Replacing Earnhardt
Team owner Richard Childress made a public pledge that the #3 would never again adorn the side of a black car sponsored by GM Goodwrench, the color scheme and sponsor Earnhardt had driven since 1988.
As the #3 team had finished 13th in the race, on its 2000 season status put it second in owner points (for purposes of provisional starting positions in case the team was slower than 36th in the new one round of qualifying rule imposed in 2001, NASCAR would position 37-42 based on owner points from 2000 the first five races of the 2001 season), and was on the Winner's Circle bonus program (ten teams with the most wins from 2000), Childress requested, and NASCAR approved, the team to be renumbered as the #29 team, with the same sponsor (GM Goodwrench Service Plus), but the car was adorned with a reversed color scheme (white body with black numerals and a black stripe on the bottom) was used for races at Rockingham and Las Vegas. The team would keep all bonuses earned as the #3 team in 2000 and the Daytona 500, and Earnhardt's 2001 points would be accumulated with Harvick's #29 points that season for the new #29 team's owner standings, used in NASCAR bonus money programs. For the race at Atlanta, a new GM Goodwrench Service Plus scheme was introduced, with angled red stripes and a thin blue pinstripe, resembling the AC Delco Chevrolets driven in the Busch Series.
From 2003 until 2006, when the Goodwrench sponsorship ended, the #29 car was painted in black and silver, bearing greater resemblance to Earnhardt's old #3 but with a more contemporary flair. A small #3 decal is placed alongside the #29 in Earnhardt's memory and the team's legacy (a move that continues to this day).
Childress' second-year Busch Series driver Kevin Harvick was named as Earnhardt's replacement driver, beginning with the race following Earnhardt's death, the Dura Lube 400 held at North Carolina Speedway. Hats bearing the #3 logo were distributed to everyone at the track to honor Earnhardt. The Childress team wore blank uniforms out of respect but as Harvick's performance improved, the regular GM Goodwrench Service Plus uniforms returned, with the team scoring a top-ten finish by the next race in Las Vegas, and winning the next week in Atlanta. Dura Lube 400 pole sitter Jeff Gordon gave a missing man formation during the pace laps, a custom used in motorsports for mourning.
Fans honored Earnhardt by holding three fingers aloft on the third lap of every NASCAR Winston Cup race. Meanwhile, NASCAR's television partners also went silent for the third lap, a practice that was repeated until the 2002 race at Rockingham, and at the 2011 Daytona 500, ten years after his death.
The team still scored a ninth place finish in the points for the 2001 season, led by Harvick's two wins and top-ten finish in the points.
Read more about this topic: Death Of Dale Earnhardt
Famous quotes containing the word replacing:
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)