Year

While Dale Jarrett celebrated stock car racing’s crown jewel in Victory Lane, Dale Earnhardt was back in the garage with his albatross.

“Will you ever win the Daytona 500?” the sport’s best driver was asked almost immediately after failing for the 18th time to claim the only thing of value yet to elude him.

To Earnhardt, that question has been and still is irrelevant. At no time in his run of futility has he wavered from his conviction that he eventually will win the race.

“We’ll be back,” he said.

As he has on the third Sunday of each February, Earnhardt began his quest for another NASCAR Winston Cup championship in defeat, but nowhere near despair.

“We didn’t have anything for him. We had a good car,” Earnhardt said. “It was a good race today. We ran real well.”

What he got for it was his third second-place finish in four years.

He has lost in virtually every way possible, the most celebrated being a blown tire with a mile remaining that cost him the race in 1990 after he led 155 of 200 laps. Earnhardt likes to say he has an excellent record in the “Daytona 499.”

This time, Earnhardt actually got a break in the race - a huge one as it was to turn out.

“We lost the ignition at one time,” he explained. “But everything worked out.”

Well, almost. He was in contention at the end only because Jarrett’s teammate, Ernie Irvan, hit the turn one wall after running into the rear of Earnhardt when his ignition failed.

That brought out a caution flag. Had Irvan avoided contact with the wall, Earnhardt would have been forced to stop under green, in all probability losing a lap or a massive amount of track position while a replacement was effected.

So, he was there at the end, bringing a screaming Daytona International Speedway crowd of 150,000 to its feet as he zig-zagged his Chevrolet repeatedly on the final lap, only to be blocked at each turn by Jarrett’s Ford. It was nearly a replay of their finish of 1993.

“Second ain’t good enough,” Earnhardt said then.

Still, he was the show, as he usually is at DIS.

Just how good has Earnhardt been in the Daytona 500? The record will show that he has finished second four times in the last 10 years. He has driven a top-10 car eight years in a row and has finished in the top five in all but two of them.

But if the true measure of greatness is consistency, it is unlikely any driver ever will approach that of Earnhardt.

Consider this: In the last 10 years of the Daytona 500, there have been 2,000 laps for 5,000 miles. Earnhardt has completed 1,999 laps - 4,997-1/2 miles.

Only in 1991, when he finished a lap down, has the native of Kannapolis, N.C., been out of it when field made its last trip around the 2.5-mile superspeedway.

Yes, second might not be good enough. But it’ll have to do until he returns next year to face the inevitable question.

Meanwhile, Earnhardt, will have to be content with making a run at an unprecedented eighth Winston Cup title - and counting his money.

The $215,065 he collected for finishing second left his Winston Cup career earnings at $26,163,610. And that’s second to no one.