Dale Earnhardt Jr. shares his dual life as a NASCAR driver and bow hunter, recalling flips at 190 mph in Talladega and a 7-flip Christmas pickup crash, while contrasting modern safety tech with older cars’ simplicity. His 2012 Kansas crash at 185 mph triggered severe concussion symptoms—nausea, anger, cognitive decline—leading to hidden struggles until 2016 rehab under Dr. Mickey Collins. Post-father’s death in 2000, he channeled legacy through honesty and sport contributions, now avoiding Cup Series due to its intensity. Racing’s physical toll, from 150° car heat to concussions, underscores the sport’s hidden dangers beyond speed. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't have the time and the patience to really block that whole day off to go play outdoors, but to go over there and just hit the driver for 30 minutes on the simulator is so fun.
Well, I would imagine with what you do for a living, I think what you do is one of the craziest, wildest, most demanding things a person could do for an occupation.
I know a lot of those guys, and our paths have crossed several times, and every time you're around them, you're like, are we going to end up in jail tonight?
Yeah, I mean, but driving a race car, I mean, you have a giant engine, you're strapped into a seat, you're hurling down the road at extreme speeds, right next to other cars doing the same thing.
Just the intensity and just everything being on nine at all times, like, that is a wild way to make a living, sir.
When I was little, thinking about what the hell am I going to grow up and be, my father was really successful in the sport, so I would go to the races and I would watch him race and see him win and watch him go through victory lane and celebrate and all those things.
I thought, man, this is what I've got to do.
I've got to do this.
This looks fun.
This looks exciting.
People are in awe of the drivers, the race, my father, the personalities.
And I just wanted to do it real badly.
But I knew that the odds of making it are tough.
So there's only 40 guys in the field every weekend.
So there's 40 guys in the whole country that are going to get the shot to do it.
The odds of me, even with my dad being as successful as he was, I'd have a lot of doors open to me, but the odds of me actually getting there and being able to stay had the staying power and the success and talent.
I just knew it were tough, so I didn't know if I'd ever get that chance.
I remember the first time I went to a two-and-a-half-mile track.
It's Talladega, and you hold it wide open.
I was working at my dad's dealership, Changing Oil.
He owned this Chevy store in Newton, North Carolina.
And the phone rang and he said my dad was on there then.
And he was in Talladega for a test and he said, get your helmet and your suit and meet me at the racetrack.
The next day you're going to fly in the King Air to the track.
Don't ask questions.
Just do it.
And so I got there and I knew I was going to Talladega and I thought, man, I must be driving.
This is going to be crazy.
I'm going to go around this two and a half mile track full speed at 190 miles an hour.
I never went faster than 90 or 95 on a racetrack before.
I never drove anything bigger than a half mile.
I got there, he's like, you're going to test this car, get in, get ready.
He puts me in there and he's like, you got to hold it wide open.
If you don't hold it wide open, the motor's not going to work.
It'll hurt the motor.
You got to hold it.
The way they tune the motor to run wide open, it has to run at full throttle.
If you try to go around there at half throttle, it'll burn the pistons, it'll run too lean.
He was saying that and I thought to myself, is he just telling me that just to make sure I hold it wide open because he thought I would be a pussy and not do it?
And so I was like, man, I'm a little nervous to hold it wide open, but I pulled out on the track and I mashed the gas full throttle and I'm going down the back straightaway and I was like, I'm looking down the back straightaway into the next corner, this long corner, and I'm like...
How's it going to stick?
You know, how's the car not going to fly out of the racetrack?
Like, I'm going so fast, it doesn't feel like it's going to stay in the track.
And I kept running that through my head about my dad saying, I've got to hold it wide open.
I'm like, well, dad said it'll go wide open around here.
So I don't think he would, you know, I believe everything he says.
And You go in the corner and you turn into the corner and there is more grip than you can imagine.
There's so much grip.
The car is stuck to the track with such grip that you've never felt this before in your life.
This grip.
You can't slide across that track.
The tires in the car hold of the track so tough and tight that nothing's going to make it.
It just goes around there like it's the craziest thing.
And so now, today, when I tell people, when we've got this two-seater car and we take people for rides and they get in there and I'm like, man, what am I going to do?
What are you going to do to explain to somebody what this is going to feel like?
I'm going to tell you things to pay attention to.
Pay attention to the grip.
You're not going to believe how much grip this car has.
Like, you're just not going to believe that it'll stick to the track the way it does.
So pay attention to that and pay attention to how bumpy and violent it is.
You know, you drive a Cadillac or any car down the street.
Well, it's, you know, six, eight inches off the ground, these big old inflated tires and big giant sidewalls.
It's going to feel nice when it hits little bumps.
Our cars are rigid and suck to the ground and don't have much travel in the suspension.
It's built to go fast, not to feel good.
It's rough as hell and shakes the hell out of you.
That's what I remember about that.
And as soon as I got over that initial fear, I think that was the only time I ever had any real fear of driving a car.
As soon as I was like, well, all right, anything, nothing else is going to be as scary as that was, right?
Driving a car.
And I mean, flipping, and when I flip for the first time, and the car's tumbling and flying, parts flying off the air, I thought to myself that I wasn't scared or I never was scared of flipping.
My thought was I just did something a lot of people are never going to experience.
You know, I did something that...
That only a few people know what that's like.
And I feel safe.
I've always felt incredibly safe inside the car.
Especially in the last 20 years, the safety stuff has really been focused on and improved and better and better and better.
But I look at the interior of our cars today versus 20 years ago, and I can't believe some of the stuff that we used to climb into.
So I get in there and I got turned around at a race in 1998. I was racing at Daytona.
And I got turned around and the car...
So I'm flipping for the first time in my life.
And this car's like over 3,000 pounds.
But it flies up in the air like it's paper, man.
It's the craziest thing in the world.
It's so weightless, you know?
And what it felt like to me, so the car rolled on its side and came down kind of on its side.
It felt like somebody rolled a prop wall of grass up against the car.
You know what I'm saying?
When I was on my side and I could see the ground, I felt like I was right side up because as you're flipping, the force pushes you down in the seat.
So you feel eternally, you feel gravity.
All the time.
As the car's flipping, you're pushed into the seat, so you feel weight of yourself in the seat.
That never changes.
You never come up out of the seat like that.
It's like somebody rolled a prop wall of grass up against the side of the car, and then against the roof, and then against that side.
It kept doing that.
I'm like...
It's just the weirdest feeling.
And you feel completely safe.
You feel like, you know, nothing's going to harm me.
One of the things they always talk about is get your hands onto something because the spinning makes your arms just go like this.
And if you watch a lot of old wrecks from the 60s and 70s, you'll see the guy's arms come flying out the window and they're just kind of flopping around.
It's spinning so fast you can't pull it in.
And your arms will go like that.
So as soon as you know you're going upside down, you grab the bottom of the steering wheel and just kind of, you know, watch.
But I flipped my pickup truck one time on Christmas Day, and I wasn't holding on the steering wheel, and my arm went out the window.
You know, for like a split second, it banged around in the window sill.
And I was like, man, you know, I got it back in and grabbed ahold of the steering wheel with both my hands.
And so ever since then, I've like, you know, now I know, like anytime I'm in a crash, you got to have your hands ahold of something because that's the one thing that you can't control.
You're strapped in with your seatbelt and everything, but your arms are, you know, can go anywhere.
And in that moment when the car is rolling or barrel rolling or flipping, It's so fast.
It's probably not fun for her to hear every time I tell it.
I had a pickup truck with a tape deck in it.
She got me that Walkman CD with the adapter for the tape deck that you stick into your cassette adapter.
And she bought me the Walkman cassette adapter and I'm in my truck.
I got an extended cab S10. I'm driving from my house to my mamaw's house where family reunion is.
My dad's there.
Everybody's there.
The whole family's there.
I'm a little late.
And I'm driving down the road.
And I got to messing with that Walkman, and I drove off into the ditch, and I hit a driveway culvert, a pipe, drainage pipe in a driveway, and went like seven flips and destroyed this truck.
And in the middle of the flipping, I remember that happening.
And everything, all my change, jacket, anything that was loose in the car ended up down in the one corner, like floorboard.
Everything sort of collects into that one corner as it's spinning.
And it crushed the windshield down.
The mirror was down into the radio.
You know, it crushed the roof down real bad.
I was really lucky.
I had my hands on top of the steering wheel and the windshield kept slapping my knuckles and busted all my knuckles real bad.
And so then I let go and my hands went this way.
And then I finally got them back in and grabbed the bottom of the steering wheel.
The tires were broken and busted off the truck.
I got out of the truck, and I was fine.
I didn't have any injuries other than just the knuckles kind of being scraped up.
This newly married couple, they either got engaged or just got married, were driving the other way and saw the whole thing.
And they stopped.
And they were like, you alright?
I'm like, yeah.
And, of course, there's this line of cars behind me stopped on the road, and this one lady pulls up, and I was like, I need to borrow your cell phone to call my dad.
She's like, you're in shock.
You need to sit down.
I was like, no, I'm not in shock.
I just need to borrow your cell phone.
So I walked in the next car, and I got a cell phone from this person.
I called my dad, and I was like, Dad, I was like, man, I flipped my truck.
I had financed this thing for five years.
I was paying $100 a month.
It was perfect.
I was working at a dealership changing oil, probably making $130 a week.
And, I mean, just got this truck for probably two, three months.
And used truck, but it was good.
It's junk.
I called dad and I'm like, man, he's going to be mad.
Can't be too mad because I'm paying for the truck, but he's going to be mad at me because I'm screwing up family reunion and Christmas stuff.
He comes to get me.
I'd flipped this truck real close to where our farm was, so he ran over to the farm and got this flatbed truck, and he pulls out there with the flatbed truck.
And he pulls up, and as soon as he pulls up, a state trooper pulls up.
And the state trooper guy and dad talked for a minute.
And the state trooper's like, you know, one single car accident, you okay?
Yeah, everybody's okay.
Dad, are you going to put this on the flatbed and take it home?
Yeah, okay, okay.
I ain't going to investigate or anything.
Everything's cool.
Y'all just go about your business.
So he left.
He did us a solid there and didn't give me any kind of traffic ticket.
And so me and dad put the truck on the flatbed and we're driving back and he started laughing.
And I was like, man, I expected you to be really mad because he was a fiery kind of dad, you know, and pull the belt out and go to town, you know.
He was a rough, strict, tough, tough dude.
And so I thought I was going to get a good cussing at least, but he started laughing.
And I said, man, what's so funny?
And he goes...
I was 18 when this happened.
He goes, when I was 18 years old, I flipped my car.
He's like, I can't get mad.
He's like, I'm just glad you're not hurt.
I'm like, that's nice.
So we drove back.
I took a couple pictures of it and got insurance for it.
Got like 11 or 12 grand for the insurance to be able to buy another truck.
I got an 88 S10. That was the first pickup truck I owned or had.
That was like the car I got when I was 16 years old.
And I got one and restored it, which was a terrible investment.
But it makes sense for me because it was my first truck.
And I didn't think anybody would give a shit about it, right?
Because it's an S10. It's like the bottom of the barrel in pickup trucks for Chevrolet in 1988. But I drive that thing around and people are like, Wow, that's the cleanest S10 I've seen in 15, 20 years.
And so we got, I wanted to hunt, but not, you know, I'm not going to be going every week.
But I knew he was probably interested in probably buying some land and us managing it together and learning how that process goes.
So we bought this land and we've put the crop, we've put the, you know, we put the food plots in, not ourselves, but we've managed the land on how we want to change it.
I think a lot of people who don't hunt don't even understand what we're talking about, the whole process.
If you buy a nice piece of land, people who, especially if you look at, there's a bunch of organizations that teach classes in how to manage a giant piece of property, but laying out food plots.
People buy these big chunks of property specifically for whitetail hunting.
Well, I would imagine, again, with what you do for a living, having something that's peaceful and quiet and out in nature would be very important to kind of balance out just the wild, hectic nature of race car driving.
I mean, for me, when I get in the stand and I sit down and I look out across the field and look at the land and everything, man, you ain't got to worry about...
You know, answering no email or getting back to this guy or setting up this appointment or answering this question or, you know, it's just, it's even better.
It's better than going on vacation.
Like, we go on vacation with my wife or with my buddies or whatever.
You still can't ever really disconnect from everything you're doing.
It seems like, though, when I go hunting, I can completely get rid of technology if I want.
I think even a park, you know, even people that go to Central Park in New York City, they go to that park and sit down by a tree and they just feel better.
Do you have apprehension about the horsepower wars with just modern consumer cars?
Because I look at some of these cars that they're putting out that are amazing, like the new Corvette ZR1s.
700 plus horsepower right from the factory.
The Dodge Demon's like 800 horsepower.
They're putting out these insane race cars right from the factory that any dummy like me, I could just go to, if I have the cash, I go to a Corvette dealership and pick one up and all of a sudden I'm on the highway.
I don't have a problem with it now until it becomes a common occurrence where people don't know how to control it, you know, or don't know how to manage what they're doing behind the wheel or something like that.
But until that's like a common issue, I don't know that it'll need regulation.
I have a lot of friends that are responsible gun owners.
I've used guns for hunting.
I think you should have a gun for protection.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
But I don't think it would be a bad idea to have some sort of course that you have to go through so you understand all the aspects of safety and precautions that you should take and how to correctly load a gun and clean a gun.
I'm not talking about gun control as much as I'm talking about gun safety and gun responsibility.
I feel like the same way about a car.
I feel like if you're going to go out and buy a Corvette ZR1, the kind of body-mashing acceleration, the G-forces you can get from something like that right from the factory, zero to 60 in under three seconds, that's an insane automobile.
Maybe someone should take you around a track a little bit.
If you have to have a particular license to drive 18-wheelers down the interstate, there should be a style or type of license that you need to achieve to have a certain type of license.
Anytime I got behind the wheel of a Corvette or anything like that, I would get pulled over for, you know, rolling through lights or rolling through a stop sign or reckless driving or whatever.
And I kept...
I mean, it happened as recently as two or three years ago.
I got pulled over for rolling through a stop sign and speeding.
And the guy's like, man, you don't need these tickets.
Like, what are you doing?
And I was like, you're right.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
I don't need to be driving this damn car is what's up.
I need to get out of this stupid car.
I don't need no Corvette with all this power.
And so...
And I've got this original...
I got this original 65 Impala that's been in my family since it was brand new.
It's kind of been the community car.
It was passed around, got banged up on the corner, right front corner.
A couple crashes here, a couple crashes there.
This guy needed a car because his was broke down, so he used it for a while and such.
And I finally got it.
I bought it for two grand for my dad.
And I've fixed it up.
It's got a two barrel, 283. Wow.
Doesn't go anywhere.
Right?
And I just as much rather drive that car as little of power as it has.
Knowing I won't get myself into any stupid trouble.
I think the reason why I like to work on cars is because it makes you a little invested in the car.
There was a point of time where I was just kind of like, that's cool.
I want to buy that.
I'll get that.
I'll drive that a year.
Now I don't like that anymore.
Oh, that's cool.
I want to buy that.
I'll get rid of this one and get this one.
And that got old real fast for me.
And so I started to...
That's when I put a little more time in that 65 Impala and fixed it up.
And I'm like, I'm never selling that car.
Never going to sell it.
That 48 truck, I'll never sell it.
Just because of the work I put into it or the time that I've spent with it.
I've had...
I mean, you know...
There's people that are helping me work on these cars.
I've got a buddy of mine that actually helps me work on these cars.
But...
When I finish that Nova wagon, I'll probably never sell it, even though it's probably nothing special if someone else were to look at it, but it's what I put into it.
And the more you work on these cars, the more confidence you get in trying to do more, getting into the jobs that you didn't think you were capable of doing.
When I was in high school, there was a man in the neighborhood when I was a kid that had a 55 Chevy, and it was the greatest thing anybody had ever seen in their lives.
And we would all wait while this guy drove by in his 50s.
55 Chevy.
We just couldn't believe it was a real car that someone could own this.
In that flip I was talking about in 1998 at Daytona, I got a concussion from that crash.
I'd had concussions throughout my career at many different points and didn't think anything of them.
I thought when you got a concussion, you joked about it with your buddies, about how it made you feel, and you just rested until it was gone.
And you raced through it and eventually it'd go away and you were fine.
You know, it was just something that would go away and you never thought anything about, you never thought about seeing a doctor.
You never thought about getting treatment.
You didn't know there was even treatment available for a concussion.
You just thought it was something like a bruise, you know.
So this is going on throughout my whole career.
I was racing at, I was testing at Kansas Motor Speedway in 2012, blew a right front tire, hit the wall at 185 miles an hour, and it screwed me up.
And so that was a really not, you know, That wasn't a typical crash, not something that drivers deal with usually in their career.
This was something that was unique to me and it was just a terrible impact at a bad angle at a very, very fast rate of speed.
And I got out of the car and I knew something was wrong with me and I couldn't, you know, I couldn't I felt, you know, just like I'd been hitting the head with a bat, shocked and shell-shocked in a way, or just couldn't...
I couldn't...
Shake it off.
You just kind of wanted to shake your head and get it out, whatever it was, and you couldn't.
That's the way I failed immediately after that crash.
Our test was done because the car was killed.
So we went over to this place to get some lunch, and we're sitting there, and I started getting sick, nauseous, before we ever, you know, I wasn't eating.
We just ordered, we just sat down, and I started, I'm sitting with my team, all my guys, and I'm starting to, I feel like I'm going to throw up right there in front of them, and I'm getting nervous, and I don't, I haven't said to them that I feel this way, you know, so I don't want to tell them I feel this way.
But my crew chief, Steve LaTarte, is like a brother.
I was like, Steve, I am getting sick and something's wrong with me.
I don't know what's wrong with me, but I got to get out of this room.
It's lunch hour.
It's full of people, noises, talking, chatter, shit going on, and I got to get the hell out of there.
And as I was getting up to leave, my wife came walking in.
She was coming to get me.
We were going to Washington Redskins Monday night game and sitting on her box with Dan Snyder and whoever else was there.
So we had them plans to go.
I said, Amy, I'm going to go lay down in the car.
I just got to lay down in the car for a minute.
And I laid down in the car all the way to the airport.
I'm thinking, this is bad.
This is worse than I've ever felt anything, but hopefully it's going to go away.
And so we get to the game.
We went to the Redskins game.
We watched the game.
Did that whole thing.
And I went about four weeks of feeling bad and sick for about four weeks, and it finally went away.
And I knew that was unusual for it to be that long, but in my mind, I wasn't thinking doctor.
I wasn't thinking treatment.
I wasn't thinking anything like that.
It didn't even cross my mind to tell anybody or that I really needed...
I thought, you know, I thought that I had been dishonest and not...
I hadn't been honest with everybody about the way I was feeling, but I didn't ever think that it was going to cost me anything.
So I thought, alright, I'm feeling better.
I'm good.
Go to this race.
I'd been racing the whole time, right?
Finally, four weeks later, I'm great.
I go to another race.
I'm racing.
I crashed.
And it all came right back.
Like, as bad as it was, if not worse.
And that's when I said, I've got to go to the doctor.
This is bad.
I can't even...
I can't keep crashing like this.
Just putting these concussions so close together is a bad deal.
This is dangerous.
And I couldn't bite my tongue.
My attitude and my emotions and shit was out of whack.
I couldn't control my anger.
And I was like, anybody say something I didn't like, I'm like...
I wanted to tell them to fuck off.
That was just not like me.
I couldn't keep myself calm.
Everything that I heard made me angry.
It was the craziest thing.
Even people just talking about stuff would just get under my skin.
I'm like...
Real impatient.
And there were some new symptoms, but I finally went to the doctor and I went to this neurosurgeon in Charlotte, Dr. Petty.
He's like, I want you to meet this guy in Pittsburgh.
His name's Mickey Collins.
He works with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Penguins.
And I'm like, alright.
I go up there and I'm thinking I'm going to meet this guy that works with the Penguins and the Steelers and he sees...
He's a doctor that sees anybody and everybody.
There's kids in there that got hurt playing on the playground.
There's workers, carpenters, housewives.
Everybody's in that damn waiting room to see this man.
He sees about 25 people a day.
He's an expert on head injuries.
He's on the cutting edge of whatever the hell the new shit is, he knows it.
His team and his people are investigating it.
He fixed me.
I go there and I'm like, this is what happened.
This is how it happened.
I crashed.
I hit it.
I didn't tell anybody about it.
I was sick for four weeks.
I got better.
I crashed in this race and I feel sick again.
And he was like, well, these are two different injuries, two different parts of your brain.
The first injury, you bruised this right front edge of your brain when you hit the wall.
He said this second crash, you twisted the base of your brain and injured some things in the back of your brain, and that's why you're having the emotional and different things like that.
But he went deeper into it than that.
He was like, you know, we did all these tests and visual tests and all kinds of stuff.
And I'd go back to, I mean, we did this thing.
I went through the gamut for a whole day of doing tests.
And then I went back every week before I, you know, and in two weeks I was back racing again.
I was clear.
And so he took an injury that I hid and took four weeks to heal and healed it in two weeks.
The ocular stuff, I mean, you can have injury to that part of your brain or you can have an injury to the vestibular part of your brain that may, like if you have bad balance, then your eyes and your balance work together.
And so if you have vestibular issues, that can create ocular issues.
That can affect your anxiety and depression and things like that.
You can have an injury to one part of your brain that affects four other areas.
And we talk about that in the book.
Mickey comes into the book and I'll say, this is what I was feeling, this is what I did, and Mickey will come in behind me and say, this is the medical science behind that and this is how we treated it and why.
I would have an injury to one singular area of my brain, but I would have four different symptoms affecting four different parts of my brain, four different senses.
And, you know, he would have to hone in on the one that was broken and then know to fix it.
And when he started fixing it, all the other ones would start communicating together.
The brain would start working again, balance and visual and all those things would start to work again and anxiety and all those things would, you know, begin to come back in tune.
Basically, if I turned my head or looked up and down, I would get dizzy and sick.
Like, my stomach would turn if I turned my head left to right, if I looked up and down, just sitting there.
Like, the best thing for me was to sit on the couch and not move.
Literally not move.
I felt fine then, but if I moved an inch, it would make your stomach nauseous.
I did a lot of exercises that created a ton of motion with my head, lifting heavy balls up.
And passing them over my shoulder this way or that way, taking a ball and turning around and hitting it this way, taking the ball, turning around and hitting it, just doing that for hours and hours and hours.
And so I would train, basically, I was training myself to balance again.
Training my body to balance itself again.
If I couldn't see a horizon or a flat surface, I couldn't tell which way was up.
It was so bad.
The visual stuff, there was these, I had a string with these balls on it, and I would hold the string on my nose and hold it out here, and I had to look at all those balls, and it would, my eyes are focusing, just, all it's doing is really just making my eyes change focus, from one to the next to the next, and back, one to the next, next, and back.
And there was this I-chart on the wall, and it had all these letters and all these numbers on it.
And I had to look at that I-chart and turn my head back and forth this way, but look at that I-chart and count from A to Z, but backwards.
And what they believe today is that exposure is what helps.
Pushing yourself into these complex environments and doing things that are really challenging for yourself.
Even doing that, if I put you in front of that eye chart and made you turn your head back and forth and walking two steps forward, two steps back, it would be difficult for you.
But for an injured person, it's super difficult.
It has to be really challenging.
But it just sort of tunes the mind or retrains the brain to balance.
It retrains the eyes to track on objects and to lock on objects and stay on them.
Yeah, I mean, I imagine it was feeling pretty good after a couple days.
I'd have to, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know if it affected me right away or, but I know I was, by the time we had, I take an impact test, which is basically kind of measures memory and things like that, all kinds of different stuff, and And my measurements had come back to my norm, you know, my basic You know, they kind of make you take the impact test beforehand, so that gets your blueprint of how you are.
And then whenever you get injured, you take it again, and they'll line that up against that and say, okay, yeah, you're deficient here.
This is a problem.
Maybe it's not diagnosing a concussion, but it's asking us to look in this area.
And so you have a baseline, and then you have whatever your injury or post-crash baseline is.
So I was matching all my normals on that impact test, and that was kind of the trigger for them to go, man, if you feel good, you look good here, all the things are saying that you're back.
That's why, so in the book I talk about these notes I started taking.
After that crash in 2012, when I would wreck after that, I would get sick and I wouldn't tell anybody.
And so I started writing these notes in a journal in my phone.
And from 2013 all the way to 2016, I had this long journal of crashes and how I felt.
And I would crash on Sunday and I'd write in the journal on Sunday night, Monday morning, Monday at lunch, Monday at night, you know, three times a day every day until whenever I felt good, which was usually either Wednesday or Thursday of that week.
And I was writing these notes because I couldn't tell if I was getting better.
The brain injury or any type of head injury, I mean, if you said, how's it feel Monday, and then you asked me again Tuesday, I'd be like, I really don't fucking know, man.
And so I would try to write as detailed as I could on a Monday and then try to write as detailed as I could on Tuesday and reread Monday and see, hmm, is it better?
I can see in the comments or, you know, I can't really remember exactly what I was feeling Monday, but in the comments it seems better and I would write these notes, right?
And so I kept doing this and I thought I was treating myself.
And eventually it caught up with me.
Like I had about a dozen concussions in a period of about two and a half years.
And that time, they put me on medication that would drop my anxiety levels, so the anxiety levels would stay down so that I could concentrate on the injury.
I don't know exactly the names, but it was very, very small doses, and it would take about three weeks for it to kind of kick in.
I'd have to take it for a while before it'd start working.
But it just made me real chill.
And it made me not analyze myself every single day when I got up.
When I got up, I wouldn't go, hmm, is it still there?
Is it as bad as it was?
Let me walk across the room and see how I feel.
Let me go do this and test this and try this and try this and try this all day long and see how I feel.
It made me stop doing that because I was driving myself crazy.
He gave me a lot more physical therapy, basketball, movements, anything that got my head moving.
I'd do those exercises for about two weeks.
Some of them would stop triggering symptoms.
I'd go back to his place in Pittsburgh.
We'd go through about 30 more exercises and I'd take home about 15 that made the symptoms trigger.
And I'd do them for about two or three weeks, and some of them would stop working.
I'd go back to him.
We'd go through more physical exercises.
Kept doing that process over and over and over.
I took the medication for about a year and a half.
And I had a lot of...
They gave me this computer program for my eyes and I was wearing these...
I would wear these 3D glasses and this computer program would try to take these 3D objects and go to 2D and back to 3D and my eyes would literally try...
It felt like it was trying to rip my eyes apart.
It hurt, like physically hurt when this object would try to go from 3D to 2D and it was going very very slowly and it felt like it was trying to rip my eyes apart.
And imagine your eyes are tethered together.
So when you look left, they both go there, right?
And they both go wherever you look.
They go together like they're supposed to.
And mine didn't want to do that.
You couldn't physically see my eyes towed out or going the wrong way.
You couldn't see that.
But when I try to look over here, they both didn't go to the same place.
And that action or that computer program was strengthening that activity of my eyes trying to do something together.
I would walk, so if I, I've got these buffalo on my property, and they're across the field, you know, 200, 300 yards out across the field, out the back window of my living room, and if I walked across the floor, every step I took would knock my eyes off of the buffalo.
Like, they're way out there, and I could look at them, but if I took a step, my eyes would shake, and I couldn't, I'd have to find them again, you know?
And so that computer program would strengthen my ability.
It's called gaze stabilization.
It would make it to where when I walk, if I'm walking or bouncing across the room, I can still look at you in the eyes like a normal person.
And when I was at my worst, I couldn't do that.
But that took a long time to fix.
The book basically is me admitting making those mistakes.
I should have went to him as soon as I got sick again the first time instead of trying to document it myself and hide it and manage it myself and trying to get to whatever the end of my career was, whenever that moment was, and retire thinking I was going to walk away without anybody ever knowing.
And I had to retire after that.
After that 2016 year of missing half a season and going through all that, I didn't want to go through it again.
I had one more year on my contract in 2017, so I finished that season, and that was that.
Over the last five years, it's been hard for me to turn my back on articles, stories about NFL players and their history.
The whole lawsuit brought up so many stories about what these guys have went through, what their families have went through.
It's been impossible not to read that stuff and fear that, is that something that's going to happen to me?
Do I need to be worried about my long-term health?
It took me the longest time to watch that concussion movie because I just didn't want to know what it had to tell me.
And I... Eventually, I got to a place where I thought...
I talked to Mickey.
When I was hurt in 2016, I said, Mickey, why aren't you shutting me down?
He shut down some player.
I don't know the guy's name.
I don't know whether he was a hockey player or a football player, but the guy was making millions of dollars, and he was in his mid-20s, and Mickey had to say, you can't play anymore.
And I wanted Mickey to tell me that.
I didn't want to have to go out the room and say, y'all, I'm retiring.
I don't want to do this anymore.
I wanted to say, y'all, Mickey said I got to retire.
But he wouldn't.
And he said, you know, you're not where that guy is.
And I don't see what's going on.
I don't see anything going on with you that tells me you can't race if you want to race.
I said, well, what if I get hurt again?
He said, if you get hurt again, I can fix it.
It's up to you if you want to go through that.
He said, you're just as likely to get hurt as you were before the injury.
You're going to race in racing and racing is dangerous.
You got to make up your mind whether you want to go out there and risk getting hurt again.
And if you do, I'll fix it.
You can come right back here and we'll fix it all over again.
And I was like, alright, if you're not shutting me down, then you must not be worried about my long-term health.
And he's like, no, I'm not worried about your long-term health.
There's nothing going on here that I see that would make me concerned about your long-term health.
And so...
With all that said, I got married.
I had a little girl.
I'm sitting there on them days at home with them, and I'm thinking to myself, what if I'm sitting here worried about CTE or my mind, you know...
Going away, and it never happens.
You know, am I going to sit here and worry about that at 44 all the way through my 50s and my 60s and 70s and then one day wake up at 80 and go, damn, I lived a pretty good life.
Why did I worry about all that?
Why didn't I enjoy what was in front of me?
And so...
So I'm going to enjoy what's in front of me, not going to worry about CTE, not going to worry about my long-term health.
And there's another thing, too.
The conversation about concussions has really just skyrocketed into warp speed over the last five or six years.
And the way they treated me in 2012 to the way they treated me in 2016 was completely 180 degrees because they know so much more and they understand so much more about treating the injury.
And so if I do have any problems, whenever that is, I'm confident that there'll be something there for me, that there'll be something there to give me a good quality of life.
I had a hell of a run.
I had a lot of fun.
I raised hell.
I partied.
I won.
I lost.
And if it all ended now, I wouldn't have missed out on anything other than my wife and my little girl.
And so...
I'm content with where I am.
All I want to be able to do is just be a good father and be a good husband.
And I think I'm going to have that opportunity.
But if anything does happen to me, I think that there will be some technology, some information, some medicine, something that would give me a good enough quality of life that I would be able to enjoy those things.
And I think that, look, I'm very familiar with head injuries.
I'm around people that have had them all the time.
And I think it's something that we're understanding now more than ever before.
But someone like you, writing a book about this and your experience with it, I think is really important for people.
I think it's going to help a lot of people.
It's going to help a lot of people understand it.
And the more we talk about this, the more this gets out there in the public, the more it helps just regular folks that have had concussions understand what a significant thing this is.
Yeah, I know they're starting to do some stuff with stem cells as well.
And, you know, there's a guy named Dr. Neil Reardon that I've had on the podcast before that he did wonders for Mel Gibson's dad.
And so Mel Gibson came on and wanted to talk about this.
They have to do treatment in Panama.
Treatments here in the United States because they're not legal yet But the effects that they're having on people that are they're bringing down to Panama.
I mean, it's just mind-blowing You know, and I'm hoping that's gonna also Help people with traumatic brain injuries and CTE and some other things as well.
And I'm hopeful that there aren't a lot of drivers that have experienced what I've experienced and crashed the way I've crashed.
And there's drivers that will race their lives without it, you know, without ever having that experience.
And I'm glad for that.
But for the guys that have, I've had veterans, retired guys call me, say, man, I've given my doctor's number to so many damn people ever since I've spoken up about this in 2012 to now in this book.
Mickey says there's at least three people a week that come in his office talking about me, and that's why they're there.
And so that's the whole mission, man.
Because Mickey gave me my life back twice.
I'm telling you, man, in 16, I was in bad shape.
And without my wife and without Mickey, I don't know that I would have made it out there then.
This book or anything else, this podcast, any opportunity to talk about this is only to push more people to Mickey so that he can do the same thing for them he did for me.
There's a guy named Dr. Mark Gordon that's also been on this podcast before that does a lot of work with TBI and soldiers and football players and stuff like that.
So there's a lot of other doctors out there that are specializing in this and realizing this is a significant issue.
Well, they're getting some good, you know, they're getting some opportunities to actually, you know, get up there and speak up about it and make it known.
There's some people that just don't know where to go, you know, or don't think that they can afford it or don't think that they're going to get that...
You know, like, when I first went to Mickey, I thought I was going to go in there and see just Steelers and NHL players.
If I would go back, it would take me six months just to get up to speed, not even really even get competitive, just to get up to speed physically and mentally.
And somebody next door, the guy next to you and the guy next to him and the guy next to him is always constantly trying to build a better mousetrap.
And everybody's...
And what's new and badass today is going to be okay and not very good six months from now.
And...
They're constantly, so the teams are constantly working, and if you're not in those cars and current and in that flow, in that changing, in that cycle, in that wheel, then you can't, you're behind.
Like, when you get in the car and you get around the team, like, you're behind on what's in the car, what's happening with the car, and I don't know, it's just not something you just jump in and out of, because you're not really the The key component.
Like, your body as a fighter, you know your body, and your body is the tool.
A football player, same thing.
Quarterback, his arm's the tool, right?
In racing, it's the car.
And so, if you're not in it and around it every day, you will be behind on technology, understanding what's happening, what teams are doing, what you need to be doing.
The damn dash is full of switches with all kinds of shit going on, and this needs to be on, and this needs to be off, and this needs to be back on and off and on.
And there's, you know, levers, there's brake levers.
Some drivers have four fucking brake levers.
There's like a rear...
You can shut off the left front, the right rear, the right front.
You can put all the brakes from the back to the front, from the left to the right.
I mean, that's just the brakes.
And, yeah, I mean, there's just so many...
There's just a lot going on that...
It would take you a while to get back up to speed if you were to take some time off.
I mean you can have as many as you want or as little as you want.
Some guys really think that that stuff's a good tool for them to be able to adjust the brakes and change how the brakes work on all four corners of the car.
Some of them do.
They move them during the race, while they're racing.
They're changing them and fooling with them.
In an Indy car, you can adjust the roll bars and wings and all that stuff in those cars and stuff like that.
As a race car driver, there's a ton of stuff going on in that car that people don't even know about.
I would get in the car and forget about those tools and forget that I have those adjustments and knowledge and getting beat by guys that are using it every day.
We can see during the in-car camera, it'll be pointed at that temperature gauge, and all of the guys' cars were 150 degrees inside, all the drivers, and it was miserable.
And so the drivers try to trim the cars out so much that there's not a lot of air moving around in the car.
And it's so low to the ground, there's not a lot of air moving around under the car either.
So that air under the car is just kind of baking in there and just sitting in there.
So they're miserable.
They're a miserable, miserable, miserable car.
When I watch races and I'm like, you know, I'd love to get out there and do that for a few minutes, but damn, running three hours in a 150 degree race car.
When the caution comes out and you have to come in and change tires and you're sitting there and you go about 8 or 10 pace laps at 50 miles an hour, that's when you get to think about it.
That's when you're sitting there going, damn, this is hot!
While you're racing, you're almost so hyper-focused on what you're doing, it kind of doesn't bother you as bad.
There's these new vests that we wear that has a gel in it, and you plug into a little machine that pumps it, and so you unplug it to get out of the car.
Those work really well.
I actually used one the last year of my career, and it was very comfortable.
So there's some innovative stuff out there.
They have a helmet cooler.
There's a hose that plugs into the top of your helmet, and it blows some air in there.
It's a little bit cooler.
But those two things draw so much amps that the teams don't want to use them.
The drivers want to use them, but the crew chiefs don't want you drawing that many amps off the alternator.
They want to use amps for other things that are going to make the car go faster.
Now, when you think back on doing all that stuff that you did do, and think about those kind of races, and think about all the endurance and all the different aspects of it, does it ever seem kind of crazy that you did it?
Do you think you had such great success, not just because, obviously, your dad is one of the greatest of all time, but also because your love for it was what propelled you?
It wasn't trying to seek fame or fortune.
You just truly loved racing, and that's why you became so great at it.
I mean, I wish I'd have known a little bit about trying to build my brand, and I wouldn't have been such a hard-ass and hard to work with a lot of times.
There were some sponsors I loved, and I did everything they wanted, and there were some that I just wasn't as good as I should have been.
I wasn't...
I have regrets, but I'm just saying, as I was going through this career, I wasn't thinking about me, me, me.
I didn't even know how to build my own brand.
I didn't know what that meant.
I was thinking about, man, I love this.
This is great.
I can't believe I get to do this.
I can't believe I'm here.
I can't believe I'm...
Racing here, racing this person, driving this car, got this sponsorship.
Everything was the best of the best.
I had great sponsors, awesome equipment.
Everybody always nice.
Hey, how you doing?
Everybody's so nice.
My wife just hates that because everywhere I go, I'm like, everybody's so nice.
He was so worried that me and Kelly wouldn't finish school, that we would give up on school.
He gave up on school as an 8th grader at 16 years old.
He was 16 in the 8th grade and quit and never finished high school, never got no GED, nothing.
And people would come up to him and say, or people would talk about him, even while he was alive and ever since, and say, look what this guy made of himself, having quit the 8th grade.
That's awesome.
And he always hated that.
That was embarrassing.
He was embarrassed that he quit.
He knew how bad it disappointed his own father.
So he was always worried about where I was, who I was hanging out with, whether I was doing my homework.
And then even when I started racing, it was who I was hanging out with, what I was doing with my free time, what I was focusing on, whether I was thinking about what I was Whether I was on time for sponsor appearances and never, this is how you drive this corner.
This is how you get around this racetrack.
He never talked about that stuff.
It was always the personality, being a man, being right, being good to people, being on time, being ready to work, looking your best, general, you know, Morals and values.
We never sat down and talked about racing, like, I'm going to show you how to get around this corner and this is how you shift and shit like that.
I always felt like that when I was younger, I kind of let my father down because there was this one time, I was probably 12 years old, and there was this, me and my buddy, we were gonna play.
Man, we're here, we're outside, we're gonna play outside.
My dad's standing over there and there was a bucket full of shit.
And he's like, hey, come here.
Junior, pick that bucket up.
Move it over here.
And I went over there and tried to pick it up.
And I was like, I can't lift it.
And he got so pissed off at me because he knew I didn't try.
And he said to my buddy, Ryan, he goes, Ryan, come here.
Pick the bucket up and take it over there.
And he turned around and gave me this look of pure freaking disappointment.
And I felt like that set the tone for our relationship.
But then, one day, so right around the end of 1997, I was out of money.
He was like, hey, you know, you're out of money.
You ain't gonna race.
I was like, shit, my life's coming to an end as far as I know it.
You know, I'm not gonna...
I guess my racing career, this is it.
It's coming to an end.
1997. He was sitting down talking to...
He had a car that races in the Xfinity series that I told you about.
On Saturdays, and his driver was leaving to go to a cup car, and he was talking to his best friend, Tony Sr., is the guy's name that actually crew chiefs that car, and he's like, who are we going to get to drive this thing?
Who should we get?
We've got to hire us a driver.
And Tony Sr. said, why don't you put Dale Jr. in there?
And he goes, what?
Are you serious?
You really think so?
He's like, you're going to spend a little money on this car, why don't you spend it on your own kid?
I can probably make a driver out of him, Tony Sr. says.
So they made the decision to put me in this car in the Xfinity Series.
You'd think that Dad would come tell me, or we would have a press conference, might be a press release at least.
I walked into, this is a month before the race season starts.
I think I'm out of racing, right?
I ain't even talked to anybody about what I'm racing or if I'm racing in a couple months.
I think that it's dried up, opportunities are gone.
I walk into the shop to get something where Tony Sr.'s race car was and my name was on the roof.
And I was like, I thought it was a joke, like a mean joke, a prank.
Wow.
And they were laughing, Tony Sr. and some of the guys in the shop were laughing, and I'm like, man, that's messed up.
Man, y'all are dicks for putting that name on there.
This ain't no funny.
And they were like, it's true, man.
I was like, you mean I'm going to race this car?
I'm racing this car?
And they were like, yeah.
I was like, really?
And, I mean, obviously I was thrilled.
Like, man, I couldn't believe it, but this is the way I found out.
If it hadn't paid a lot of money and I didn't have partners and people that were depending on me or counting on me, I probably could have easily walked away from it.
But we had a great partner in Budweiser that was incredibly supportive.
I had a lucrative opportunity in front of me personally to be a race car driver for as long as I wanted to, which I wanted.
And I just had to go through missing him really bad for a few months.
I had to go to the racetrack, and everywhere I looked, there's Dad.
There were fans mourning.
There were signs and paintings and things.
There were just markings and acknowledgments and just shit everywhere for like a year.
And I appreciated it and I knew why it was like that.
But it took a while for me to sort of get to where I didn't...
There was a little period of time where I was real self-destructive and just like...
I was mad at everything.
It took me a while to calm down and get to work.
For a while there it was just sort of going through the motions.
I mean, you must have always known, I mean, everyone knows there's dangers involved in racing cars, but when it hit someone so close as your own father, that had to change what racing felt like to you.
Yeah, I'm sure it would have completely been a different experience emotionally had that not happened.
Racing for me would have meant something completely different.
You know, I just was...
He was this invincible...
Guy that wasn't supposed to get hurt.
He was supposed to get hurt and drive hurt and be tough.
He wasn't supposed to get killed and leave us all.
He left the whole sport and no one knew what to do.
The whole sport was sitting there going, shit.
What do we do?
You know, he was the guy for everyone.
And even the competitors, you know, looked up to him like he was the guy.
Like, that's the man.
And so it was tough on the whole sport.
Big, giant void for the whole sport.
But I, you know...
We just huddled together, me and my team, me and our company.
I raced for my dad's company, so that whole company just kind of held itself together and everybody kind of pulled together and worked our way through it.
That first year in 01, just that year that he was killed, that was just kind of a tough year.
I don't even really remember anything much about what happened that year.
Won a couple races, but it was otherwise, you know, the races where we didn't win, I can't even, I don't even remember much about them, you know, just retaining too much from it.
It was just kind of a daze, you know.
04 was a great year.
I think we kind of finally were coming out of the funk, you know, around 2004. Kind of coming out of the cloud of that.
He knew that he carried a big, massive fan base, and he knew that people listened when he spoke and all those things.
And so when he was gone, I think some people kind of looked at me to try to carry that same load and even be that same person, and I just wasn't going to do it.
I was like, man, I'm going to be me.
Like I said, he's this 10 foot tall black hat and I'm this short, scrawny, pale kid.
I couldn't be who he was.
I'd have been faking it.
And I couldn't be the intimidator.
So I just have always, ever since then...
And if that's good, if you like that, great.
I think I've been relatable, honest, genuine.
And the fan base that I gained when he passed away, I thought we nurtured that and grew that.
And I think we did a lot of great things in and outside the sport to do that.
So I'm kind of proud of all those things.
I thought I handled that well, considering there are a lot of different avenues to go at that time.
And I think I chose some good ones and certainly probably could have made some different decisions and have regrets.