Some have called stock-car racing a blood sport. and Tony Stewart, like many others in the business, has seen his share of friends killed.
The fifth anniversary of Dale Earnhardt's death is bringing it all back home for a few painful moments as SpeedWeeks opens, heading toward the Daytona 500 on Feb. 19.
"There are days when it seems like it was yesterday, and days it seems like it was a million years ago," Stewart, the 2005 Nextel Cup champion, said yesterday during NASCAR's annual pre-500 Media Day. "Yes, we miss him every day. There's not a week goes by that we don't think about something that happened during the two years I got to know him.
"Scott Brayton, whom I lost as an Indy teammate (in 1996), Robby Stanley, Rich Vogler - and Kenny Irwin, whom I raced with a ton. I miss Kenny more than anyone.
"There are all kinds of guys you raced with and wished they could still be here."
Yesterday's media marathon, NASCAR's Super Bowl knockoff, was this time about giving pause to remember the man whose death on the last lap of the year's biggest race was such a traumatic, and historic, turning point for the sport, in so many ways.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. said he's surprised at all the attention being given here to his late father.
"I really didn't expect it to be talked about a lot," Earnhardt said. "I didn't think there would be a lot in the media. Because there aren't a lot of things you celebrate the fifth anniversary of.
"It doesn't seem like five years. And it's good he's still on people's minds, and people still miss him. I still like to see the threes on the back of pickup trucks.
"It's OK to talk about Dad. I don't mind talking about him. But there are questions I get tired of trying to answer, because there are no real answers to them. I was proud of him. I don't know what it would be like if he were still here. It's hard for me to imagine...even with my imagination.
"It was hard to be Dale Jr. when Dad was around. And it's still tough. When he was around, man, you knew he was there.
"I miss him a lot. He could have been a huge assist to me personally in things that have happened to me over the past five years."
For Bill France Jr., the loss of Earnhardt was more than just the loss of a prized star. It was really the loss of a very good friend, a man who wouldn't hesitate to tell France bluntly what he thought was right and wrong.
France was probably closer to Earnhardt than he was to any other driver.
"People ask me, 'What kind of guy was he?' I say he was somewhere between John Wayne and Clint Eastwood," France said.
Dale Jr. liked that.
"I want his legacy to be a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, that when he worked he did a good job and gave you everything he could give you, and he was respected, well-mannered, and treated people the way he wanted to be treated. And hard-nosed," Earnhardt said.
"But I've got to take my career seriously right now. I can't be fooling around with tributes and feel-good stories. We've got to get down to business and race."
Still, getting into a black No. 3 is, he said, a goal.
"I'd love to drive the three on down the road, and Richard (Childress) knows that," he said. "But I don't want to disrupt what he wants to do today. So we've just made that clear to him, and we've dropped it."
France didn't always agree with Earnhardt Sr., of course.
"I didn't agree with his comments at Bristol that night when he ran into Terry Labonte and said, 'I just wanted to rattle his cage,'" France said. "That ticked me off, quite frankly. Which I told him. He just grinned like a jackass eating briars."
Earnhardt, remember, was the man for whom France invented the "penalty box," for rough driving.
And then there was the Earnhardt-Geoff Bodine feud.....
"I remember Charlotte that time Earnhardt and Bodine were knocking each other around, and I brought them down to Daytona to talk about it, him and Bodine and Rick Hendrick and Richard Childress -and to go to dinner together," France recalled. "I think one of them didn't want to go to dinner, but I told them they were. And they had to ride together.
"I told them, 'You're going to settle this thing, or we're going to settle it for you.'"
Earnhardt was an aggravating cuss for France at times.
But France leaned on Earnhardt many times for advice, from whether the track was still too wet to race on, or, at Atlanta one afternoon when rain nearly forced postponement of the season finale - until Earnhardt told France to finish the race under the lights, because he was going on vacation the next day.
Through it all they were good friends, the billionaire and the scruffy kid from Kannapolis who happened to make it big.
"Earnhardt loved to fish, and we'd be down in the Bahamas, and he'd get up early in the morning and we'd be sitting out on the dock at 4:30 in the morning, shooting the breeze," France said. "We got to spend a lot of away-from-the-track time together...."
"He was good for the sport, no question about that. I respected his ability. He was what he was, and everybody needs somebody like that."
Michael Waltrip, the winner of that ill-fated Daytona 500 in a car that Earnhardt owned, still has a hard time dealing with the loss of Earnhardt, the man who gave him his big break.
"I miss him," Waltrip said. "But there have been a lot of events at this track that have made me sad and made me happy. I don't want to answer questions about 'Five years later...' That just makes for good print. I miss him every day, so when you come up with 'Five years later,' that's not for me."
Kevin Harvick is the man who got the call from Childress to take Earnhardt's seat immediately after his death, and he says Earnhardt's legacy still looms large over that operation: "We live it every day, so it's a little different for us than others. We've lived that since the day it happened.
"It's something everyone remembers, and would like to forget but you can't."
• Mike Mulhern can be reached at mmulhern@wsjournal.com
