Earnhardt Jr. Uncovers Rare Stories from Dale Sr.'s 1980 Season in New Show

Newsweek

12-06-2025

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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Dale Earnhardt Jr. spoke about his upcoming show, 'Becoming Earnhardt 1980,' which is based on two scrapbooks that his aunt created from articles about Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s NASCAR Cup Series title fight from 1979 and 1980.
The show will focus on the 1980 season, revealing lesser known details of the events that unfolded, eventually leading to Dale Sr.'s spectacular championship victory. Dale Jr. opened up about the show on his Dale Jr. Download podcast. He said:
"It's just a show that I started. I got these two scrapbooks from my aunt when my grandmother passed away. We went to her house, we were kind of looking through some of the things - photos and all kinds of stuff - and there were these two scrapbooks that my aunt made.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. speaks on the NASCAR on Prime Video broadcast set after the NASCAR Cup Series Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville Superspeedway on June 01, 2025 in Lebanon, Tennessee. (Photo by )
Dale Earnhardt Jr. speaks on the NASCAR on Prime Video broadcast set after the NASCAR Cup Series Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville Superspeedway on June 01, 2025 in Lebanon, Tennessee. (Photo by )"They are literally, one is from the '79 year and one's from the '80 Cup season. She cut out every article and everything. So right there in front of me, man, is basically this kind of book of, like, 'here's what happened to Dad.'
"I just never really dove into that real deeply to get details about that particular couple of years when he drove for Rod Osterlund and landed his first full-time ride in NASCAR.
"So we decided to make a series, Becoming Earnhardt, to detail what's in those scrapbooks and the things that we learned. It's pretty interesting."
Dale Jr. revealed a controversy from 1980 that will be covered in the show. He added:
"1980 is what this particular season of Becoming Earnhardt will be focusing on, and there is a high-profile split with crew chief Jake Elder. How Jake handles that in the media is wild—Jake goes off the rails, Jake comes back on the rails—it's just wild.
"And Dad and Cale get nippy in the media late in the year. Cale actually is real critical of Dad on the racetrack. Just watching that whole thing—kind of reliving it, putting yourself in the moment of going back through that particular year—I think it's really fun for me.
"I'm a nostalgia freak. I love the history of the sport. So it is a great time for me, a good excuse for me to dive more into learning about that particular part of Dad's life. I lived a lot of the late '80s and the '90s. I wasn't even in Dad's life in 1980. I was not living with him yet."
One point to be noted is that the show uses original calls from the radio broadcasts, adding to its authenticity. Dale Jr. confirmed:
"We used a lot of original calls from MRN, and there was also an alternate broadcasting network that is now property of App State—the college.
"So we went to their archives to pull out some of the original calls from those radio broadcasts, and hearing all that stuff is a lot of fun."