Earnhardt’s auto racing graveyard keeps growing
It’s hard to fathom why Dale Earnhardt Jr. would want to collect race cars that were involved in spectacular crashes and plant them in conspicuous places on his farm in North Carolina.
Maybe it’s remind to him that what he does is dangerous, and that he should be thankful for every living minute.
Or maybe it was because he was driving through the Texas panhandle one day, listening to his grunge music, when he pulled off I-40 outside Amarillo when the light was just right to check out the Cadillac Ranch.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I came across this picture of the Indy car, or what’s left it, that Will Power crashed at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2011. What’s left of it is pointing upside down in a tree on Junior’s property.
Power broke his back in that 15-car crash.
Dan Wheldon, that year’s Indy 500 winner, was killed.
So. I dunno, it seems a little bit grisly to me.
“It’s just the cockpit hanging in a fork in a tree about 10 feet off the ground,” Junior recently tweeted to somebody who had asked about the remains of Power’s car. “My mom thought it was a bobsled.”
This week, Junior added one of his own to a collection that includes the car Juan Pablo Montoya drove into the track dryer at the Daytona 500 a couple of years ago causing an inferno.
The burned-out remains of the car Earnhardt wrecked at Texas two weeks ago is now sitting in his driveway, probably waiting to be planted on top of a shed somewhere on the back 40.