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Written by:
Tom Jensen
05/08/2008 - 12:02 PM
Harrisburg, N.C.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. made All-Star history at Lowe's Motor Speedway on May 20, 2000 in Concord, North Carolina. (Photo by Craig Jones/Getty Images) ยป More Photos
The running of the NASCAR Sprint All-Star race in 2000 saw history made at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, as rookie Dale Earnhardt Jr. captured the All-Star title in his first attempt. In the process, he became both the first rookie to win the event and half of the only father-son tandem to win the race.
That he made it in at all was a bit of a longshot. After all, Earnhardt Jr. was in his first Cup season with Dale Earnhardt Inc., the team his father had started. And he had become eligible for the big race just a month earlier with a surprise victory at Texas Motor Speedway,
“We didn't even think we were going to be in that race. We had just won at Texas a couple weeks earlier," said Earnhardt Jr. “I remember in victory lane in Texas looking at Tony Jr. (Eury, Earnhardt’s cousin and crew chief). We just got hit with the wave of excitement from winning our first race, and I looked at him and said, ‘You know we're in the All-Star race now. I hope you got a good enough car for that; because that's a big deal. That's 20 cars and we don't want to run around the back of that race.’ We were a rookie team and we didn't have but maybe six or seven cars built. But we brought a good one.”
On the strength of his Texas victory, Lowe’s Motor Speedway President and General Manager H.A. “Humpy”
Early on, things didn’t look good for the younger Earnhardt after contact with the LMS walls left a big streak of red paint. “I was running as hard as I could to run third in the first segment and we hit the wall,” Earnhardt Jr. “The car slowed down about a half-tenth (per lap) and I was a little nervous that we had hurt the car a little bit.”
But far from hurting the car, it actually seemed to help it. “We had stumbled across something in our practices that week by accident that worked really well in the last 10 laps-the 10-lap deal at the end,” said Earnhardt Jr. “The new tires we kept coming in and getting every two laps - every time the caution came out-were helping a lot, too. We learned something and applied that to those last 10 laps and smoked 'em.”
Dale Jarrett led the final segment, but a caution came out with eight laps to go, and once the track went green, four fresh Goodyear allowed Earnhardt Jr. to easily blow by Jarrett and hold on to win $516,410 in front of 150,000 delirious Earnhardt fans.. Finishing third was Earnhardt Sr., followed by Jerry Nadeau and Jeff Burton.
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