Junior Needs Father’s Legacy

After winning the Nationwide Series race in his father’s paint scheme on July 2, Dale Earnhardt Jr. stated that he would never again pilot the No. 3 Chevy in NASCAR.

It was a sad admission for long suffering Earnhardt fans who hoped Junior would finish his own career in the same car his father drove from 1984 to 2001.

Almost 10 years after his father’s death, most expected it to have happened already. But Junior chose the megapower Hendrick Motorsports over RCR during free agency and the Earnhardt diehards will have to dream on.

“It’s not my number to take and use whenever I feel like using it,” Earnhardt Jr. said to reporters prior to the event. “You don’t just grab the keys off the counter and go run out the door and haul down the road with your dad’s car. I didn’t do it when he was alive, and I won’t do it now. I’m borrowing it once, and then maybe sometime down the road some kid will come up, and he’ll have a connection to the 3. Whatever, you know, that will be his. It will be someone else’s.

“I made my life pretty much driving that 8 and now the 88. It doesn’t make sense for me to do this again. I think in the Nationwide Series, it made enough sense, and I really wanted to do it, and I’ve done it. I don’t ever want to do it again. And I’ll never change my mind, ever.”

But we’re calling shenanigans. Dale Earnhardt Jr. has never needed his father’s legacy more than he needs it now. Even before leaving DEI for Hendrick Motorsports, Jr. Nation was losing faith in Dale’s motivation and capacity to be a Sprint Cup Series driver.

The 2005 season was Earnhardt Jr.’s last as a championship contender. Since then he has dropped crew chiefs like most teams drop lugnuts. The 2008 move to HMS brought a lot of excitement for “The Nation,” but that fire soon burned out as Junior won only a single points-paying race in two-plus seasons. Toss in countless pit road errors, the 2009 Daytona Dale-gate incident and several changes in the pit box, and Jr. is starting to look like a dud.

After Earnhardt’s initial success in the early 2000s, fans cited the elder Earnhardt’s absence as the reason for Little E’s struggles.

By 2007, it was DEI and Teresa Earnhardt’s fault for not supplying a championship-winning program. By 2009, it was crew chief and cousin Tony Eury Jr.’s turn to play scapegoat.

It’s almost time to consider the option that Dale Earnhardt Jr. is just plain uncoachable and doesn’t have what it takes to win championships at the highest level.

Dale Jr. is now out of options. He’s quite possibly incapable and unwilling to continue the Earnhardt legacy.

It’s not that Little E doesn’t have the talent. He does. It’s just that Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants to be his own man at a stage of his career when that’s just not good enough.

For example, when father and son were racing together in the late 90s and early 2000s, father was black and son was red. Dad was country and his son was rock. That’s not even mentioning Jr.’s bleach blonde haircut from 1997 to 2000.

Junior loves and respects his dad’s place in not only his own heart but NASCAR’s soul, yet he’s just not “That Dale Earnhardt.”

Despite being NASCAR’s most popular driver, the Dale Jr. brand is running out of steam. There is very little that Earnhardt Jr. has left outside of the RCR No. 3, and now he’s vested it.

Let him tell you that Daytona was it in the No. 3 but don’t believe it. With Kasey Kahne, Danica Patrick, and Landon Cassill becoming more and more of Hendrick’s future, Dale Jr. is becoming less and less.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. has so much left to offer, to both NASCAR and Junior Nation. The most viable among them is racing the No. 3 and doing it at the highest level. In doing so, Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s legacy may be just the spark that Dale Jr. needs.