Mr. Austin Dillon

Drivers' Motor Coach Compound

Daytona International Speedway

1801 West International Speedway Boulevard

Daytona Beach, FL 32114

Dear Austin,

An open letter here to assure you, and the public, that you have every bit as much right to drive a car carrying a slanted 3 on the side as Dale Earnhardt did.

You see, Earnhardt didn't make the 3. Your Pop Pop, your grandfather, Richard Childress, did. He built it from nothing. He earned it. In fact, I know of no one who earned anything more, or harder, than R.C. earned the 3.

R.C. was what we called him in his younger days, when he was an "independent" driver -- a euphemism for barely sponsored or unsponsored.

Whatever booing you hear Sunday, when your car is rolled onto the pole on the grid for the Daytona 500, likely will come from NASCAR's hard-core audience, which skews heavily to white males over 45. Indeed, nearly half, according to analysis published recently in "The Atlantic" magazine, are over 55.

That's Earnhardt's audience. They lived vicariously through him, and so part of them died with him. I don't recall a single fan I've talked to who fits into that demographic who hasn't said, "It just hasn't been the same ... " since Earnhardt died in the Daytona 500 in 2001, and the 3 vanished from the Cup series from then until now.

Me, I'm 65. I go back farther than his cult does. I saw Earnhardt come into Cup, and I saw him, at first, get a reputation as a crasher and a villain more than as a winner and a hero.

And then I saw your Pop Pop make him.

(R.C. himself will bristle at that, because he believes Earnhardt made him. I don't believe Earnhardt would have made it to seven championships and 76 wins without your Pop Pop.)

All this happened long before 1990, when you were born.

Summer, 1979: Riding after midnight through the Arizona desert, air conditioning broken on a gasoline-powered truck -- R.C. couldn't even afford a diesel in those days -- towing a race car on a trailer.

In the early years, Richard Childress drove the truck carrying the No. 3 car he was going to race in Cup. ISC Archives/Getty Images

R.C. was driving his own rig -- he was so short on people that he even made me take stints driving that old C-300 on that trip that took us from Texas down into Mexico, out to California, back through Las Vegas and on up to Michigan, nearly three weeks all told.

In those wee hours in the desert he was talking, telling me not so much his dream as his plan -- your Pop Pop never was much of a dreamer, more of a doer who worked hard with a purpose.

Other "independent" drivers, he confided, sometimes diverted what little sponsorship money they got -- one bought cattle for his farm, another took his wife to Europe.

Not R.C. He was plowing everything back into that fledgling racing team.

He was only 34, but he was already planning to "get out of the car and put a younger driver in it, and build a team capable of winning."

Great expectations, wouldn't you say? But your Pop Pop was always something of a Dickensian character. When he was 5, his father died, leaving him to go through elementary school sweeping up the cafeteria to earn his lunch while the kids who could pay were out playing.

On weekends he earned money selling Cokes and popcorn in the grandstands at Bowman Gray Stadium, the race track in Winston-Salem, N.C., catching glimpses of Junior Johnson and Curtis Turner racing.

As a teenager he worked at an all-night gas station, and the moonshine runners, down with full loads from the Brushy Mountain stills, would park their cars there and walk off, around Winston-Salem to visit girlfriends and such.

Austin Dillon has won driving the No. 3 in both the Camping World Truck and Nationwide Series. Chris Graythen/Getty Images

Young Childress would then unload the cars and deliver the moonshine at the retail level, a couple of cases at a time, to the "drink houses," the unlicensed bars, mostly in the black neighborhoods.

About dawn one morning he walked in on a fight among customers. One pulled a sawed-off shotgun and made a mess of the other against a wall, and "that was the day I stepped out of the liquor business," he recalled decades later.

But he already had a little stake, and he began racing, largely hand-to-mouth. He already had a plan, to get into NASCAR, and he would get there whatever it took.

What it took to get his big break was racing as a replacement driver, during the notorious drivers' boycott of the inaugural race at Talladega, Ala., in 1969. He was paid $10,000 to join the motley field of drivers and cars scraped together just to run a race of some kind, after the likes of Richard Petty, David Pearson and Bobby Allison had pulled out.

That was the most money he'd ever seen, or probably even thought about. I've been told there is a photograph somewhere of Richard Childress that Sunday night at Talladega with a glass of champagne in one hand and a bologna sandwich in the other. I've never seen it, but I'd love to. There could be no better portrait of your grandfather.