May 1995. The spring parade winds its way through downtown Charlotte. The route's not long, maybe a dozen blocks. But for Dale Jarrett it seems endless. The voices raining down on him are a judgment of his career. You're a lo-o-o-ser! Nobody needs to remind him. He's finished in the top 5 in just 28 of 228 races. But everybody does. Get the hell out of Ernie's seat!
Six months before, Jarrett had called the owner of the No. 28 team, begging to fill in for the injured star Ernie Irvan. "I need this ride because I need to find out if I'm good at this," he had said. "If I can't win in the 28 car, I'll be done."
Now, 10 races into the season, Jarrett is averaging only a 14th-place finish in the 28 car. Put a real racer in the car! He knows no one trusts him. And as he forces a smile along the parade route, he isn't really sure that he trusts himself.
June 1999. The press box at the Michigan Speedway looks like a Best Western bar after the jukebox breaks down -- everybody's bored silly. Jarrett takes the lead on the 53rd lap in a caution-free race and is never remotely challenged. The race is such a rout that, with 50 laps to go, a track worker decides to count sleeping reporters. He quits at 15.
No one looks twice at a good DJ day any more. For the past three years, he has been the winningest racer in NASCAR not named Jeff Gordon. He's everywhere -- selling burgers during The Simpsons, plastered on soft drink machines in malls, crowding the shelves of Toys "R" Us. At a time when the Winston Cup is overrun with young guns, he's a hero for the Once and Again generation.
At 42, he has outlasted the recently retired Ernie Irvan and outdueled Dale Earnhardt Sr. at Daytona. He has won a pair of Brickyard 400s and finished 3-2-3 in the most recent Winston Cup seasons. He has proved he's a complete racer, something that was in doubt not so long ago. He has proved he's an elite racer.
After Gordon won 13 races in a Chevy last year, Ford opened the vault for team owner Robert Yates. The result: Jarrett has led the Winston Cup standings since May 15. He went into Talladega on Oct. 17 with a 222-point lead over Bobby Labonte. At last, a title seems all but inevitable.
So how come Dale Jarrett is so, uh, edgy these days?
It's more than the way he confronted Gordon at New Hampshire after getting rear-ended, spewing some choice words he later sheepishly described as "un-Christian." (In private, he's still peeved, grumbling, "Now I know how to race Jeff.")
It's more than the way the usually suave star sniped at reporters during a September slide in which he finished 38th, 16th, 3rd and 18th. It's also more than the strain of being teammates with Kenny Irwin, who collects feuds faster than Jarrett's 4-year-old son, Zachary, collects scraped knees.
Jarrett is edgy because he's deathly afraid of the lousy luck that kept him from front-running until now. "It's amazing how you view the schedule coming up when you're in the lead," he says. "I used to think about how much fun the tracks were. Now all I think about is how easy it is to become a victim."
Ned Jarrett, Dale's father, was one of the original briefcase racers, a two-time NASCAR champion who took a Dale Carnegie class so he could raise his family in better circles. DJ may have grown up in infields with Kyle Petty and Davey Allison, but by high school in Hickory, N.C., when his dad was hired to manage the local speedway, the Jarretts' home life was decidedly suburban. Dale, the middle of three children, quarterbacked his high school football team and became a trophy-winning golfer.
At 18, Dale worked for his dad and played 36 holes a day. Then he heard about a couple of teenagers who needed an engine for a modified Nova. Dale offered to raise $2,500 to buy an engine -- as long as he could drive. "This was one guy who wasn't born with the gift," says Andy Petree, one of the Nova owners and later a championship crew chief. "He had to learn his talent."
After kicking around dirt tracks for a few years -- and blowing through a marriage -- Jarrett landed in the Busch Series at age 25. He became a journeyman there, setting a record of 323 consecutive starts that stood for years. The record is a testament to resilience. It's also a sign of how reluctant the big-money teams were to invest in him.
Finally, in 1988, he was hired to pilot a shoestring Winston Cup team for two seasons, and finished 23rd and 24th. Around Halloween '89, the phone rang in the kitchen of his new home. Dale's second wife, Kelley, then pregnant with their second child, watched his face go white as he mumbled a series of uh-huhs. "They got a new sponsor and want me out," Dale said as he hung up the phone. "They got a guy they want more."
Even now, DJ can't shake the moment that booted him back into the Busch Series. "I was left out in the cold," he says. "I finally felt like I had some security. And then I had nothing. I didn't even have a full-time Busch sponsor."
He might still be there if not for a wreck in the spring of 1990 that left the late racer Neil Bonnett with a concussion and intermittent amnesia and his team in sudden need of a replacement. (In a bit of irony, the accident was caused by Irvan, whose own near-fatal crash in 1994 led to Jarrett's second big break.) But Jarrett's next two years didn't exactly burnish the rTsumT. He did win his first Cup race in Michigan, but he had just three other top 5's.
In 1992, he moved to a start-up operation run by Redskins coach Joe Gibbs, who was dismissed on the circuit as a dilettante. But in his second year with Gibbs, Jarrett won the Daytona 500. Going into Turn 3 of the race's final lap, he swung low and inside Earnhardt. When the black No. 3 got loose in the swirling currents, DJ stunned everyone by dusting The Intimidator and finishing two lengths ahead.
Still, it would be years before Jarrett was regularly feared on the super speedways. The Gibbs team was last in line when Chevrolet handed out money and attention.
Besides golf -- he recently fulfilled a lifelong dream by playing in a pro-am with Arnold Palmer -- DJ's greatest off-track passion is blackjack. When he vacations in Vegas, friends leave him for the night at the $20 tables, half expecting to find him in the same chair when they return in the morning. But Jarrett's career with Gibbs was more like a crapshoot -- disappointment interrupted by the occasional tantalizing success. So when Irvan wrecked in Michigan in August '94, Jarrett took a calculated gamble. Though he had a long-term deal with Gibbs, he called Robert Yates.
"One day, coming back from lunch, we passed the secretary's stand and saw a message slip with Dale's name on it," recalls Larry McReynolds, Yates' crew chief on the No. 28 car. "We looked at it and said, 'Naaaah.' But he kept calling. Finally Robert talked to him, and Jarrett said, 'All I want is one year.'"
The move proved to be a mixed blessing for Jarrett. The 28 crew had suffered through the death of Davey Allison in 1993 and had nearly lost Allison's replacement, Irvan, a year later. Most crewmen were wound tighter than Yates' high-rev engines. It didn't help that everyone expected to see the black-and-yellow T-bird in Victory Lane. In the 31 races Jarrett drove as Irvan's replacement, he finished outside the top 20 more than a dozen times. "A lot of our people were down on him," Yates concedes.
That's an understatement. Jarrett spent a year under the withering stare of McReynolds, who openly blamed him for not matching Irvan's results. Jarrett kept his emotions in check when the rehabbing Irvan mocked him in the garage. And he shrugged off the boos that rained down on him at Pocono as he walked down pit road, the longest on the circuit, before getting in his car and driving to victory in the Miller 500.
In 1995, when Yates needed a driver to pilot his new No. 88 team and found all his first choices unavailable, he turned back to Jarrett and decided his resolve had to count for something.
"I've had to turn the other cheek a lot in my career," Jarrett says. "A lot of things have been said about me being inadequate. My four children were brought to tears. But I think the way I dealt with it all earned me a lot of respect and had a lot to do with Robert hiring me."
At the '96 Daytona 500, DJ came out swinging at his critics. With a car custom-built to his tastes, he took the lead with 23 laps to go and held off a furious late-race assault by Earnhardt. In a reversal of their '93 matchup, the pair entered the third turn with Earnhardt swinging high and low, looking like he had the power to pass. When the crowd thundered, Jarrett's crew chief, Todd Parrott, was sure Earnhardt had overtaken them. But when he craned to see them coming out of Turn 4, DJ still held the lead, barreling toward the flag.
The No. 88 team finished third in points that year, and suddenly NASCAR had a new superteam. The next year Jarrett won seven races, finishing second in Winston Cup points.
Then, just when they appeared to be ready for the ring, Ford shelved the reliable old T-bird and introduced an egg-shaped, high-drag, four-door family truckster, the Taurus. Not only did the switch dash the team's momentum -- they didn't creep into the top 10 until late March -- but Jarrett came down with an energy-sapping ailment no one could initially diagnose.
He got progressively weaker until, in October, he couldn't finish the race in Phoenix and was flown to a local hospital to be treated for gallstones. He hadn't eaten for six days when he was runner-up to Gordon the next week in Rockingham. Then he finished second again in the season finale in Atlanta. Lord help anyone who was going to stand in his way when he got healthy.
When the preseason hype machine cranked up this past winter, it was all Jeff Gordon all the time. He'd won his third title in four years. But Ford had quietly poured nearly $2 million into the Yates operation, making it more Silicon Valley than Gasoline Alley.
After Parrott miscalculated fuel consumption at the '98 Brickyard, causing Jarrett to run out of gas in the fastest car of the field, the crew chief made a science out of figuring how long a tank lasts. Yates also tuned down the engines that he'd wound too tightly in '98, causing blown engines that resulted in three DNFs. By hiring engineers expert in aerodynamics, Yates was able to trade horsepower for reliability without giving up speed.
Until Jarrett crashed and finished 38th in Bristol on Aug. 28, he had a string of 19 straight top-10 finishes -- one shy of Gordon's mark the year before. In the past month, he has averaged a seventh place over four races. He needs only to average 19th in the season's final three events to win the title.
You can imagine the scene. Dale Jarrett in Atlanta, flashing that smile that the sponsors love, the smile that got stretched wider every time it had to do the work of hiding another disappointment, the smile that had to be forced in that parade in Charlotte four years ago.
"People who spend a lot of money in this sport don't want to hear the drivers whining, so I don't," DJ says. "But I think when people see me smiling all the time, they don't realize how long a road it's been for me."
The parade smile broadens, pushing the age lines around his eyes together. And you realize he's not really smiling at all.