Dale Earnhardt Jr. was driving the No. 8 Budweiser Chevy in 2004. It appeared to be headed to a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship. (PHOTO: LAT Photographic))
Maybe it’s because I’m getting old or because I dwell too much on the past, but I can’t help but think of the ironies in the Carl Edwards-Brad Keselowski situation at Atlanta Motor Speedway last Sunday.
It seems like just a few races back that Edwards was involved in another late-race run-in at Atlanta.
It was back in the fall of 2004. Lap 312 of 325. At that point, Dale Earnhardt Jr., the man who plucked Keselowski from the ruins of a failed Nationwide Series effort and made him a star, was on pace to win the Sprint Cup championship in the first year of the Chase.
Kurt Busch, the latest Atlanta winner and Earnhardt’s main rival back in ’04, had blown an engine early, leaving Earnhardt in position to take a huge points lead. Earnhardt was on pace to finish second or third in the race.
Enter Carl Edwards, then making his 10th career Cup start and in a similar position to Keselowski today – a talented, aggressive young driver trying to make a name for himself.
As the two entered Turn 3, they crashed. Earnhardt wound up 33rd, and his best chance to date of winning a championship was lost. That wreck was a lot like the one early in last Sunday’s race at Atlanta, the one that apparently got Edwards so steamed that he went back out and wrecked Keselowski, sending him flying into the fence.
Imagine how much simpler everyone’s life would be if Keselowski had given Edwards a break at that point.
Likewise, imagine how different NASCAR and Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Inc. would look today had Edwards cut Earnhardt a break and the two of them had made it through Turn 3 back in ‘04.
I asked Earnhardt last year where that moment ranks among the significant milestones of his career.
“When you look back over your career, that definitely sticks out in the top five,” he said, adding that if he’d come through that one corner unscathed it would have led to “a whole new outcome for our team and the championship that year, not only that year but in the future.”
His uncle and then-crew chief, Tony Eury Sr., agreed that a lot changed that fall afternoon in Atlanta.
