Dale Earnhardt Jr., net worth pushing toward half a billion dollars, can see himself there, at one of the car dealerships he owns in Tallahassee, hurrying from the garage to the sales floor, talking to the mechanics about their kids and the salesmen about which Chevy has sold the most that week.

That’s the happy future, the one beyond a present that finds him as contented as he’s ever been.

Right now he’s a driver in the midst of a resurgence at age 40, fresh off a victory at Talladega that gives him five wins in the last two seasons after a torturous nine-year run with only four.

He sits in fifth place in the points standing after 10 races, the Chase squarely in front of him. His father won seven series championships, but Earnhardt Jr. has never finished better than third in the final standings at NASCAR’s highest level. Despite his unspectacular history, Earnhardt Jr. has some of racing’s most loyal fans, many of whom he inherited from his father.

He has a serious girlfriend, Amy Reimann, and the guys on his crew like to rib him about engagement rings and starting a family. He’ll tell you earnestly – the curse words that otherwise pepper his perfect North Carolina drawl suddenly subsiding – that she’s made him a better man.

When you ask about what’s ahead, he gestures wildly with his hands before holding one still in front of him so that he can get a look at where the grease might be.

“Man, I see myself workin’ the shop because, you know, that’s what I did before racin’ really hit,” he says. “I went to college for two years – well, a technical school, I don’t call it college – then I worked as a mechanic in my dad’s shop. I was just a kid. Showed up late every day. Fixed whatever they brought me as fast as I could.

I can see myself doing that again. I want to. It’s the last time I was a normal person.”

This does not appear to be an act. Dale Earnhardt sincerely wants a simpler life. He does not tell you so because he thinks it will burnish his image (it does) or because some brand manager from any of his sponsors suggested it (they probably would).

He has been dealing with fame by accepting and resenting it for decades now, and has never tried to pretend otherwise. He’s always been honest about this fight.

His father projected the clearest, most unambiguous image in the sport: Clad in black, he was nobody’s friend.

Earnhardt Jr. is shy. Crowds can make him anxious but he wants to make friends and oblige requests from his fans. They love him because this makes him authentic.

He is the child of a mercurial, transcendent star. He saw the crash that killed that star, his father, in his rearview mirror. Living up to his father’s legacy, and competing in the sport that killed him seems an impossible task.

“I love it,” he says, “and it’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

The significance of the first three words in that quote is perhaps only understood if you consider that Dale Earnhardt Sr., who oozed whatever it was we thought was the stuff that made real race car drivers, maybe didn’t live long enough to understand this much about his son.

According to an NBC Story, Earnhardt Sr. once responded to his son winning a Busch Series title by saying, “That Junior, he’s been the big surprise to me. I didn’t think he had racin’ in him.”

This was more than the Man in Black being characteristically surly. Maybe he had a point. His son didn’t commit to racing until he was 16 – Hendrick Racing teammate Jeff Gordon began when he was 5 – and by that age had decided he preferred video games to hunting and grunge to country music. He was – and is – not much like his father.

Rolling Stone ran a profile of Earnhardt Jr. in May, 2000 that introduced non-racing fans to a conflicted young man, a new kind of rebel within a sport built by them, who listened to Nirvana because of the unwieldy guitar riffs and the way the lyrics introduced him to his own disenchantment.

Earnhardt Jr. was a rising star then, coming off back-to-back series championships before making the jump to NASCAR’s highest level. He won the eighth race of the season, and reading through coverage of that time makes it clear that Earnhardt Jr. felt he was finally beginning to enter his father’s world.

Later, he would reflect on his emergence and what it meant for his relationship with his father while speaking to NBC:

“I just wanted to be something he could be proud of. Well, all I really wanted was to talk to him, to talk about adult things with him, the things he talked about with his buddies.”

Dale Earnhardt Sr. died on the last turn of the last lap of the first race in 2001.

How did Earnhardt Jr. get here?

Look back upon the disenchanted teenager, the young rising star, or the struggling career racer, and you see endless opportunities for the Dale Earnhardt Jr. story to turn down an unhappy road. Yet, here stands a man at peace. He’s a man with hope, and a man with purpose.

How?

Begin in 1997, when he was not yet a famous race car driver but was most certainly the son of the most famous one still racing, he liked to play games online. This was when you connected using a modem, sitting through the noise and the uncertainty until suddenly, through the pinhole that was an internet connection, the world opened.

Earnhardt Jr. played a racing game. This was before racing paid all the bills, before he stormed through NASCAR’s junior circuit. Long before he proved himself to his father.

Earnhardt Jr. had tried for years to talk to his dad about racing but the Intimidator was usually so locked in – that stare never really left – that the races seemed to replay in his head on endless loop, the mistakes festering. It wasn’t easy to break through.

So Earnhardt Jr. would be in his room, on the computer, his mind working through whatever the screen gave him. He’d run his car hour after hour, tinkering between races to figure out which configuration suited him for each track. Over time he noticed another driver and came to admire him, not just the way that he seemed to understand the best car setup for each run but how honorable he was. They always raced clean.

Eventually Earnhardt Jr. took it upon himself to ask for the driver’s number, and to call him at home in upstate New York, where TJ Majors, then a high school student, had one thought: He hoped his mom wouldn’t pick up when the son of Dale Earnhardt called.

Nearly 20 years later, Majors is still one of Earnhardt Jr.’s best friends – and his spotter. All race long he talks to his friend, tells him which cars are ahead and which are chasing. The symbolism is impossible to ignore: Majors looks at the race perched from above, the way you might in a video game, and tells Earnhardt where to go.

Earnhardt Jr. trusts Majors with his life.

He was angrier as a young man, Majors admits. More likely to curse out somebody on his crew for a mistake. “Now, we don’t beat on people when they’re down,” he says. “We pick them up. That’s Dale, his influence.”

They partied more, and longer, then. On Easter weekend, with no race scheduled, they’d pile into an SUV and see where they ended up.

On nights when thoughts of his father blocked his sleep, Earnhardt Jr. would slip into the computer room at his house – where’d he set up four cubicles to allow his buddies to play – and ask his friends to keep him company.

He rarely brought up what was on his mind. He just wanted to talk about something else.

When he did bring up his father, it was with reverence about something he’d done on the track. Many of Earnhardt Jr.’s strongest memories of his father are the same as the fans who adored him.

“He’d just say to us, ‘Remember when he did that? How he passed this guy?” Majors says. “He was in awe of him, just like anybody.”

There’s still time for those conversations every weekend at the track, of course, but Earnhardt’s life is different now. His friends have more responsibility, and so does he.

“I’m busier than I’ve ever been,” he says after practice for the race in Richmond late last month.

That morning he’d received word that one of the drivers for JR Motorsports, which runs cars and trucks outside of the Sprint Cup, had been involved in an incident at an event the night before.

“One of my drivers spun a guy, and then the guy hit his car after the race and it was just a mess,” he says. “They’re acting like dummies on Twitter and I was pissed off about it because I was mad my driver run over the guy in the first place.”

And this is how Dale Earnhardt Jr. has changed: In the past he would have let this sort of bad news sit inside for hours. But Reimann – who declined an interview request for this story – won’t allow it. The relationship almost fell apart early on because Earnhardt wouldn’t talk.

“I knew right away today,” he says. “I gotta tell Amy all this, otherwise she’s gonna see it on my face and be like ‘What the is your problem? Why you in a bad mood?’ When I talk to her, it’s like I’m letting go of it.”

He pauses.

“I guess everybody knows this,” he says. “This isn’t revolutionary. I get better at it.

“I was a terrible boyfriend. I didn’t know what being a boyfriend meant, how to be there for her like she was for me, how to think about her first. I think I’ve learned how to be good to her and not just think about myself.”

And with that, he’s one step closer to back to normal.