Fans shared in the grief when his legendary dad died. But in this USA WEEKEND exclusive, the son he loved recalls "the greatest gift" the NASCAR star left him.

I know my dad would be really proud. His death came as we had reached a good point in our relationship, one that I was looking forward to building on. In the early days, I don't think he felt like I'd amount to anything. We remained two different kinds of people: He'd generally be getting up before dawn, just about when I'd be going to bed.

Gaining my dad's loyalty and trust was difficult. I sometimes liken it to climbing a ladder. My dad had such high standards -- such authority, integrity and grit -- that you started on a certain rung and had to earn his respect to move up. Some people may think I got a free pass up that ladder just because I was his son and carried his name. Don't believe it. I started out on the bottom like everybody else and worked from there.

Even though we were different, it wasn't like there was this huge father-son tension between us. No more than the typical stuff. He was a remarkably driven man, and I was always more laid-back. It took a while for us to really get to know each other. For all the commotion he stirred about getting an education, for example, he didn't even go to my high school graduation. Between the racing, the business and his hunting trips, he was usually somewhere else early on in my life. I didn't harbor any great resentment, though. He earned the life he wanted. He's the kind of guy who'd tear it up at a racetrack all day Sunday, then come home and hop right on his bulldozer and start doing some landscaping. He felt compelled to be that way, because everything he earned was a result of his internal fuel. Sure, he was pretty damn stubborn. But that stick-to-it personality brought him a long way.

This was a man who dropped out of ninth grade and ended up as a multimillionaire businessman with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He once addressed the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., like he was a head of state. For his fans and his racing enterprise, he built a shiny racing shop and fan attraction the size of a GM plant. (Some folks call it the "Garage Mahal.") That meant a great deal to my dad. He wouldn't let a fan set foot in there if every detail wasn't right -- if there was a light that looked funny or if a ceiling tile was missing. He built what was, at the time, the largest complex ever for a NASCAR racing organization. For him to spend so much money out of his own pocket showed how serious he was about it.

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We became closer as I got older. I started racing in my early 20s and then won two championships on the Busch circuit, and my dad started to realize that I was going to make something out of this. I was succeeding on the same tracks where he had made it. Then, for just one special season, Dad and I raced together in the Winston Cup last year. It doesn't get any better than that. The most memorable moment on the track came in Concord, N.C., in May 2000 at the Winston. The Winston is one of the biggest races of the year. It doesn't count toward the season championship standings, but fans see it as the All-Star Game. The car team that wins gets $500,000. Not a bad chunk of change for a night's work.

As a kid, I always watched the race in my family's condo built above the track overlooking Turn One. My dad raced like hell every year to get it -- the hardest he ever drove. He won three times. Well, in my first year racing with him in the Winston Cup, I won it. That was like me officially joining the fraternity, and I could see in his eyes how proud he was, standing in the winner's circle with me and the trophy, practically in the back yard of where we lived in Mooresville. We savored the moment together for what seemed like an hour. Usually, you couldn't keep Dad at the track after the racing was done; he'd be the first guy to tear off his driver's uniform and climb into the helicopter to get home.

Dad started working with me on my garage, next to my house. As usual, he took charge, measuring out 60 by 100 feet in my back yard, telling me how the driveway would be sloped so the water would run off right and where the portable compressor would go. We got all wrapped up in that but didn't get it finished before the accident. That's a big regret. After the crash, I didn't really want to go in there. But eventually I did. His private garage was a special place for him, where he'd pass the hours working on a car or kicking back with the fellas. They called it The Deerhead Shop because of all the big game he had hunted that was mounted on the walls. I decided my garage would be my special place, too. But in my style, not his, with my Nirvana CDs, a Nintendo game set and big-screen TV. It's not exactly a place where my dad would spend too much time, but we keep a photo of him in his black Goodwrench colors framed over the kitchen sink. He wasn't able to see the garage through to the end, but now he has his eye on us while we're hanging out there.

His last gesture sticks with me. At Daytona, just before his crash, there was a real mess of a multi-car wreck where Tony Stewart flipped down the backstretch. Tony was behind me and Dad was beside him when the wreck began. Somehow, Dad avoided it by trusting his instincts and swerving through the mess. Then he pulled up beside me and gave me the thumbs up. I could see how happy he was about what was about to happen. Michael Waltrip, another driver who races for Dale Earnhardt Inc., was in the lead. I was in second place. Of course, every driver wants to win. But if the three drivers in front all work together, you don't want to mess things up with a bad pass. That could wipe out everybody and put someone else in front. Dad relayed a radio message to both of us: "Y'all just don't pass each other, and it will be y'all at the end." While Michael and I were in first and second place on the final lap, Dad was third and doing his best to stay there by blocking the cars behind him. When he crashed in Turn Four, I caught a glimpse of it in my rearview mirror but didn't realize how serious the situation was. I focused on racing to the finish line, in second place, behind my teammate.

They asked me if I wanted to see Dad's remains, but I didn't. I wanted to remember him when he was full of life. I'm glad we reached this special point, where I knew where I stood with him. Sometimes it was because of a big win like the Winston. But there were other times that meant a lot, moments between a father and his son. Early on, I started writing a monthly article for NASCAR.com. Nothing fancy, just little thoughts and observations about racing and life. A few months after winning the Winston, however, I put a lot of heart into a column about my dad and what he meant to me.

"I know a man whose hands are so callused that gloves aren't necessary. Once, while cutting down a tree, he cut the back of his hand to the bone with a chain saw. He didn't even stop to look until the job was done. He gained his knowledge in hard dirt and secondhand tools, from his toys as a child to the trucks he drove in his 20s. From that natural upbringing, he has an incredible sense of good and bad. He sees it before it sees him, in people, in anything imaginable ..."

I learned from him that you are the people you surround yourself with. I stopped spending so much time with those who do not improve me as a person. It takes a while to realize who they are, but I was learning. I took the column to my dad's office after writing it and read it to him. He just sat on his desk and listened."His friendship is the greatest gift you could ever obtain ..."

When I was finished reading, he walked over to me. "I know how kids feel about their parents," he said, "but this just makes it so clear." He was moved, in a quiet way.

Four months later, he and I raced for the last time in Daytona. Then, this past July, just four months after my dad's crash, I went back to that track for another race. I was nervous about it. I knew every move I made would be scrutinized. But one day shortly before the race, I took some friends to the track and drove around it. I stopped at Turn Four and had a moment there to think about what had happened. You know, it didn't rattle me at all to be there. It made me feel good; I was as close to my dad as ever. Then, that Saturday night, I went out there and won. My team and I whooped and hollered and stayed up all night. The other drivers all came to victory circle with bearhugs and best wishes for me. These were the same guys who raced as hard against my dad as he did against them. Through the years, they cursed him, tussled with him and laughed and carried on with him when the racing was done. "... He trusts only a few with this gift." I had earned it. I don't know if I'm on the same rung as my dad, but I'm climbing higher and higher.

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Earnhardt Jr. on ...

The holidays: "We're facing our first holidays without him. As Dad and I got more and more involved with racing and our sponsors and the other demands off the track, it became harder and harder for the whole family to get together. But we'd always manage to do it during the holidays. On New Year's Day, we'd have a traditional dinner to get the year off to a good start, with beans and greens and black-eyed peas. If you ate them, you were guaranteed success. And if I even thought about missing it, Dad would start hollerin'. 'Junior, if you don't come to this dinner you're gonna race like hell this year!' So I'd show up after that."

The autopsy photos: "My stepmom, Teresa, and I have made it clear we do not want autopsy photos of my dad released to the public. Anybody would have made the choice we made. We didn't feel these photos needed to be made public to help investigators understand what happened on the track. All kinds of other people wanted access to them -- Web sites and all -- and this would have given them the right to exploit Dad's death. It's kind of disgusting to all of us. Hell, I myself refused to take a look at my dad's remains after he died. That's not the way I wanted to remember him."

Wearing a head and neck restraint: "My dad's death changed a lot of my thinking. At least a month before NASCAR made it mandatory in October, I went ahead and started wearing the device. I was resisting it, but guys like Dale Jarrett and Terry Labonte asked me to wear it. They said, 'We like you, and we want you to be around for a while.' That was nice. And let me dispel some popular thinking about my dad: He would have worn it, too. A lot of people think he avoided it because of some macho thing. That's not true. He didn't wear it because, to him, it was still in the proving stages. This season, with the majority of drivers wearing it and saying it works, he would have been convinced. He was the Intimidator, but he wasn't reckless."

Grieving: "The outpouring from fans was immediate and intense. They meant the best in their hearts, but, honestly, a lot of things I saw and heard shook me up. Fans brought me things to sign, but it was more my dad's stuff than mine. It was too soon, too weird, to deal with. There's a point where you don't want to see his picture and face and likeness every place you turn. You want to deal with his passing in a gradual way. A lot of people reacted in just the opposite way, and that made it hard for me."

A book by 27-year-old Dale Earnhardt Jr. about his rookie season in NASCAR Winston Cup racing, Driver #8 (Warner, $23.95), is out Jan. 15.