Dale Jarrett made a risky career move a few years back, and now it has paid off nicelyby Bruce Anderson
For a guy who's supposed to be too nice to win, Dale Jarrett has shown some pretty steely moves on America's raceways. Perhaps you remember when he spurned a new set of tires at the Michigan International Speedway in August 1991 and held off Davey Allison for nine laps to win the Champion Spark Plug 400 by a hummingbird's heartbeat. Or when he swooped low and roared by Dale Earnhardt on the final lap to win the Daytona 500 in 1993.
Great moves on the NASCAR circuit result from an ineffable
balance of timing and surprise, calculation and danger. Jarrett's best move, and certainly his most improbable, displayed all those qualities, but it didn't involve tire management at Michigan or a daring pass at Daytona. It was a phone call to Robert Yates in September 1994.
Jarrett wanted to know if Yates, owner of the black number 28 Ford, would be interested in his services while Ernie Irvan recovered from a skull fracture suffered in a crash at Michigan the previous month. The call was a stunning maneuver comparable to, say, showing up at the starting line, leather-helmeted, behind the wheel of a Hudson Hornet.
"I kind of surprised myself and my wife and most of the people around me," Jarrett says, "because I had a very good situation."
Jarrett's "very good situation" was a ride with the Joe Gibbs team in the green-and-black number 18 Chevy. In 1993, after years of struggle, Jarrett had won Daytona with Gibbs and crew chief Jimmy Makar and finished in the top five in 12 other races. Now he was ready to throw that away to serve as a one-year placeholder for the injured Irvan. Jarrett's wife, Kelley, gave him a list of 50 reasons he should stay with Gibbs.
"The majority of people in the sport were surprised," says Jarrett's father, Ned, himself a NASCAR legend. "They talked among themselves about how foolish Dale was."
For a while it looked as if they were right. Yates took Jarrett up on the offer, but the team floundered in 1995; Gibbs, with Bobby Labonte in the driver's seat, won three races and $1.4 million. Yates, though, remained unfazed. With Irvan returning to the team full time in 1996, the owner offered Jarrett a chance to drive a second car, the red-white-and-blue number 88 Thunderbird. This year, with a new car, a new crew and a new contract that will carry him through 1998, Jarrett won four races for Yates, including the Daytona 500 and Brickyard 400—the two biggest paydays of the Winston Cup series. He also had seven second-place finishes and four thirds, earned
more than $2.3 million and finished third in the drivers' race. As he turns 40, Jarrett is firing on all cylinders.
Jarrett's dicey jump to the Yates cockpit proved shrewd.
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His engine was warming up for nearly two decades. In his first race, a 25-lap, nine-mile prelim at Hickory (N.C.) Motor Speedway in 1977, an inexperienced Jarrett started dead last in a field of 24 but moved up quickly and finished ninth. "I had never been on the track with any other cars," Jarrett recalls, "so I had no earthly idea what to do. I was pretty wild, but it was such a blast. I knew right then and there that that was what I wanted to do."
His half brother, Glenn, saw reflections of his father in Dale's first race: "I thought, Here's a guy who was made in the mold of my dad. Very consistent. Aggressive when you need to be aggressive, patient when you need to be patient."
Indeed, driving—and daring—run in the Jarrett blood. Ned Jarrett won 50 Grand National (now Winston Cup) races and two driving championships before he retired at the age of 34. Though not a hard charger a la Junior Johnson or Curtis Turner, Ned was nonetheless more than willing to take a flier. Most famously, in 1959 Jarrett bought a race car with a bad check for $2,000. He went out that weekend, won two races and, when the bank opened on Monday, was there with the funds.
Dale, with no driving experience, was writing his own kind of uncovered check when he started racing. "He really threw the dice," says Jimmy Newsome, the high school classmate who offered Jarrett that first ride in '77. "He risked absolutely everything to get where he was."
Desire, though, couldn't make up for woeful equipment. Jarrett didn't win his first Busch Grand National race until 1986, his fifth season on that circuit. It took five more years before he earned his first Winston Cup win, at Michigan in '91. Then in '92 Jarrett hopscotched to the Gibbs team, and a year later he took Daytona and finished fourth in the drivers' race. His dues, it seemed, were finally paid. But in '94 the number 18 Chevy faltered, and people began to wonder where the magic had gone.
When Jarrett got off to a slow start in '95, the rumblings were that he was the problem. After all, Irvan had had plenty of success in the Yates T-Bird. Says Jarrett, "I became frustrated at myself because I couldn't come in and adapt. I didn't rely on my knowledge of a race car and how to drive it, what it needs to feel like."
Everyone, it seemed, was searching for answers. "Dale was very timid in telling us what he really needed in the car," says Larry McReynolds, crew chief of number 28. "He just wouldn't come in there and say, This dad-gum car won't drive worth a flip."
Dale (below, foreground) hit the bricks for a victory kiss after winning the 1996 Brickyard 400.
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In May 1995 Yates took an extraordinary step: He asked Hut Stricklin, who at the time was driving Kenny Bernstein's Ford, to take number 28 out for some test laps. Stricklin's diagnosis: The car was loose in the corners and the engine wasn't up to snuff. The test run, which could have gummed up the Yates-Jarrett relationship for good, instead worked as a powerful cleansing agent. The crew saw that the car needed work, and Jarrett realized that the crew needed more input from him. The payoff came two months later, when Jarrett won the Miller Genuine Draft 500 at Pocono. Resuscitated, he had five more top-five finishes before the year was over.
This season the team, with Todd Parrott as crew chief, flourished immediately. At the 1996 Daytona 500, Jarrett fought off Earnhardt over the final 24 laps for the victory, and as the year progressed he continued to win big races at big tracks: the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis and the GM Goodwrench 400 at Michigan.
"He's very smart," says Parrott. "He takes care of the race car.
He doesn't really abuse the car in the first part of the race. That's not the part that pays the money; it's the latter stages. He looks for the right setup all through the race and sets in for the kill at the end."
Some people mistake Jarrett's patience for passivity. But McReynolds, for one, knows Jarrett is no Boy Scout. "He'll race you hard," McReynolds says. "I saw that in 1991, when he beat us at Michigan with Davey Allison driving our car. He rubbed on us just hard enough down the front stretch off Turn 4 to break Davey's momentum—not hard enough to spin him out, but enough to say, Hey, you're going to have to earn this win. I won't hand it to you."
Jarrett thinks the fans overrate the courage required to get out there and trade paint at 170 mph. He understands the more perilous risks in racing. The greatest gamble, he knows, is to wager everything on yourself. It also offers the biggest payoff.
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