Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Chase Elliott have more in common than most NASCAR drivers. They have incredible family legacies in racing, they were teammates at Hendrick Motorsports before Dale Jr. retired and they or someone in their family has been named NASCAR’s most popular driver every year since 1984, with the exception of just two seasons.
They were also both named for their NASCAR fathers, and neither goes by his first real name.
Now, longtime, diehard NASCAR fans probably know by now that Earnhardt’s full name is Ralph Dale Earnhardt Jr. And when Twitter expanded the number of characters allowed in a display name, he briefly added Ralph to his profile.
Elliott is in a similar situation, only we’re willing to bet most people don’t actually know his real name. Earnhardt said he didn’t even know it until this week when Elliott was a guest on his Dale Jr. Download podcast and only found out because of the No. 9 Chevrolet driver’s Wikipedia page.
Turns out, Chase’s full name is William Clyde Elliott II, named after his father, Bill Elliott, a.k.a. Awesome Bill from Dawsonville. And that was new information to Earnhardt, co-host Mike Davis and the rest of the podcast crew.
Here’s part of the conversation from the Dale Jr. Download:
Dale Jr.: If you go on Wikipedia, you learn a lot.
Davis: That’s what I should do. I should spend more time on Wikipedia. But we all agreed that Clyde Elliott’s a hell of a good racing name. You don’t like it I bet.
Elliott: No, I don’t mind Clyde. A lot of my friends call me Clyde, actually.
Davis: They do?
Elliott: Yeah
Davis: Well that’s where you [Dale Jr.] knew it then, right?
Dale Jr.: No, I went to Wikipedia.
Davis: I stand corrected.
Dale Jr.: I’m not in the “Calling Him Clyde” circle.
Earnhardt and Elliott have known each other for years. They were full-time teammates with Hendrick Motorsports in 2016 and 2017, and Elliott even won the second-tier XFINITY Series championship with Earnhardt’s team, JR Motorsports.
But all this time, Dale Jr. had no idea Elliott sometimes goes by Clyde.
Elliott went on to explain that fellow driver Ryan Blaney, one of his best friends in NASCAR, occasionally calls him Clyde, along with some people he plays video games with.
It is a great name, and the Dale Jr. Download crew pushed for the 23-year-old driver to race under Clyde Elliott should he ever decide to return to lade-model racing. They also just really want a shirt with that name on it.
