Whether it’s Daytona or an SC short track, Dale Earnhardt Jr. keeps finding 2001
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- Dale Earnhardt Jr. raced a late model car on the CARS Tour at age 50.
- He ran the iconic No. 8 Budweiser paint scheme from his 2001 Daytona win.
- The tribute evoked strong emotion and nostalgia among packed Anderson fans.
The moment on Saturday had finally come, and the record-breaking crowd wouldn’t miss it.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. rumbled onto the frontstretch at Anderson Motor Speedway. Then parked. Then shut off his engine with the rest of the field. The 50-year-old NASCAR Hall of Famer was in a late model stock car, starting 22nd in a race on the CARS Tour — the series in which he bought ownership stake nearly three years ago — and readied for the kind of race he’d run hundreds of times before.
But this wasn’t an ordinary grassroots stock car race. It smelled like fire, looked like patina and sounded like that Phil Collins song. Fans left their seats and nearly climbed on top of each other to grip the catch fence near the start-finish line to get a better view. And Saturday, they had reason to.
Earnhardt Jr. was running in the No. 8 Budweiser / MLB All-Star Game car. It’s tough to overstate how powerful the image was. It was the same paint scheme he ran in the July 2001 race at Daytona International Speedway. You remember the one. It was the first NASCAR Cup race at Daytona after Dale Sr. passed earlier that year at the Daytona 500. It figuratively marked Rome returning to its Coliseum without its Caesar; it literally marked a son returning to the grounds where he’d lost his father.
And yet, come the end of the 500 miles on that fated July 2001 night, the son was somehow on top of his car in the Daytona infield grass, fist-pumping through his own catharsis and everyone else’s; somehow transforming an enormously difficult race into one of the most uplifting moments in NASCAR history — and that No. 8 Budweiser paint scheme was the moment’s iconography.
So yes, before the green flag dropped Saturday, with the throwback paint scheme unchipped and pristine — that was the moment that everyone was waiting on. That’s what drew the crowd of 4,000 fans. That’s what delivered a moment that was nearly ineffable.
“Great crowd,” Earnhardt Jr. said, smiling through his understatement. “Great night for the CARS Tour.”
Alone, such a moment was special. But what made Saturday night particularly noteworthy was that, in many ways, it didn’t stand alone. It is the latest in a long trend Earnhardt has established in 2025:
Wherever Earnhardt Jr. has gone this year — whether it’s a short track in the Carolinas or the superspeedway in Daytona — the year 2001 never seems to be all that far away.
Consider the NASCAR mogul’s 2025 to date. It started in February, at the Daytona 500, when JR Motorsports fielded its first Cup car and marked the first time the Earnhardt name was in the Cup Series since Earnhardt Jr. himself retired in 2017. The year 2001 intertwined more when NASCAR in April returned to Rockingham Speedway, the North Carolina site that hosted the first NASCAR weekend after Earnhardt Sr. died. The 2001 memory sustained at the beginning of this summer with the release of the docuseries “Earnhardt” on Amazon Prime. Little moments were sprinkled in thereafter, including Saturday night, which to those present didn’t feel that little at all.
Earnhardt Jr. said it’s all coincidental. But he remains delighted to tell his father’s story, to relay what he has to say about 2001 — and he’s particularly happy that people want to hear it.
“It looks like coincidence,” Earnhardt told The Charlotte Observer. ”And it wasn’t a plan to do all these things. But with the documentary, (the company) came to us a couple years ago, and around that time, like five different people came to us out of nowhere. And they were like, ‘We want to do this project, this project.’ And they were all Earnhardt projects. But they were all different, about different things. …
“And that influences this. And this influences that. And things kind of steamrolled. The Bud deal tonight, I called them. I just wanted the rights to run my scheme at Florence. ‘I don’t need money from you or anything, just let me run the red car at Florence.’ And they were like, ‘Better yet, go do two races, and go run. Go have fun.’”
Earnhardt Jr. ran his first race in a No. 8 Budweiser paint scheme at Florence Motor Speedway in November. That was the classic red car scheme Earnhardt made famous from 1999 to 2007.
“I believe in authenticity and calling somebody and saying, ‘Hey, I’d enjoy doing this. You wanna do it?’” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I’m only doing it for the love of this.”
And the love was palpable Saturday. That’s from Earnhardt Jr. to the sport, yes; he finished the race in P10, moving up the most spots in the field to cement a good run even after getting spun out on Lap 50. Landen Lewis of Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., took home the checkered flag.
But that love is also from the sport to Earnhardt. Fans flocked to the gray-bearded driver everywhere Saturday; they were working for autographs and pictures, sure, but many were also just happily standing in his orbit. Sheriff deputies asked for selfies. Seven-year-olds — a species rarely short of words — nearly went mute in his gravity.
There’s a reason for all this attention, for all this popularity. The two-time Daytona 500 winner isn’t just an icon of the sport — he isn’t still merely the most popular name in a game he’s technically been out of for nearly a decade. In recent years, he’s become more.
He’s a purveyor of the sport’s history. He’s a protector of its product and legacy. He speaks on his Dirty Mo Media platform and advocates for improvements to the Next Gen car. He invests in the sport’s grassroots. He puts his voice behind causes he believes in: In 2022, for instance, in an attempt to restore the memory of North Wilkesboro Speedway, he ended up de-facto organizing a CARS Tour event that quite quickly spawned Wilkesboro’s resurrection — it was a night not all that different from Saturday.
But 2001 cropping up all the time this year in particular has turned into something new, Earnhardt admitted. Something he wasn’t expecting.
“Different things in our universe come and go,” Earnhardt said. “And people wanted to know about Dale Earnhardt again this year. People’s kids who never saw him race are walking around with his shirt on, and don’t know who he is. He’s this mythical (character). And it has morphed into this thing. And I love it. I would forgo all of the recognition, or any of the spotlight. I want it all on Dad. I want to celebrate him. I want to hold him up. I want people to know him, who never saw him or never knew him.”
He added: “It has been a good year. It’s been a good couple years to check some big boxes. I don’t know. You just ride the lightning.”
Saturday, the lightning brought him here, in a special paint scheme, at a 3/8th-mile oval with seven light poles and the cracks and bumps and thrills in Turns 3 and 4 that you could only find at a short-track in South Carolina. It brought him face-to-face with his own mortality — he was exhausted after the race — but filled him with too much joy to think about giving racing up.
“I come here and I’m like, ‘Man, what if I showed up and I didn’t drive?’” Earnhardt said. “I might wish I would’ve raced. So I’m trying to push myself to run a little bit more. … I’m gonna run until I’m not enjoying it. And I don’t see that happening.”
Such an answer signals that he knows how much of a privilege it is to be able to go out on his own terms. It’s another example, perhaps, of the hold 2001 still has on him this year — the same hold it still seems to have on all of us.
This story was originally published August 17, 2025 at 9:48 AM.
