Dale Earnhardt Barely Blinked When He Got His Fingers Drilled Into By His Crew Chief: “Cussed Him A Little, & Finished The Job”

When it comes to helping Dale Sr., it’s best to just get out of his way…

With the release of the Prime Video Earnhardt documentary, race fans have gotten an incredibly interesting, and nuanced, look at Dale Earnhardt the race car driver, the man, the friend and the father, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.  and his sister Kelley played a huge part in the production of the series, in addition to being heavily featured in it, telling stories about their dad and memories that were both good and bad.

He really lived an incredibly interesting life, even before the racing fame, and on an episode of his Dale Jr. Download podcast last year, Jr. had on members of his dad’s famous pit crew that were known as the Flying Aces, Chocolate Myers and Kirk Shelmerdine, who were also featured in the documentary.

Kirk was his crew chief and Chocolate was his fuel man, and they had some hilarious memories of working with Dale, and they mentioned several times how Dale would often want to help fix the cars because he knew so much about them, as much as everyone on his crew… but if he wanted to help, it really just meant get out of the way, as you’ll learn from this story.

Dale asked about the time Kirk accidentally drilled a hole in Dale’s hand, which Chocolate recalls happening while they were doing a test at Charlotte Motor Speedway:

“Yeah, that that was at a Charlotte test, the best I can remember. and once again, him out of the car, gonna help Kirk.”

Kirk laughed as he explained:

“When he helps you, it’s pretty much watch out for his elbows.”

Chocolate said Dale didn’t stop for one second, only to cuss at Kirk some, but he finished the job anyways:

“Kirk’s drilling a hole for a pop rim, and your dad’s on the other side of the fender, best I can remember, but it don’t stop him, right? He drills a hole in his hand, and cusses him a little bit, and then we finished the job. But oh yeah, he was like that, I’m just telling you. You needed to get clear.”

Kirk said it was obviously an accident, but it happened because he was trying to hold a drill, and the entire handle was a trigger, so it didn’t take much to cause an accident. It obviously hurt, but it didn’t slow him down a bit in terms of fixing the car. Dale couldn’t be bothered by the fact that he just had his finger drilled through:

“The drill bit came loose, so he grabbed a hold of the chuck, he’s tightening up the thing, and it’s one of those drills, it’s a 90° thing where the whole handle of it’s a trigger. and he goes, ‘Hold this thing,’ and he’s tightening the screw. ‘And don’t hold it, don’t hit the trigger, and about that time it just razors all his fingers up.”

I can never get enough of these kinds of stories, because Dale Sr. was really such a one-of-a-kind person and it’s incredible the resilience he had until the very end to always finish the job. They talked about his sheer will, and how he never, ever gave up, even when the odds were stacked against him or it wouldn’t have even mattered if he did.

It’s like he was constantly focused on winning, and only winning, and even if winning was impossible, that was either irrelevant or not totally true in his mind. It applied to anything in life, though, not just on the track, and I think that’s why it always seemed like most things that would really matter to other people, or bother them, just didn’t phase him at all.

It also reminded Dale about a wild story from when he was 7 or 8 years old and his dad was helping a friend cut down a tree:

“I was telling the story on the show last week, I think, where he climbed up in a tree to cut the tree down. He was at Joe Whitlock‘s house cutting a tree down out of Joe’s backyard to make way for a big deck that Joe was going to build. and dad climbed up in the tree, tied himself up in there, was up in the tree for about 20 minutes, clean this thing down, right?

And he got all the big limbs out, and he’s come down, he’s gonna saw the tree stump. And he comes walking over, and he’s got them tan leather farm gloves on, and it’s tore across the backside, tore up really bad. and there’s like little white foam coming out of glove, you know, that was in the inside the material of the glove.

He pulls it off, and his hand is sliced from pinky to pointer finger across the top of his hand. and it was jagged and ripped and I said, ‘Damn, daddy.’ I mean, I didn’t say that, I was only 7 or 8 years old, but I was like, ‘Dad, when did that happen?’ He goes, ‘I just got up there.’ I was like, ‘How did you not freak out just climb right back down and want to go to the hospital?’ like he just stayed up there and saw all those limbs didn’t even look at.”

Just a different breed from an entirely different generation, and there will certainly never be another Dale Earnhardt.

You can watch the podcast episode below, and it’s a great one with two of the people who were so instrumental so his success and legend throughout his illustrious career.

The post Dale Earnhardt Barely Blinked When He Got His Fingers Drilled Into By His Crew Chief: “Cussed Him A Little, & Finished The Job” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.