It was the end of the 1995 Winston Cup season, and Jeff Gordon -- "Wonder Boy" -- was the new NASCAR champion, set to be formally crowned at the annual banquet at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.
High up in his lavish suite on the 36th floor, a day before the banquet, the runner-up, Dale Earnhardt, sat down with me and five other motorsports writers for an interview. I was doing a profile of him for Car and Driver, ready to ask him broad, overarching questions about his career, his life and his place in the sport. (Earnhardt and his wife, Teresa, are shown above at his seventh championship banquet in 1994).
It was a time of rapid expansion in a booming sport, with even bigger changes looming. NASCAR was talking about racing in Japan. Bruton Smith, on the fast track to becoming a billionaire, had gone public with Speedway Motorsports, Inc., in February 1995 and would open Texas Motor Speedway in 1997 and Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 1998.
Earnhardt was 44, having completed his 17th full season in the NASCAR Winston Cup series. Less than two weeks earlier, the two-time defending Cup champion (only his 1992 hiccup interrupted what could have been Earnhardt's own five-in-a-row string) had faced an all-but-insurmountable, 147-point deficit to Gordon going into the final race at Atlanta.
Gordon did his best to choke, stumbling to a 32nd-place finish, 14 laps down, but had such a large points lead it was all over on lap 61, when the 24-year-old rising star led a lap to clinch the title. Earnhardt, meanwhile, drove like a man possessed, and 19 laps later, made one of the classic moves of his career, passing four cars in one fell swoop in turns three and four to blast from fourth place to the lead.
Earnhardt won that race in a runaway -- his fifth victory of the year -- and even though he didn't win the title, it was a vintage Earnhardt year. He won the second Brickyard 400 in August and then at Bristol drove like a wild man, barging past anyone and everyone in his way until he got to leader Terry Labonte at the finish and wrecked him, too, though Labonte won it while crashing.
Earnhardt finished the season with 10 straight top-10s -- eight of those top fives, including two victories -- but couldn't catch Gordon. The Intimidator was done in by his two DNFs, both at Michigan, including a crash in June that injured his neck and shoulders and left him sore right up to the point of this interview on Nov. 30, 1995. But he was a happy man that day, secure in his life and his sport and still king of his domain, even as the upstart kid was challenging his supremacy.
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