the interior retaining wall leading onto pit road. After momentarily setting on the driv- er’s side, a series of sickening flips and twists unfolded as sheet metal and practically everything else was ripped from the car. Fortunately, the car didn’t make contact with the wall and eventually came to a grinding halt right-side up. A battered and bruised Rudd spent the
night in the hospital but was back at the track early the following day. “We went straight to the track,” Moore
says, “and after a couple of laps, Ricky came in and said, ‘I can’t drive this thing.’ “I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because I
can’t see.’ “His eyes were so swollen that he couldn’t
see. So I went and got some cellophane tape and we taped his eyelids open.”
A week later, wearing a special “flak
jacket” to protect his injured ribs, Rudd finished seventh in the Daytona 500. “And don’t you know the next week we
went to Richmond and he won that race,” Moore says.
•• For Dale Earnhardt Jr., the decision to
turn his car over to another driver wasn’t difficult, he says, “because it was so painful.” Te popular driver suffered burns to his
back, neck and thigh when he crashed dur- ing practice for a sports car race in 2004 at Infineon Raceway. His GTS class Corvette had spun and when the back end of the car struck a barrier, the car became engulfed in flames. Te following week at Loudon, Martin
Truex Jr. practiced and qualified the Dale Earnhardt Inc.-owned car. Earnhardt started the race and completed 61 laps before turn- ing the car over to Truex during the first caution of the race. When the series turned to Pocono the
following week, Earnhardt practiced and qualified the car but turned it over once again — this time to John Andretti after 53 laps. “I had a burn on my leg that was open
and burns on the back of my knees that were open,” Earnhardt says. “Tis one, on my left thigh, was worse. It was really painful; I felt lucky to have Martin [at Loudon] because that was a track that he felt comfortable on. “And then I felt fine at Pocono. I got out
of that more because of the way the car drove … Andretti got in it and he couldn’t drive it either.”
OCTOBER 2011 63
Photo: ISC Archives via Getty Images
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