Dale Earnhardt Jr. Opens Up On One Of His Proudest NASCAR Moments: “I Knew Dad Was Watching”

One of his proudest moments.

Before he was the most popular Cup Series driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr. cut his teeth at the Xfinity level, and he credits a lot of his driving experience and wisdom to Mark Martin, who was dominant at that level when Jr. started in it in the late 90’s.

The other day, Jr. shared a lengthy story about watching Martin practice at Charlotte Motor Speedway that he’s never forgotten:

I watched this car arc into turn 1 at Charlotte…..

It was early in the morning. Maybe 8am early. A Busch Grand National practice session on a Friday morning. There was still dew on the grass in the tri oval of the front stretch. Mark was sitting on pit road and I maneuvered… https://t.co/dbneEV3d2N

— Dale Earnhardt Jr. (@DaleJr) June 23, 2025

But there’s a lot more to why that was so meaningful to him, and during the Ask Jr. segment of his Dale Jr. Download podcast this week, Jr. explained more about some of the context behind the tweet:

“Yeah, so it was early in the morning. It’s a fun Twitter post I made, just kind of came to me. But I’ll never forget this moment. I never will. There’s some moments in life, right, that just imprint. I was young. Mark was always the car to beat when we would go to Xfinity races, and he would unload the Winn-Dixie car. It was like, gosh, he just had another 3/10s that nobody had.

It was just Kyle Busch in the Xfinity series, you know, he was gonna be one of the guys that is gonna go out there and lead every lap and be hard to beat. You would watch him in practice, and we would show up, and Xfinity was the first, they didn’t have the ruck series back then. Xfinity was the first car on the race track for the weekend. Track hadn’t had a lap on it, a little bit dirty, very green, dusty a little bit. We pull out on the racetrack and he would go out and put a lap down. He would hammer the gas and drive off into one, full commit.

I’m in my first or second year of Xfinity and I gotta work up to it. I’m gonna run my best lap around lap five or six, and still be in the top five in practice. If not one of the fastest cars. But Mark could go out there just, boom, off into one. So I wasn’t, I wanted to be great at Charlotte, and it was track that was very intimidating to me. It had a very nasty bump down into turn one. I’d busted my a** and wrecked a car there testing. I had wrecked a lot at Charlotte.

So I pull out onto Pitt Road, and there’s Mark Martin sitting there waiting for the official to wave us onto the track. and I’m at work my way up there toward Mark, I’m gonna follow him out there. So we go off on the race track and I’m going through the gears. He’s hauling a**. I’m like s***. I’m trying to keep up with him .We go through three and four wide open, you know, trying to build speed.”

He had wrecked so much at Charlotte that he couldn’t believe how easily Martin handled it:

“Come off turn four, bouncing around down the front straight away. And I’m like man I’m scared. It’s the only one I can really use to describe, I’m scared because I know to stay with him I’m gonna have to go in the corner like he does. And that’s hard to do, and I didn’t wanna wreck. I had wrecked a lot of Charlotte. I was just like, I gotta figure Charlotte out.

And we’re headed down to front straight away, and I start to fade to our turn into the corner. I start fading left to get down into the bottom of the corner, and he just drives straight really wide arc, and just stealing the gas. And there’s dirt flat off the right side tires cause he’s out there in the nasty mess. Down in there and he’s gone. I was like, God all mighty, how, you know. How did he, he didn’t have to do that. He knows his car is amazing. He knows it’s gonna be fast.

He doesn’t have to go out and there really do anything in practice. He’s just gonna qualified and race and win. But here he is, first minute of practice, he has went off into that corner faster than anybody else will go all weekend. And I was like, holy s***, dude I mean that’s what a Cup driver is right there. I got long ways to go.”

He went onto say that he learned a lot about racing at the professional level from Mark, and he said he even learned more from him than is own father when it came to ins and outs of racing like that in many ways.

In fact, Jr. recalled one of his “proudest moments” was passing Martin at Richmond while his dad was watching:

“Man, it was something. I’ll never forget it. Mark, you know, I would end up racing Mark a little bit throughout the year in ’98 and ’99. One of my proudest moments was passing him at Richmond on the outside and beating him. Heads up, holy s***.

Oh man, I was proud, because I knew Dad was watching and all that. And Mark has always been so, so supportive to me, friendly to me. We were teammates. But he taught me, and everyone else, during those years when he was racing the Xfinity series so much. And he was such a great example for folks like me to sort of try to emulate.

I might be Dale Earnhardt’s son, but I’ll be honest, a lot of the things that I learned on the race track and what I was able to do as a driver in my career are due to Mark Martin and what he taught me. So he was a great guy to race against and learn from.”

It’s not what you’d necessarily expect, but it’s cool to hear about some of Jr.’s other mentors and people who played such an important role in his life and racing career other than his father, who was obviously the greatest influence and motivation for why Jr. wanted to be a professional race car driver.

You can watch him talk about it here:

The post Dale Earnhardt Jr. Opens Up On One Of His Proudest NASCAR Moments: “I Knew Dad Was Watching” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.