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Winning the Busch Series championship in 1998 and 1999 are two of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s most impressive achievements in motorsports. A key figure who was instrumental in this was Steve Park. Park was a driver that Dale Earnhardt Sr. had handpicked to drive for Dale Earnhardt Incorporated (DEI) in the Busch Series.
Following a full-time stint in the series in 1997, during which he secured three wins, he moved to the Cup Series. However, the transition wasn’t before he set the stage for his boss’s son to strike gold. Dale Jr. shared a post on X that celebrated Park’s victory in Nashville and wrote, “This dude helped build the cars that would make us champs in 98/99.”
Park raced in 10 seasons of the Cup Series and won two races during this time. The first came at Watkins Glen in 2000, and naturally it is one of his best memories. He said about it to ESPN in 2010, “Not only is it your first win in Sprint Cup, Winston Cup at the time, but what made that victory so great was having Earnhardt come to Victory Lane and hug you around the neck and tell you, ‘Good job!'”
His second victory was at the North Carolina Speedway in 2001. Unfortunately, Earnhardt Sr. had passed away by the time this win came. Later in the same year, Park suffered a significant accident at the Darlington Raceway during a Nationwide Series race. His car’s steering wheel veered to the left after coming loose, and Larry Foyt T-boned him.
He suffered catastrophic injuries, including brain damage, and was considered lucky to even survive. He returned to racing in 2002 with slurred speech and an emotional heart. He was still incredibly fast on the track, but wrecked often. By 2003, he was out of Cup Series racing, save for the occasional one-off appearance. In the interview with ESPN, he expressed strong clarity about the risks of racing.
He said, “What we do is not the safest sport, in comparison to some other professional sports, and the reason why people fill grandstands is because there’s always a chance of something going wrong.
“Sometimes it’s big. Sometimes it’s small. But it always happens.”
In 2010 and 2011, he started races for Tommy Baldwin Jr. at Daytona and Talladega, respectively. But that was the last that NASCAR tracks saw of him as a competitor. The fact that Dale Jr. never won a championship in the Cup Series adds more significance to his Busch Series titles. And for him to credit Park with those achievements speaks a lot.
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