While Dale Earnhardt Sr., the legendary seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, was known as ‘The Man in Black’ while driving a GM Goodwrench sponsored No. 3 for Richard Childress Racing, that identity almost did not come to fruition.
It’s been a long held conviction that the decision makers at General Motors wanted the car to match their blue national brand identity and Dale Earnhardt Jr. finally asked Childress himself about the topic on his podcast this week after The Clash.
“A lot of people might not know this but after running Wrangler yellow and blue for the ’84 through ’87 seasons, you would unveil the black Goodwrench scheme at Rockingham at the tail end of the 1987 season,” Earnhardt Jr. told Childress on the ‘Dale Jr. Download.’
“One of the last races of the year, you roll this car out there. But there was a design that was blue. GM wanted the car to be blue. How did you convince General Motors, and I guess, were you even close to going, ‘Yep, you guys write the checks, blue it is!’ How did y’all convince them that they needed to have a black race car?”
Childress did not like the blue paint job and worked to find something better to convince them of it.
“You know, GM Goodwrench, their brake boxes were blue and white,” Childress said. “And they wanted that same color, blue and white. So we painted one left side of the car, we painted it blue and white, put the Goodwrench on the light blue.”
“Then I took black duct tape and silver duct tape, and taped the right side of the car and put Goodwrench on it with the decals and the number ‘3’,”
“I told them, Archie Long was running it back in that day for GM…We had the car sitting there just inside our old shop, and I said, ‘Well, here’s the design you guys want, here’s the design that when this car is going around the track, it’s going to be closer than what the asphalt looks like. You’re gonna be able to see this white Goodwrench, and you’ll see this white ‘3’.
“We started with silver ‘3’ I think, because I had silver duct tape for some reason. But we ended up convincing them that it would show up a lot better on the race track with a black car and No.3 and Goodwrench being white on the back of it.”
