Earnhardt added, “The Daytona 500 is over. We won it. We won it. The monkey is off my back.”
Childress made every effort possible to win the race, but it simply wasn’t meant to be until the checkered flag waved over Earnhardt’s Chevrolet in 1998.
“Every year, we went to Daytona with full intentions of winning the 500,” Childress said. “We had the best driver, the best car and the best pit crew. It was always something that would happen. Dale Earnhardt won the Daytona 499 a few times but with two or three laps to go, something would happen. Dale needed that Daytona 500 win. He had won so many races at Daytona over the years, but he just couldn’t seem to get the 500 in his win column. I knew and this team knew that was one of our goals to get that win with Dale.”
Childress had carried the weight of coming so close and coming up short since joining forces with Earnhardt in 1984.
“I think what I remember most about that day and that win was the burden being lifted off my shoulders and Dale’s,” Childress said. “We had the car to beat so many years. There was the time we ran out of fuel, the seagull, the blown tire on the last lap in the third turn and having the car flip and seeing him hop in and drive it back to us. Something would always end up getting us at the end of the day. We finished second a few times there, too.
“Finally winning it like this; it was like trying to accomplish something for so long and putting everything you have into it. We would go and test and test and test and we knew we had good cars. We had cars capable of winning all the way back to the 1980s.
“For him to be able to pull it off was something really special,” Childress added. “What really made it special was the effort put into it for so many years in a row and then to have the racing gods smile on us, and it become our day.”
Ken Martin, director of historical content for NASCAR Productions, believes Earnhardt’s 1998 Daytona 500 victory was a huge milestone for the sport.
“I think for so many people, Dale Earnhardt’s 1998 Daytona 500 win is the most memorable moment of their NASCAR participation,” Martin said. “For NASCAR’s 75th anniversary, we are interviewing people and asking them what the sport’s biggest moment was. Because it was 25 years ago, it’s hitting our 35-year-old drivers and they were 5 to 10 years old when it happened, and they were watching it on TV. I think it just made an indelible mark in their minds of seeing that.
“From a NASCAR standpoint, that was the first race of our 50th anniversary season. We had been working all through the winter preparing documentaries and sort of building the hype for the start of the 1998 season to celebrate that.
“There was no better script that we could have written than Dale Earnhardt winning the Daytona 500 after 20 years of trying to get to victory lane,” Martin continued. “That launched the 50th anniversary into a whole different stratosphere. Not only for the attention that he got inside the sport, but also the attention he got outside the sport. The fact it was Dale. The fact it was after 20 years of trying. He had owned everything at Daytona but the 500. It drew the community together. It’s still one of the most memorable moments in our history.”
McReynolds thinks of that day as one of the greatest memories of his career.
“That was my second Daytona 500 win, having won the first one with Davey Allison in 1992,” McReynolds said. “It’s very flattering to have people offer compliments about being a part of Dale Earnhardt’s Daytona 500 win, even 25 years later. I’ll have people call me on radio shows and say, ‘You’re my guy. You got my guy that 500 win.’ That’s flattering and very honorable, and means the world to me. I just happened to be the lucky crew chief that was in place when it all came together.”
This story appeared in the Feb. 8, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
