Dale Earnhardt Jr. Reveals His Dad’s Biggest Superstition

Don’t ever give Dale Earnhardt Jr. a $50 bill…

This week on the Ask Jr. segment of his Dale Jr. Download podcast, Dale Jr. was asked about his personal superstitions, as well as some of the superstitions he followed on the race track.

He explained that he followed some of the basic ones like not walking under ladders or breaking glass, and apparently, one he learned from his dad that Dale Sr. was very serious about in never accepting or carrying a $50. He says his dad hated them, and it’s always stuck with him:

“Yeah, oh yeah. Well, any of the traditional ones, like walking under ladders, breaking glass, $50 bills. Dad, so I just did everything Dad did, right, and if Dad believes something I believe something. and Dad thought $50 bills were suspicious. He didn’t want one in his pocket, if you tried to give him one, he wouldn’t take it. and so I have that as well, as silly as it sounds.”

Jr.’s grandfather Ralph, who was a legendary drive in the ’50s, didn’t want peanuts anywhere near his car, and if someone lingered too long near him with a bag of them, he’d tell them to lave:

“My grandfather Ralph Earnhardt was very serious about peanuts being around his race car, that’s an old racers… I don’t know. I don’t know where the origin of that comes from, but apparently, like if you came around, a bag of peanuts in a brown bag was a common racetrack snack. Before we had all the s*** we have today, snacking in the 50’s was relatively basic, a bag of peanuts was pretty common as an item at a race track.

But apparently if you walked by his car and spent too much time with that bag of peanuts, he would tell you to leave. Or he didn’t want you around the car with those. That did not carry to my generation, I didn’t give a s*** about peanuts. But the color green was apparently superstitious, obviously, we have all gotten over that. I drove green race cars.

I used to say, man how could they say green was bad luck when we all love money. Money is green. The green flag waves. What the hell are we doing here? We’re racing for money, you know, at the end of the day. So I never understood that superstition with racing. Mine were always pretty traditional.”

Jr. also talked about how it wasn’t as much of a superstition, but rather routine that he would always pray with an MRO pastor at the track, and they’d usually have a couple walking on pit road at every race.

If he somehow got too busy or missed them, he always felt “a little less safe,” so he made a point to make sure someone prayed with him before each race:

“I didn’t have a weird one like, I gotta wear this pair of underwear every day or I gotta do this. Everybody used to ask me, what is the thing in the morning that has to happen? It wasn’t really so much of a superstition, but the prayer. So we have a MRO person that walks pit road. And there’s maybe at Cup races, there may be a couple, and they go to every driver while you’re standing outside of your car with your team, your wife, whatever it may be.

They’ll come up and go, ‘Hey, can I pray with you?’ and if you wanna pray, you pray. and I’m religious, so I’m all about that, so I felt like I needed… I was going to say a prayer to myself. Sit in the car, get all buckled in and I’ll close my eyes say a little prayer. ‘God keep us safe.’ I don’t pray for a win, but I’m like, ‘Hey man, I’d just like to leave here with a smile on my face.’ That’s not too much to ask.

But I always felt like, if that didn’t happen, and sometimes it would be these odd occurrences where things would get so busy that maybe they got tied up and they didn’t get to everyone because sometimes you’ve already be in the car buckled up in the in the MRO pastor would come by and just grab your hand, and I always felt like when I didn’t get that prayer that I was less safe. That I was like not protected in some weird way.”

That’s completely understandable, and it sounds like Jr.’s prayers were always answered because he obviously lived to tell the tale about the crazy races he was in, even if he did wreck or go through some gruesome crashes, which is the most important thing, obviously.

Obviously, the superstitions have evolved over the years, but I’d love to know where the whole peanut thing came from… I’ve never heard anything like that before.

You can watch hum talk about it here:

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