Firecracker 400!
Jr still remembers the real name< Firecracker 400
Earnhardt: “When you were a kid, and you went to the races, you didn’t get to go to all of them. Maybe one a month or so. When the summer came, you wanted to go to as many as you could and as many as Dad and Teresa would take you to, and those were even the select few. You got to go to Bristol and a couple of other places, obviously Lowe’s (Motor Speedway). The biggest trip of the year was the Firecracker 400 at Daytona. It was the biggest trip of the year when I was a kid ... Daytona, like a baseball fan going to Cooperstown. It was this grand thing. I looked at Daytona the way that fans looked at my father. Going there as a kid and seeing all the cool races and hanging out with all my friends. The (drivers’) wives and children were all in the scoring tower down in Turn 1 during the race, so we all hung out. It was a good experience. I never got to go to the Daytona 500, which was the biggest race, so going to the Firecracker 400 was the second-biggest thing you could do in the NASCAR season. The first Daytona 500 I went to was the first I competed in, so I never saw one until I raced at Daytona.” <<<<<<<<<<I didn’t know that!