Dale Earnhardt Jr. Says Father’s Documentary Reveals Surprising New Details About NASCAR Legend

The Earnhardt name is synonymous with stock car racing.

From Ralph Earnhardt racing in the early dirt-track days of NASCAR, to his son Dale winning seven Cup Series championships and becoming the sport’s biggest star, and to Dale Jr. following in his father’s tire tracks all the way up to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, the Earnhardts have left a legacy of excellence that has not come without terrible sacrifice.

Prime Video‘s four-part documentary series Earnhardt looks at the family on and off the track, and how an emotionally distant and success-driven Dale had difficulty connecting to his daughter Kelley and son Dale Jr.

Ultimately, as Dale Jr.’s NASCAR career was on the rise and his relationship with his father grew closer, tragedy struck the family and the sports world as Dale was killed in a crash on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500.

Dale Jr. and sister Kelley Earnhardt Miller talked about the documentary and the stories shared about their father:

Have you both seen the series, or is was it “I don’t need to see it. I lived it”?

Dale Jr.: Yeah, we’ve seen it. Me and Kelly actually watched several versions of a few episodes trying to help the team get to a final place on the edits. So yeah, it’s been a project that we’ve been heavily involved in.

You were both in the media at a young age and your family took a lot of home movies. Did you see anything particularly embarrassing, something that you wore or said or maybe an old hairstyle?

Dale Jr.: Probably the hairstyle. Yeah, that was a good one. I wish they’d have taken more, honestly. I wish there was more footage of our childhood for sure. But it’s good to see some of the stuff the team with Imagine uncovered a lot of things that we’d never seen before, so that was fun.

Were there any eye-opening moments for you like, “Man, I didn’t know that!” or “That’s not how I remembered it?”

Dale Jr.: Listening to Kelley’s version of her experience was fun because she certainly saw things different than I did, and she shared some feelings about certain things that happened in our lives that I didn’t really truly understand or know. And so that was fun for me to go through that. And they found some additional video footage of Ralph Earnhardt that I didn’t know existed. And so anything like pre-1980, that was fun. Seeing some of the photos and stuff that I didn’t know existed.

Kelley: I enjoyed seeing a lot of the footage. It just brought back a lot of memories that you just don’t think about in your everyday world. There was also a lot of footage from us when we were racing that I maybe remember doing or whatever, but don’t remember ever seeing the outcome of that footage. And the other thing that I have enjoyed about all the episodes is hearing stories from other people in Dad’s world — friends, his crew on the Goodwrench and Wrangler cars, David Allen, who was with Wrangler in the beginning when they picked up my dad. And so there was a lot of different perspectives that I got to hear more of. I haven’t had conversations with those people in that same way. So hearing their perspectives and different storytellings and things that the way they felt about Dad and the way Dad felt about things that they knew of was really awesome to hear.

What was it like to have Darrell Waltrip speaking so highly of your father, even though they were bitter rivals for early parts of their careers?

Kelley: I knew they were rivals, but in my perspective of their careers, they were fast friends there towards the end. And so I actually enjoyed Darryl’s storytelling of that time period, and I thought it was good that I knew they were friends in the back of my mind because I thought that at times he was very brash about their relationship and their own track rival and things like that.

Your dad’s friend Hank Parker Sr. is interviewed in the series and says your dad was a master of blocking things out, not talking about things, not addressing those feelings. Has the culture of “We don’t talk about this stuff” changed in the sport?

Dale Jr.: I think sometimes for some things it’s changed, but I think just certain people are going to do things a certain way. Some people deal with grief or grieving or loss differently. Everybody’s kind of different. So I don’t know. The trouble, I guess, is that Dad’s not here for us to ask, and that’s probably the most frustrating part. There’s so many questions that you’d have to ask Dad, and doing this documentary and putting this all together just really created more questions and reminded you of things that you hadn’t thought about that you’d love to know what his thoughts were. And some of those get answered in the comments like Hank Parker Sr. had. Some of those questions do get answered. So that’s kind of fun hearing different people’s perspectives. But Dad was really lucky to have a lot of people like Hank that wanted to contribute. And I think that that made a really big difference.

Dale, you ever regret not going to art school?

Dale Jr.: I’m very thankful that didn’t happen to me.

Earnhardt, premieres Thursday, May 22, Prime Video.