Filed under: FanHouse Exclusive, NASCAR
Once there was a time when the great Dale Earnhardt was a crew chief.
As you might expect, it was before he could legally drive.
From the age of 13 until well after he got behind the wheel of a race car, Earnhardt was the crew chief for Gray London, a Kannapolis sandwich maker who took up racing in the 1960s to escape the stress of producing 60,000 sandwiches a day at his Dainty Maid Foods plant in Kannapolis. The teen-aged Earnhardt also worked at London's Sunoco gas station in Kannapolis.
One night early in his driving career, London's yellow 1957 Chevy was fishtailing every time he came off the second turn on the dirt track at Concord (N.C.) Speedway.
"I came back into the pits and Dale was jumping up and down, raising Cain."
"Quit that!" the 13-year-old crew chief hollered at London.
"Quit what?"
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