Dale Earnhardt: Rear View Mirror

Dale Earnhardt: Rear View Mirror
Hardcover & Leather Editions

Book Cover The editors of The Charlotte Observer have selected the most exciting moments from the career of NASCAR Legend and seven-time Winston Cup Champion Dale Earnhardt and sewn them together into this impressive book. The book provides a unique view of the various stages of Dale's career from his early days working with poorly-funded teams, to his record-tying seven championships, to his astounding 1998 Daytona 500 victory, through his final race. "Dale Earnhardt: Rear View Mirror," also includes an informative section on rising star Dale Earnhardt Jr. This hardcover book is a must for the coffee table of every serious Earnhardt fan!

Update: This book has just been updated to cover Dale's entire career, through Daytona 2001. It has just been released and is available now. Order your copy today!

Hardcover Edition (Almost sold out) Hardcover with protective outer sleeve.	Leather-Bound Special Edition (Limited Edition) Bonded in rich, black leather trimmed with red. The leather-bound edition of "Dale Earnhardt: Rear View Mirror" is individually numbered and strictly limited to 1000 copies. Less than 400 are left!
$28.95 + S.H.	$48.95 + S.H.

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Review of leather-bound edition, by Ron Wilson
This was without a doubt the most thorough and comprehensive one volume work I have seen on Dale. I followed Dale for over 15 years and when he died a void was left that this book was able to fill. For anyone who is a fan of racing this tome shows what a great family man Dale was. From a novice to an old pro one can not help but get chills and thrills from recalling all the events in Dale's life. If you can only buy one Dale book this is it. 5 stars for the book and raves for putting Dale in leather for the book like Dale should be long lasting.

Stay tuned as The Earnhardt Connection releases selected eye opening excerpts from the book "Dale Earnhardt: Rear View Mirror."

This weeks excerpt features Dale's first win of 1996.

WIN NO. 1: ROCKINGHAM

A bumpy win, just like old times

by Ron Green

Rockingham, N.C.—Dale Earnhardt polished up his image as “the Intimidator” Sunday. Just when he was starting to look like a choirboy.

Even he has spoken, albeit briefly, about driving with a bit more caution now at age 44 than he did in his earlier days when he was earning his reputation as the nightmare in every racer’s rear view mirror. But caution ran quivering for the exits Sunday when Earnhardt hooked up with Bobby Hamilton in a breathtaking, lead-swapping battle around North Carolina Motor Speedway.

With the Goodwrench 400 starting to wind down, Hamilton drove the red-and-blue No. 43 that Richard Petty made famous around Earnhardt’s black racer into the lead. That lasted one lap. Earnhardt swept back around him.

So Hamilton swept back around Earnhardt. Then suddenly, Hamilton was sliding sideways, tagged by the Intimidator. Hamilton gathered his car up enough to keep it from wrecking, but it scraped the wall and when he opened his eyes, he was back in fifth place.

Earnhardt went on to win. It was his 69th Winston Cup victory. Hamilton, who has never won a Winston Cup race, spun out trying to make up his lost ground, hit the wall and finished 24th.

Earnhardt dismissed the incident as just a racing accident.

"We were coming through the (fourth) corner and there are some bumps down there," he said. "We were bumping and we just bumped together."

Did you bump him or did he bump you?

"I didn’t turn the steering wheel to bump him. When we got together, I tried to get off him as fast as he tried to get off me," he said, his hawk-like features showing nothing in the way of emotion.

Hamilton saw it differently.

"I haven’t won seven championships (as Earnhardt has) and I haven’t won 80-something races but I’m smart enough to know you don’t do stuff like that this early in the season," he said. "That’s an end-of-the-season move (when positions in the points race are at stake.) He plain hit me. It wasn’t close at all."

A NASCAR spokesman testified in Earnhardt’s behalf. He said, "We have a penalty box for certain situations. We use it when we’re much more sure of an intentional move to advance a position or to create a caution period than we were today.

"You saw a lot of hard racing all day. There was nothing we saw about that move to create a penalty box situation."

Earnhardt is an easy target in a situation such as this. His car is black, his racing uniform is black, therefore his heart must be black. He could have been as blameless as a baby Sunday but when you move the guy in front of you out of the way with a good whack at 100-plus mph, you’re going to enhance that Intimidator image, no way around it.

It didn’t help that the man he bumped was trying for his first Winston Cup victory and was driving a car owned by Petty, the King himself. And that Earnhardt was driving a Goodwrench-sponsored car in a Goodwrench-sponsored race.

Earnhardt looked down the road apiece, at what he called "the big picture," and said, "I’m just going to race whoever is there racing.

"We’ll just see who’s next to come up there and race, and see who wins."

He didn’t mean it to sound like a threat but it did, like bring ’em on and I’ll kick their tailpipes. When the Intimidator says it, it sounds, well, intimidating.

Seven-time Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt looks pleased as he leans on the roof of his Chevrolet Monte Carlo. (Mark B. Sluder/The Charlotte Observer)

Last week's excerpt:

December 9, 1990

From dirt tracks to the Grand Ballroom

by Tom Higgins

Earnhardt gives the Winston Cup trophy a victory hug after he finished third in the Atlanta Journal 500, but first in the points race. (Mark B. Sluder/The Charlotte Observer.)

It's Likely Ralph Earnhardt, inducted into the National Motorsports Press Association Hatt of Fame in 1989, was there. Invisible, certainty, but there at Date's shoulder just as Date had stood at his on the front seat en route to a race more than 30 years ago.

New York- Dale Earnhardt's earliest memory of stock car racing traces through time to the late 1950s.

Then, as a 5- or 6year-old, he stood on the seat of a passenger car or pickup truck at the side of his legendary father, the late Ralph Earnhardt of Kannapolis, as Dad towed souped-up coupes to dirt short tracks around the Carolinas for weekend shows, most of which he won.

Dale Earnhardt's latest memory of stock car racing is of standing on the stage Friday night in the elegant Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, warm applause washing over him as he was honored for winning the NASCAR Winston Cup Series championship a fourth time.

The 1990 title gives Earnhardt four, second only to Richard Petty's seven, and the $1.3 million in bonuses accompanying it push his career winnings to $12,827,634, tops for all forms of motorsports.

What a journey three decades-plus have produced for the tow-headed lad with the

mischievous twinkle in his eye from those days he spent idolizing his dad.

"I think I watched every foot of every lap he ever run after I started going to races with him and Mom," Earnhardt, 39, said Saturday at the Waldorf, where he and his family spent the week as series sponsor R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company's guests in the $4,000-per-night Presidential Suite.

"And I was almost always at his elbow there in the garage in the backyard of our house on Sedan Street in Kannapolis, trying to see what he did that made his cars so strong."

Dale decided to become a race driver, too, in the early 1970s, wheeling his own "little ol"' 1956 Ford six-cylinder" at Charlotte's Metrolina Fairgrounds Speedway.

Devastated when his father died of a heart attack in the mid-1970s, Dale almost quit. But the sensation of speed generated by unmuffled engines had become too much a part of him. He stuck with it to become, in the opinion of NASCAR pioneer team owner Bud Moore, for whom Earnhardt once drove, "just simply the best overall that's ever been."

Not many can be found to dispute the grizzled Moore's contention, especially after Earnhardt's nine-victory 1990 season that produced world record single-year winnings of $3,089,056.