Word: ironhead
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...first contact was made--with Sterling Marlin's car. It didn't seem a big thing, although Marlin would receive death threats in the week ahead. No. 3 veered right, plowed into the wall and slid back just as Ken Schrader's car broadsided it. The crash was undramatic. Ironhead had survived much worse...
...clean up the mess--and only a bum shoulder, Stewart's, as a result. Then on the last turn of the last lap, Earnhardt's famous black No. 3 Chevy Monte Carlo plowed--thud--into the wall and drifted back out, nose smashed. No fire, no catapulting frames. Ironhead had walked away from stuff that looked a lot worse than this. "No one ever expected Dale Earnhardt to die in a race car," said Max Helton, a NASCAR chaplain...
...Petty and Earnhardt, each of whom won the season-long Winston Cup title a record seven times, who had the largest legions of fans. King Richard's subjects loved his laconic aw-shucks manner and the way it contrasted with his ferocity behind the wheel. Ironhead's followers reveled in their hero's orneriness. Jeff Lancaster, owner of Lancaster's BBQ, a restaurant and car-racing shrine in Mooresville, N.C., explained it last week, the walls around him covered with souvenirs of racing giants: "He was the John Wayne of NASCAR. He was a kick-ass, take-names kinda...
Sometimes too hard. In one early-career incident, he tapped and spun the car of dirt-track driver Stick Elliot. The word went out that Stick's mechanic had a gun and was looking for Ironhead. The grease monkey didn't find him, and the racer who would soon be known by a second sobriquet, the Intimidator, drove off to greater glory. Earnhardt was NASCAR's rookie of the year in 1979 and won the season-long title in 1980. Even critics of his aggressive tactics acknowledged that in Earnhardt, NASCAR had as talented a driver as it had ever...
...second, that NASCAR is a Big Business that doesn't stop for one man, even though it's the man who helped make it big. So they planned to rev the engines and drop the green flag Sunday. No one in the vast, grieving NASCAR family felt that Ironhead Earnhardt, Ironheart's boy, would have wanted it any other...