April 29th marks what would have been late NASCAR icon Dale Earnhardt’s 65th birthday. The wildly successful driver was killed just two months shy of his 50th birthday in a last-lap crash at the 2001 Daytona 500.
"It's crazy to think about what he would have been like at 65-years-old," son Dale Earnhardt, Jr. told reporters recently. "You kind of have an idea that he wouldn't have changed a whole lot had he lived a little bit longer. But at 65, and what would he have been like at 80? All those things would have been hard to imagine.”
The senior Earnhardt’s aggressive driving style earned him the nickname, “The Intimidator” and helped land him nearly 100 NASCAR wins, plus induction into multiple halls of fame, including the inaugural class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2010.
Earnhardt, Jr. has continued the family racing tradition with six Talladega victories of his own and is the current defending winner of the Geico 500.
“It's great that people still talk about him, that the sport, his fans, the media, that everybody still acknowledges who he was and what he meant,” Earnhardt, Jr. said of his beloved father. “That's all I care about, that we never forget just the impact that he had because I felt like he had so much influence — definitely in the top five, top three people that influenced the sport as a whole as much as Bill (France) Sr. and guys like that. I put him right up there with people that really changed the sport.”
We here at E3 Spark Plugs agree. What’s your favorite Earnhardt, Sr. memory? Post your thoughts on the E3 Spark Plugs Facebook Fan Page.
