Image via Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Dirty Mo Media/YouTube
Legendary NASCAR driver and team owner Richard Childress revealed to Dale Earnhardt Jr. recently that he was in fact a bootlegger back in the day. The man was a guest on Junior’s Dirty Mo Media when he was directly asked if he illegally ran moonshine, to which he answered that he did.
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If you know the history of NASCAR, this revelation is hardly surprising. The whole tradition of stock car racing evolved out of moonshine runners taking production vehicles and modifying them to be fast enough to outrun police. They would come out of the mountains in North Carolina, often on backroads, going as fast as they could, driving it like they stole it.
While Childress says he did run moonshine down the mountain a couple of times, he had a different job in the illegal trade. A teenager at the time, he worked at a service station where the moonshine runners from the mountains would appear.
Those runners would provide him with the addresses of “drink houses” and he would deliver the moonshine to several spots in the area. He said those locations were always in the roughest parts, but he did it for the money.
One would like to believe those experiences helped steel Childress’ resolve, making him into the tough driver he later became in NASCAR.
What a lot of people also don’t know is that Childress worked as a stuntman in the 1980s, something Junior asked him about during the interview. He said he did the dangerous work to “help pay bills.” Childress wasn’t a rich man back then.
He would take off during the week and do stunt jobs, admitting once he volunteered to slide a motorcycle in front of an airplane that was landing. That job paid $400 or $500, which to him was big money back then.
During the interview, Junior talks with Childress about a variety of other issues like the future of NASCAR, charter agreements, the rise of Kyle Busch, Dale Earnhardt’s legacy, and Kasey Kahne’s return to the sport.
Image via Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Dirty Mo Media/YouTube
