continued<\/a>, \u201cI wasn\u2019t really as supportive, or I didn\u2019t lend them advice, or try to really help them as much as I probably could have. I went to Hendrick Motorsports, and then I wasn\u2019t the big man on campus anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cI was working with Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon, who had won championships and had a ton of seniority at Hendrick Motorsports, and I learned what it was like to be on the other side of things, and I learned what it was like to watch them be good teammates to me, to be supportive, to be helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while it\u2019s not such a prideful thing to do, Dale Jr. did not sugarcoat it, preferring to come out and admit his reluctance out loud, even so, in the years after his driving career.\u00a0 Often, for someone in their late 20s, life moves at full throttle, and the world can shrink to a single lane, shifting focus to only oneself.<\/p>\n
That is the nature of a sport like NASCAR. It can nudge drivers toward looking out for the number one spot, and nothing else. Putting oneself first and being selfish can pay off, especially at a level as high as the Cup Series. Still, Dale Jr. believes there were stretches where he could have stood taller for those around him.<\/p>\n
Maybe that is why he now goes out of his way to lift young drivers who enter the garage. From nurturing their craft via his O\u2019Reilly Series team to sharing insight that shapes the sport through his podcast, Junior has spent years trying to give others the support he once struggled to offer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dale Earnhardt Jr. has poured back into the sport as much as he ever took from it, whether…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,14056,4384,9397,634,8354,82],"class_list":["post-502356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-dale-earnhardt-jr","tag-hendrick-motorsports","tag-jr-motorsports","tag-nascar","tag-nascar-cup-series","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}