The Penny That’s Still on the Dashboard

Not once in nineteen tries. In 1986, he ran out of gas with three laps to go. In 1990, he ran over debris on the final lap and blew a tire while leading — handing the win to Derrike Cope. In 1993, Dale Jarrett beat him. In 1997, he flipped his car on the backstretch, climbed out, demanded the wrecker put it back down, and drove the mangled thing to the finish.

For twenty years, the Daytona 500 was the one race that wouldn’t let Dale Earnhardt be Dale Earnhardt.

One of them was a six-year-old girl named Wessa Miller. She had spina bifida — a condition so severe that doctors said she wouldn’t live past age five. Her family had driven more than 700 miles from Phyllis, Kentucky, because Wessa had one wish: to meet Dale Earnhardt.

She brought him two gifts. A hunting video, because she knew he loved to hunt. And a penny she’d rubbed for good luck.

She told him he was going to win the Daytona 500 tomorrow.

McReynolds watched him dig through it, confused. “I’m like, ‘What in the world is he doing?’” he later recalled. “Finally I walk over there. ‘Dude, what are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’ve got something I’ve got to do. Where’s the yellow glue?’”

The glue was a thick orange adhesive the crew called “monkey snot.” It was meant for weather stripping, not dashboard décor. Earnhardt smeared it on the penny and pressed it to the dash of the black No. 3 Chevrolet. The penny kept sticking to his thumb instead. He used more glue. Then more. By the time it finally held, his hands were covered.

McReynolds couldn’t help but smile. The Intimidator, hands covered in glue, had finally gotten the damn penny to stick.

After twenty years — after the blown tires and the empty gas tanks and the wrecks and the near-misses — there was nothing left to go wrong.

Dale Earnhardt won the Daytona 500.

What happened next is the part most people remember, even if they don’t remember the details. As Earnhardt drove slowly down pit road toward Victory Lane, something spontaneous happened. Crew members from other teams — not his team, every team — walked out and lined up along the wall. Men in different colored firesuits, who had spent the last three hours trying to beat him, stood there waiting to shake his hand or slap his fender.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. later said it was the image that stayed with him most. “Nobody’s ever received that type of pat on the back,” he said. “Pretty much the entire industry dropped that competitive guard and just went over and said, ‘Man, I’m happy for you.’”

Earnhardt did donuts in the infield grass. He pulled into Victory Lane and told reporters, “The Daytona 500 is ours. We won it, we won it, we won it!”

Later, in the press box, he pulled a stuffed monkey off his shoulder and tossed it across the room. “Finally got that monkey off my back.”

Less than three years later, on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, Dale Earnhardt was killed on the same track.

But there’s one penny that still matters.

It’s sitting on the dashboard of a black Chevrolet Monte Carlo in the Richard Childress Racing Museum in Welcome, North Carolina. If you look carefully, you can still see it — small, copper, glued down with orange adhesive that has long since dried.

Wessa Miller, the girl who wasn’t supposed to live past five, graduated from high school in 2011. Her family opened a small country store back in Kentucky and named it Wessa’s: Home of the Lucky Penny.

The Daytona 500 runs again this Sunday.

And the penny’s still on the dashboard.

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Copyright © 2026 Anthony S. Owens. All rights reserved.