Junior remembers dad

Father-son relationships are complicated enough, never mind trying to sort out the issues while nudging the speedometer toward 200 mph.

Yet that’s the delicate task Dale Earnhardt Jr. set himself this weekend at Talladega, hoping to honor the man who taught him the business while scaring the snot out of everybody else – and still win the race. If that sounds like a tall order, keep in mind that NASCAR’s restrictor-plate events don’t allow much wiggle room to begin with.

But Junior has decided to roll in the old man’s colors, swapping the familiar red paint job on his No. 8 Chevy for a likeness of the black No. 3 car the late Dale Earnhardt drove, and see if it helps him channel the spirit that made “The Intimidator” the most feared racer of his generation.

“Everybody,” Earnhardt Jr. recalled earlier this week, “always said he could do a lot of things with a race car a lot of other people couldn’t.”

As if anybody needed reminding, Earnhardt Sr. was inducted Thursday night into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame at Talladega. It was there as a kid that Junior rummaged through the exhibit soaking up most of his history lessons.

Today would have been Earnhardt Sr.’s 55th birthday, excuse enough to recall his 10 wins on the track – the last of which, in October 2000, marked the 76th and final victory of his career. His closing run that day is still considered one of the best the sport has seen. On top of that, one of the last cars “The Intimidator” zoomed past that day was being driven by none other than Junior.

But there’s another layer to the story.

It was at Talladega in October 2004, when Junior, still working on his own legacy, learned a painful lesson. He climbed out of the car after winning at the speedway for the fifth time and fumbled to pay tribute to the old man. The win didn’t mean much, Junior said during a live broadcast, since, “Daddy’s won here 10 times.” Only he used a saltier word for “much.”

Though Junior was being neither angry nor boastful – exhilarated was more like it – the moment that word left his mouth, he knew NASCAR officials were lining him up for a $10,000 fine and docking him 25 points in the race for the season-ending championship.

So while this might be the first time Junior reached down this far into his motivational bag of tricks, it won’t be the first race he felt there was something left to prove. That’s been the case throughout his career, at least the portion of it that began after Earnhardt Sr.’s fatal, last-lap crash at the Daytona 500 six years ago.

It’s that way for a lot of the kids who try to follow famous fathers. So you could look at this a number of ways: cynically, as a ploy to sell more NASCAR-licensed merchandise; whimsically, as nothing more than a bid by Junior to change his luck, since he arrives at Talladega on an upswing after his most disappointing season in 2005; or even as a calculated gamble.

With his confidence growing and so many story lines waiting to be knotted together, Junior could have it all – and make another down payment on the debt he still owes his father.

“His birthday is something I do enjoy pointing out or celebrating or recognizing myself personally, because that was always a lot of fun with him,” Earnhardt Jr. recalled. “When he would get a little bit older we were always picking about what his real age was. …

“There were some things that come and go with a blink of the eye, but there are other things that come and go that you want to point out and you want to recognize and you do appreciate and you do miss or you do want to – between me and my family or whatnot, and all of his fans, you do want to take a moment and remember. I think,” Junior said finally, “his birthday is a good one.”

Like we said at the top, father-son issues are generally weighty ones. When someone asked Junior earlier this week whether he paid attention to paint schemes before now, he talked about how his father and his racing team had always done that, “thinking of cool ways to do and ways to incorporate neat things that they like or enjoyed.”

But then, in one of those utterances that would fill up an hour on a psychologist’s couch, Junior said, “If I had my choice, I’d be driving an all-white car. I’d paint it sort of like the delivery trucks that Budweiser has. But, you know, I like the car I’ve got and I think it is a reflection of myself. I think it fits my personality as good as any.”

It does.

But maybe it’s a good sign, too, that Junior feels comfortable enough to wear his dad’s colors for a race, the way some sons try on their father’s suits after a while, to feel for themselves how far they’ve come and even more important, to get a sense of how much farther they still have to go.