![]() The statue’s original $200,000 cost was footed largely by David H. “We are very pleased that the statue personifies the Dale Earnhardt we all knew on a daily basis,” Teresa Earnhardt, Dale’s widow, said at the unveiling in 2002. And that was an awesome feeling.”ĭale Earnhardt’s statue in Kannapolis, N.C., includes personal touches like Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots and sunglasses, but there is no race car in sight. ![]() When he was at the track, you knew he was there, even if you couldn’t see him. They’ll just be looking at him in a two-dimensional sort of way. One day I’m worried that everybody will just be looking at pictures and stats of him. Not like the power of a king, but just this energy that just filled the room. “He entered a room and changed its atmosphere. “The one thing that you’re always scared is going to evaporate is how he made people feel when he walked into a room,” Dale Jr. once, several years back, what was the one thing he hoped that people would remember about his father. Three years later, Earnhardt died in a last-lap crash in the same race. 16, 1998, after winning the Daytona 500, his only victory ever in The Great American Race. So that was how we wanted to see him portrayed.”ĭale Earnhardt celebrates at Daytona International Speedway on Feb. “If you knew Dale, you know that was how he was most comfortable,” said Lynne Scott Safrit, a local business executive who knew Earnhardt and was instrumental in the statue’s development. The statue depicts Dale being Dale, dressed the way his hometown most often saw him. If you didn’t know Earnhardt was a racer, there’s nothing about the statue itself - which was partially designed by Earnhardt’s widow, Teresa - that would tell you he was. It’s that version of Earnhardt that the bronze statue in Kannapolis commemorates. He still fished at a local lake in Kannapolis. He still ate the same sandwich (white bread, sliced tomato, lettuce and Miracle Whip) at the same restaurant. Even after he got rich and famous, he still got his hair cut at the same place. Kannapolis was always a part of Earnhardt, a blue-collar man as familiar as red clay to the city’s inhabitants.
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