Every Nextel Cup driver in the garage Friday was pondering the possibilities of having Dale Earnhardt Jr. as a teammate.
Team owner Richard Childress took the protective role he always had been expected to take if Earnhardt ever left Dale Earnhardt Inc. — but not yet as his boss, just as the longtime family friend who helped make the late Dale Earnhardt legendary.
Four-time champion Jeff Gordon said he would be surprised if his own Hendrick Motorsports team is Earnhardt’s choice over Childress.
“[But] he’s in the driver’s seat,” Gordon said. “He gets to do whatever he wants.”
Earnhardt was mobbed by media with virtually every step he took in the garage area at old Darlington Raceway, on the day after NASCAR’s most popular driver created a national frenzy that transcended his sport by announcing he is a free agent.
Pressed for a timetable for choosing, Earnhardt was adamant that “I’ll get it done when I’m ready to get it done. I’m in no hurry. No pressure from the media, or from any direction, for that matter, is going to persuade me to hurry anything. … This is a real, real important decision, for me personally, that I have to make sure I’m making correctly.”
Much on the mind of Earnhardt, 32, is that his father was the same age when he made his final — and monumental — team change, to Childress. The elder Earnhardt won six of his seven championships there and stayed until the day he died, at the 2001 Daytona 500.
Both Earnhardt and Childress had to fight off rampant rumors, with flat denials, that they already had come to an agreement to team up in 2008, less than 24 hours after Earnhardt announced he is leaving DEI after this season.
“There’s nothing to that,” Childress said flatly, upon making a preemptive walkup to a crowd of reporters. “Let me tell you where I’m at on it. Dale Jr. just made a major decision in his career and in his life yesterday, and out of respect for Teresa (Earnhardt’s stepmother, who owns the team he’s leaving), Dale Jr. and this situation, let’s all give him some time to make the decisions that he needs to make and be fair.”
“He’d be a big asset to Gibbs as a whole,” said Denny Hamlin, Earnhardt’s computer gaming buddy who is the prodigy at Joe Gibbs Racing, with Tony Stewart — another close friend of Earnhardt’s — as the senior driver there. “He would bring a lot of sponsors, a lot of money. … It’d be a great fit; we’d love to have him. It’s just that there are a lot of things that have to be worked out.”
The Hendrick, Childress and Gibbs teams are considered the front-runners to sign Earnhardt because they are the best Chevrolet teams and he wants to stick with that make in the family tradition. All three have won multiple Cup championships, and winning a season title is Earnhardt’s primary motive for moving.
But other owners were planning to at least make bids, even as long shots.
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“It’s like getting a date with Jennifer Aniston — you never know until you ask,” Dodge team owner Ray Evernham said. “So I’m going to ask.”
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