Earnhardt's future begins with glance back at past

For Ed Clark and his staff at Atlanta Motor Speedway, this race weekend is going to last one additional day. Rather than arriving Monday at an empty facility, wearing jeans and ready to oversee the big clean-up that follows any Nextel Cup event, they'll open up sections of the grandstand to anyone with a stub from Sunday or a ticket for next March's race. They'll have a couple of concession stands ready, and a public address announcer conducting interviews in the infield.

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And why not? Monday brings perhaps the most anticipated event of this extended Atlanta race weekend, one that has nothing to do with the Chase or who might win the championship. Monday is the first day that Dale Earnhardt Jr. will slide behind the wheel of a Hendrick Motorsports vehicle for a real -- his nine-lap emergency substitution for Kyle Busch at Texas doesn't really count -- as part of a Car of Tomorrow test that will keep much of the sport's media corps in metro Atlanta for an extra day, and likely attract a throng of spectators ready to see their hero debut in his new colors.

"We're going to try and make a little bit of a show out of it," said Clark, the track's president. "Instead of coming in in jeans and picking up the trash on Monday, we'll come back in race mode. It will be a good way to wind down from Sunday, I guess. We're thinking we'll have certainly a few thousand people or more here, and we may be surprised."

Only four more races remain until Earnhardt will slip out of his trademark No. 8 car at Dale Earnhardt Inc., leave his Budweiser colors behind, and move into a No. 88 vehicle fielded by a team that seems a lock to win its seventh championship on NASCAR's premier level. But don't look for Junior in a No. 88 on Monday -- sources have indicated that his test car will instead be a No. 5, but not the one currently driven by Busch. It will be a reproduction of Rick Hendrick's first Cup car, which was a red and white Chevrolet driven by Geoffrey Bodine for an organization known at the time as All-Star Racing.

Somehow, it all fits. Earnhardt and Hendrick have long been linked by the late Robert Gee, the driver's maternal grandfather, and an ace fabricator who hailed from the same small Virginia town as Hendrick and helped the future car owner break into the sport. Earnhardt may be the sport's hippest driver and Hendrick may own the sport's most modern team, but the two share old-school bonds that stretch back decades. Sure, Monday's retro paint scheme will sell a few die-casts, but it just seems appropriate that Earnhardt should begin his tenure at Hendrick Motorsports by driving a car with a big red star on the side that serves as a rolling appreciation of the past.

It's a heartwarming story -- how Gee co-owned the Busch car that won Hendrick's first race on a NASCAR national series, how the fabricator worked for Hendrick until his death in 1994, how Hendrick helped Gee find medical care after he suffered a stroke, how Dale Jr. saw all of it and quietly looked up to a man who in less than a month will become his boss. But Monday, despite the paint scheme, isn't about the past. It's the first tangible step in Earnhardt's future, the first time he'll be in a Hendrick driving suit, the first time he'll debrief with Hendrick drivers, the first time he'll be surrounded by Hendrick technology and engineers. Crew chief Tony Eury Jr. made the move a few weeks ago. Now it's time for Earnhardt's new beginning. (Continued)