by Lee Spencer

Comment

Lee Spencer: Is there anything that you can get into about the sentimentality of that number because numbers are big things to drivers? Cars are a big thing. Can you talk about the whole scheme?

Dale Earnhardt Jr.: Well, when we first started working with a scheme, me and a friend produced something really close to what Darrell (Waltrip) had in the '80's because I thought that was a great-looking race car. Brian Vickers ran it in the Busch Series last year. It's still a great-looking race car. We massaged that quite a bit to come up with the scheme. I really am happy with it.

Just give me a little input, and I feel real good and comfortable with it, so that was really great. I got more than that. I got just about 90 percent control, and that was awesome. So I was really surprised.

But the number itself, having been a big fan of the car that Darrell and Rusty (Wallace) and Ricky Rudd drove, the 88 from the early '80s — Bobby Allison drove it — that car was a prominent car at that time, in that era. Dale Jarrett has had a lot of success with that number, who is a great friend of mine and a guy that I respect quite a bit. I feel like he would be really happy and proud of this.

I like the fact that the number has some history. That makes me feel very proud to have it. I'm very excited about it. That was what some of the other options sort of lacked was that they didn't have any true history or any true greatness behind them. No substance. This was really sort of a gold mine in effect for me because of the heritage that it had. I was really proud of that and very happy that we were able to be part of that and to make that our own.

So I think the fans... I was really trying to do the best I could to do good by my fans because that was very important to them and that was one of the more popular questions, "Would it have an '8' in it? What's the number? What's the number?" So I think that they can be twice as happy about the situation. It's got to be sort of a relief for them, and they've got to be pretty happy about it.

I know that I've been really excited to make this announcement, not only with my sponsors, but the number as well. So this is a great day for me.