"Y'all mind if I take spin through your grass here?"
The voice that crackled over the radio and into NASCAR's race control box high atop Daytona International Speedway was unmistakably that of Dale Earnhardt. The same Dale Earnhardt who had just won the Daytona 500 … finally won the Daytona 500.
It was a long wait for the Intimidator, but 1998 finally saw the seven-time Cup champion win NASCAR's signature event.
For two decades, racing's biggest star had failed miserably at winning NASCAR's biggest race. He'd lost by running out of gas, lost while leading in the final turn, and lost by pit strategy, by poor timing and by simply being outrun.
The 19-race losing streak had started with a stunning eighth-place debut on Feb. 18, 1979. He'd arrived at the beach looking as though he'd slept beneath the grandstands, along with a ragged bunch of dirt-faced crewmen pieced together by West Coast car owner Rod Osterlund. His crew chief, Doug Richert, was still a teenager, and his No. 2 Buick was one of only nine of the 41 cars entered without a sponsor on the hood. While the famous finish and fight took place among the superstars of racing, the 28-year-old short tracker quietly started 10th and finished eighth.
"I never raced so damn hard in my life than I did that day," Earnhardt recalled nearly two decades later. "I wanted so badly for those guys to believe that I truly belonged to be out there with them."
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