Darrell Waltrip to end NASCAR broadcasting career at Sonoma Raceway's Toyota/Save Mart 350

Darrell Waltrip made it 19 years as a NASCAR on Fox analyst, a storied career that almost didn’t get off the ground after one fateful Saturday in the 1980s.

“My start to being an analyst on TV was a little bit on the rough side,” he recalled.

Waltrip, still at the height of his racing career, was in the middle of his first broadcast ever with racing broadcast legend Ken Squire, calling what is now equivalent to an Xfinity series race sometime on a Saturday at Daytona.

It was DW’s first major broadcast. He had done some small TV work, but nothing of that magnitude to that point. During the final lap, Waltrip recalled a pair of cars going into the third turn and crashing, then another car T-boning one of the vehicles that had crashed.

“Of course, me, working around cars and crews in the pits and all that, when that happened I said ‘Oh s---!’” Waltrip said. “Just like that. It just came out because it was a huge hit.”

Waltrip recalled the look he got from Squire - it wasn’t good.

“Oh my God, your TV career is over before it even gets started,” he recalled thinking. “And I thought it was. I thought, ‘Man, this is the worse thing I ever done, I said a bad word on TV and I’m in trouble. And I was in trouble.”

Luckily for Waltrip, he got a pat on the back and a free pass for being a first-timer in the booth, and another chance that’s allowed him a second career in an industry he excelled at for the better part of 20 years. He called his final NASCAR race Sunday at the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway.

Waltrip became an anchor on Fox NASCAR broadcasts, well known for exclaiming “Boogity, Boogity, Boogity, let’s go racin’, boys!” as the green flag drops. When a NASCAR fan heard that, or even his voice on Saturday night or Sunday, they knew they had tuned in to watch a Cup series race.

The “natural progression” from the track to the booth, as he calls it, started when Waltrip recognized during his racing career that the media can be used to deliver a message to the guys in charge.

“I found out that the best way to get a message to Bill France Jr. in NASCAR was through the media,” he said. “Say something to a reporter, he’d put it in a newspaper, they would read it and they would receive your message.”

Waltrip thought he would originally call it quits in 2017, but Fox Sports and Waltrip ultimately decided to wait until 2019.

“I had originally thought 2017 because I love the number 17. I had won the Daytona 500 in car No. 17, my name has 17 letters, my house is on lot 17,” he said.

He and Fox Sports executives had discussed his retirement for a few years now, but chose to wait after Jeff Gordon joined the broadcast and it was agreed leaving commentator Mike Joy with two rookies in the booth might be too much.

“I stayed on and Jeff and I have developed such a great relationship and we have so much fun, I was thinking this might last a little bit longer, but it’s time for me to step aside and let someone else a little bit younger and ?maybe with a different perspective have the kind of fun I’ve had, because I’ve had a ball doing this,” Waltrip said.

Broadcasting also became a family pursuit, with Waltrip’s younger brother Michael also commentating, reporting and analyzing for Fox Sports as well. The younger Waltrip has always looked to big brother Darrell to see how he handles things with the fans and the media.

“I felt like he was a good template for me to try and follow and it’s worked out well,” Michael Waltrip said.

The two have done the occasional race together. Michael said broadcasting with his brother is fun.

“He’s always entertaining, always insightful and got a good story to tell,” Michael said.

Darrell remembered things a bit differently.

“Very difficult. I’m 16 years older than him and my point of view wasn’t always necessarily his point of view,” Darrell said. “Sometimes we would get in an argument in the booth of who was right and who was wrong. I love my brother … but I’m not sure we should be working together.”

It hasn’t always been fun and games for DW, and no race was a bigger example of that than the 2001 Daytona 500, Waltrip’s first major TV broadcast and arguably the darkest day in the sport’s history. Michael Waltrip won the race - his first career Cup victory, in the sport’s biggest event - but it was overshadowed by the death of Dale Earnhardt from a crash in between turns 3 and 4.

Heading to Rockingham the next week wasn’t easy.

“It was hard to do,” Waltrip said. “It was sad to go to the next race and think about what had happened the week before, but it wasn’t near as hard as on us as it was on that race team - trying to decide if they should race or not race, Richard Childress and his crew thinking about whether they should race or not. It was a tough time for everybody.”

The wounds of that fateful day eventually healed. DW became a fan favorite for nearly two decades. And NASCAR eventually moved on from that day.

And 19 years later, Waltrip had his swan song in Sonoma after a successful broadcasting career. Though he has no immediate plans for what he’ll do next, he said has always been like that.

“I think that’s kind of the way racers normally operate - you can’t plan too far ahead because you don’t know what the future is going to be,” he said. “Yesterday is a history, tomorrow is a mystery, you got to live in the present.”

Waltrip dropped one last “Boogity, Boogity, Boogity” - without any expletives - when the green flag dropped for last weekend’s race at Sonoma Raceway.