For Jarrett, racing is a way of life
By Rea White - Associate Editor
Thursday, February 14, 2008
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John Harrelson / Getty Images
DAYTONA BEACH, FL - FEBRUARY 08: Dale Jarrett, driver of the #44 UPS Toyota, stands in the garage during practices for the Budweiser Shootout at Daytona International Speedway on February 8, 2008 in Daytona, Florida. (Photo by John Harrelson/Getty Images for NASCAR)
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Growing up, Dale Jarrett found himself chasing the NASCAR circuit from time to time, watching his dad win races and championships.
Little did he know he would follow the same path to success.
At 19, he was racing in the Limited Sportsman division at his hometown track in Hickory, N.C., where his father, Ned Jarrett, once worked as a track promoter.
At 34, Dale grabbed the first of his 32 Cup victories in the series where his father won 50 races.
At 42, he hoisted the Cup championship trophy, joining his father – a two-time champion – on an elite list in the sport.
Now, at 51, Dale Jarrett is running his last handful of NASCAR Sprint Cup races and preparing to move to the ESPN broadcast booth. That television booth is where his dad sat and emotionally called his son’s first Daytona 500 victory.
Dale would go on to win three of those, one of the few feats he accomplished that his father never did – though the son does remember vividly the day Ned Jarrett was leading the race and ran out of gas with two laps to go.
As he attempts to qualify for his final Daytona 500, Jarrett admits to both a bit of nervousness about this event and anticipation of his future television career. He also finds himself drawing comparisons to his father – not a compliment to be taken lightly.
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“He continued the impact that his father started,” says Brett Bodine, who came through NASCAR competing against Jarrett and is now a NASCAR official. “Dale was certainly the saying the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Still, Jarrett’s life hasn’t always been about racing. He was an all-conference high school athlete in football, basketball and golf and is
still said to swing a pretty mean club on the course.
Yet racing is what drew him in and what has kept him coming to the track since 1982, when he became a regular in what was then known as the Busch Series.
“It’s literally been my world,” Jarrett says. “I was at Daytona since I can ever remember. Traveling around other places, every small track that my dad was racing at for many years. It’s been a way of life. It has been the Jarrett family’s way of life for over 50 years now.”
While he’s seen changes and developments in both the sport and his life, Dale Jarrett still carries a fiery passion for NASCAR. He chafes at criticism of it and quickly points to what he sees as the good things about NASCAR – the millions of fans, the competition, the quality of the competitors themselves.
He’s a man who has crafted a life bouncing back and forth across the country, watching the grandstand seats grow and fill and the business grow into a multibillion-dollar industry.
He’s watched the men behind the wheel, though, remain essentially the same.
“I’m still very proud of this sport that you don’t pick up the paper every week and read about people in trouble and shootings or DUIs or whatever it may be,” he says. “Certainly there are things along the way. Yeah, we’re not perfect by any means and don’t even want to start to think that, but we do have a good sport that’s made up of a lot of good people and run by a group of people that are very smart, very innovative.”
Many point to Jarrett as one of those men.
While he did come from a racing family, it’s clear that didn’t pave the path to instant success for Jarrett. He fought to gain solid footing in the sport and had to patiently wait for a consistently competitive Cup team.
In 1988, Jarrett drove for four different teams and then went full time with Cale Yarborough in 1999. A year later he was driving for Wood Brothers Racing. In 1991, he finally earned his first win in the sport, a victory that was applauded by other competitors.
He moved over to Joe Gibbs Racing, where he won his first Daytona 500 with his dad commentating and then landed at Robert Yates Racing in 1995 and stayed for 11 years.
It appeared that Jarrett would retire with that team, but he had one more trick up his sleeve. Lured by the chance to build something, he joined the upstart Michael Waltrip Racing for 2007. He will retire with that team, attempting to make five points races this season, including the Daytona 500, then concluding his career in the annual all-star race.
While the recent endeavor hasn’t matched the success of the rest of Jarrett’s career – his team is outside the top 35 in owners points and Jarrett must attempt to race his way in to his final Daytona 500 through today’s Gatorade 150-mile qualifying race – it hasn’t dimmed his love for the sport.
“I do care deeply about this sport and one of the reasons, if I didn’t have that passion for it, I certainly wouldn’t have been thinking about continuing to stay on in the sport after I quit driving,” he said.
There seems to be a lot of passion for Jarrett as well.
“Dale is one of the drivers that I’ve always looked up to,” says fellow Cup champion Matt Kenseth. “He’s one of the, I hate to use the word, old-school guys, but there were guys when I came in … there was a select group of guys that you had the extra respect for them where you just knew the way you needed to treat them or race them. They had been there for so long and done so many things and were so good that they commanded a certain respect to them.
“He was one of that group, one of the guys that had been around for a long time and had a lot of success. He was always very friendly. He was always there for advice. … He is one of the icons of the sport. He’s been there for a long time and has done it all.”
Competitors smile when asked about Jarrett, talk about the driver’s personality and impact on the sport. Often when a professional athlete is preparing to retire, stories of encounters or funny moments surface.
With Jarrett, there’s a more general analysis of just how much respect he’s both shown and received within NASCAR.
And a lot of talk about how similar to his dad he has been.
“I’ve always been a Jarrett fan,” Ken Schrader says. “Forget about championships and wins and that, I just thought the way he carried himself and represented the sport was pretty classy.”
That should continue in the television booth.
In the handful of broadcasts he’s already done, Jarrett has drawn comparisons to his father. Calm and relaxed behind the microphone, he brings a folksy touch to the race. To borrow a cliché, he’s a natural.
Jarrett has a way of outlining an issue and explaining changes without being either too technical or too simplistic. It’s a melding of driver and television that seems rare in the world of broadcasting, but commonplace in the Jarrett household.
While he hasn’t sat around studying his father’s style, Jarrett hopes it’s only natural that he follows it.
“You can learn a lot by talking to someone like my dad because he’s just such a real person,” he says. “I’ve been fortunate over the years. A lot of people might grow up with a parent or someone around them that tries to be a role model and they might want to tell you what to do but not necessarily do they live that, I’ve grown up with someone who lives it and you can believe it when they say it.
“That’s the way my dad is.”
His father’s advice? It’s simple.
“I think the biggest thing he’s told me is just be yourself. That’s kind of easy because I’m not good at trying to be someone else,” he says. “Hopefully what I’m going to try to do on TV is just tell people about the race and maybe give a little bit of insight that they wouldn’t know because they haven’t been in the car, but I’m not going to try to be overwhelming, and I’m certainly not going to be using words that they’re going to have to have a dictionary sitting beside them to understand what he just said. I’m not capable of doing that.”
Everyone expects Jarrett to attack this new role with the same dogged determination that led him to become a champion. Everyone expects him to continue to be respectful and classy when it comes to racing.
In the end, that’s what matters to Jarrett as well.
What would he like people to remember about his career?
“I don’t know that it’s necessarily what I’ve accomplished, but more that people look and understand that I have a huge passion for this sport and that when I was a driver, I drove to win each and every time that I got behind the wheel of a race car and that I was a competitive and that the decisions I made as a driver had this sport in its best interest, that’s what I was after,” he says. “I was taught that by my dad and by my friend Dale Earnhardt … I hope they understand that I gave a lot of time and effort to make this a better sport.”
- Mentioned Drivers:
- Dale Jarrett
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