A Month Before His Death In 2001, Dale Earnhardt Had Surgery To Remove A Piece Of Metal Shrapnel That Had Been In His Head Since 1976

They don’t make ’em as tough as the Intimidator anymore.

If you ask a lot of NASCAR fans (or former NASCAR fans), they’ll be quick to say that the sport died on February 18, 2001 when Dale Earnhardt was killed on the final lap of the Daytona 500.

While I’m not as cynical as those people, it’s hard to deny that the sport has changed a lot since that day, nearly 25 years ago. It seems like Earnhardt was one of the last of his kind: A generation of drivers who were rough around the edges and only cared about winning.

There are a few reasons that are often mentioned when discussing why we don’t have drivers like Earnhardt anymore. First of all, the sponsors became more and more important to race teams, which meant drivers needed to maintain a more polished personality in the media to keep their sponsors happy.

But with sponsorship at a premium, that also meant that the days of drivers who scrapped and clawed their way into the NASCAR Cup Series by building their own cars and entering them at short tracks on weekends is long gone. These days, the easiest way to get a ride in NASCAR’s top series isn’t to have the talent, but to have the money. It’s why we see talented drivers like Corey Heim, who doesn’t bring the sponsorship that other drivers do, without a full-time ride in NASCAR while others bring sponsorship to a car and run 36th every week. (Not mentioning any names, but if you’re a NASCAR fan you know who I’m talking about).

Anyway, all that to say, Earnhardt was from a different generation of NASCAR drivers, one who knew everything about his car and came up through the sport at a time when it wasn’t uncommon to see drivers working on their own cars – something that would be pretty much unheard of today.

In fact, Earnhardt raced much of his career with proof that he worked on his own cars quite literally embedded in his head.

Back in January of 2001, just a month before his tragic death, the Intimidator revealed that he had undergone surgery to remove a piece of metal shrapnel from his head – that had been there for over two decades.

According to an article published ahead of the 2001 Daytona 500, Earnhardt had only discovered the metal – which measured only about 1/8″ – in his head about four years earlier when he underwent an MRI:

“Then the MRI aggravated it. And it started to become a knot on my head – more than the other knots on my head.”

Earnhardt determined that the metal in his head had been there since 1976, when he cut his head working on a race car at his father Ralph Earnhardt’s shop:

“I cut my head working on a race car at my dad’s shop, with a chisel and a hammer.”

Ironically, Earnhardt’s fellow NASCAR driver Bobby Allison had given him the nickname “Ironhead” because of how tough he was.

But even Earnhardt didn’t know at the time how appropriate that nickname really was.The post A Month Before His Death In 2001, Dale Earnhardt Had Surgery To Remove A Piece Of Metal Shrapnel That Had Been In His Head Since 1976 first appeared on Whiskey Riff.