Kenny Wallace shared why drivers did not retaliate against Dale Earnhardt despite him routinely dumping them.

Wallace shared his thoughts during the most recent episode of Herm & Schrader, “We didn’t mind the pecking order. We knew Earnhardt was the man. Rusty Wallace says it best. Rusty says, ‘Every time I tried to wreck somebody, I wrecked myself.’ Earnhardt had such good car control that he was so comfortable in that race car that he could just wreck you and think it was funny. We were race car drivers, but there weren’t very many drivers that had that much talent.”

Wallace then pointed to Harry Gant as another talented driver who could do it when he recalled how he got to his bumper and slowly moved him up the track in turn 3 at Bristol. He then parlayed that point into Mid-Atlantic and North Carolina drivers such as Earnhardt growing up on short tracks like Hickory where they honed that race craft that allowed them to be able to make those moves.

Next, he reiterated his previous point, “We didn’t mind Earnhardt being the man. He was the man. We’d take these group photos and Rusty would rush to Earnhardt’s side because he wanted to be next to Earnhardt in the pictures. Nowadays people are very resentful. Now, everyone is fighting and clamoring, ‘I am the greatest. I am the greatest!’ Back in our day, we knew Earnhardt was the greatest. Listen, he trained us. He looked in our mirror, here he comes, we’re pulling over.”

“Later in Earnhardt’s career he really didn’t have to wreck nobody because he trained us,” Wallace shared.

Kenny Schrader also shared why he did not give it back to Earnhardt, “I got wrecked by him way too many times and I never paid him back. I never paid him back. I probably should’ve. Petry begged me one time not to wreck him and Dale at Sonoma was in the hauler when I got there. Should’ve, didn’t. I only paid a few people back ever. That’s just the way—. I got one back a couple of weeks ago.”

“I just didn’t,” Schrader added. “I just didn’t. Should’ve.”

Wallace and Schrader are not the first ones to comment on why drivers did not retaliate. Dale Jarrett shared, “Myself and most others were on the wrong end of his bumper a number of times. But he had this way about it that was incredible. Usually when you went to talk to him, you’d be so mad, and it almost seemed like before the end of your conversation, that at least 50 percent of what happened was your fault.”

“He just had this way of making you seem like he really hadn’t done anything wrong,” Jarrett added. “He never really apologized for anything, not with any incident I had with him. There were times that you could get him back, but the scoreboard never evened up. He’s just a hard-nosed racer. A lot of people you didn’t know what you were going to get week to week and track to track, but with Dale Earnhardt, you knew what was coming.”

Jeff Gordon said something similar in 2010, “Dale didn’t say, ‘Mess with me, I’ll mess with you.’ He just messed with you to do it and then laughed about it later and say, ‘Hate that happened!’ and put his arm around you. He was so good about it. He wrecked me once at Phoenix when I was a rookie and racing the hell out of him on the outside for 10th place. I was so mad and then I looked at it on TV and I thought, ‘Man, I don’t know. Did he wreck me? I think I came down on him a little bit.’ He was so good at knowing how to make it so close, you weren’t sure if he wrecked you or not. But he was just one of those guys who could get away with it for some reason, and it didn’t seem to cost him the championship.”

In regards to Wallace’s point about the other drivers eventually being trained, Earnhardt’s crew chief Kirk Shelmerdine said it was part of the plan, “It was always us against the big teams. (The) controversy was all great. It was part of the persona. The more stuff he got into, that was better. We supported him. If he backed into somebody in the parking lot with the van, it was their damn fault for parking there. We had each other on anything. It was the game plan. We just had the attitude the more aggressive he was and more afraid they were of him, the better. We tried to back that all we could.”

NEXT: Kenny Wallace Reveals What NASCAR Thinks About Jeff Gluck’s Race Polls