CUP: Earnhardt Jr. Marks Two Years Since Win

Sprint Cup

CUP: Earnhardt Jr. Marks Two Years Since Win

Dale Earnhardt Jr. says anniversary doesn’t make his streak worse...

Bob Pockrass | http://www.scenedaily.com | Posted June 12, 2010 Brooklyn, MI

Dale Earnhardt Jr.in the garage during practice for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips 400 at Michigan International Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Dale Earnhardt Jr. has talked a great deal about his losing streak, so now that it is officially two years old doesn’t make it sting any more than it has throughout the 71-race skid.

PDF > STARTING LINEUP BY ROW: HELUVA GOOD! 400 - MICHIGAN INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY
LINK > QUALIFYING RESULTS: HELUVA GOOD! 400 - MICHIGAN INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY

Earnhardt Jr.’s last win came at the June race at Michigan International Speedway in 2008.

“I didn’t even think about it until y’all asked Mark [Martin] about it,” Earnhardt Jr. said after qualifying Friday at Michigan International Speedway. “It’s a long time, but what are you going to do? I’ll be around for a long enough time hopefully to get a few more wins.

“Whenever that happens, it happens. We’re starving for one and working hard to get there. But we’ve still got to improve on our team yet we’ve got 42 other guys out there that we can’t control. It’s pretty difficult for us to win right now.”

Earnhardt Jr. will start 27th in the Heluva Good! Dips 400 on Sunday. He had a decent practice session where he was 13th and is optimistic about his car in race conditions.

“It’s underestimated by so many people how difficult it is to win these races and how little things interrupt,” Martin said when asked about Earnhardt Jr.’s losing streak. “They have run good enough to win some races last year and they’ve run well in some races this year, many of them have been foiled by one little issue here, one little issue there.

“They are dug in and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. is driving, in my eyes, he’s driving harder than any race car driver out there. I can see it clear as day how bad he wants it when I’m on the race track with him. All the stars just haven’t lined up to work out yet.”

Joking that Martin has to say that because they’re Hendrick Motorsports teammates, Earnhardt Jr. said he, indeed, is working hard.

“Those comments mean the world to me because I do know in my heart that I do work every corner for what it’s worth,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “It’s really difficult to see that from a thousand yards away, how much somebody is working.

“But when you’re out on that race track, in and around somebody and behind somebody, you can actually see it. And so I feel like I’m sure he is having to be positive due to our relationship as co-worker, but at the same time I feel like he feels honest because I do work really hard out there. I drove last week as hard as I could every lap because I knew we were really close on the car.”

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But in the end, Earnhardt Jr. wasn’t close to the front last week at Pocono. His team’s pit strategy ended up having him pit later than many others and he wound up 19th. He dropped to 16th in the standings and is 87 points behind 12th with 12 races left before the Chase For The Sprint Cup field is set.

“I ran 10th all day and I felt good and really liked the car,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “Considering how the last month has been, we definitely were having a pretty good run. But at the end of the race, I lost all my track position on pit road and it’s hard as hell to pass there and we didn’t do ourselves any favors.”

Earnhardt Jr. has finished worse than 13th in each of the last five races and it seems as if crew chief Lance McGrew’s pit strategy has backfired more often than not in the last couple of months.

“I’m not upset with the fact that we’ve made some calls that didn’t work out for us,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I as a driver know that I can always improve for this team. If I was sitting there with a perfect record on my end, maybe I would have some ground to point fingers.

“I think we as a team, we’ve just got to keep getting better.”

Earnhardt Jr. said he is standing behind McGrew’s calls.

“With everything that I’ve been through … since I won my last race, I can honestly tell you with no [b.s] that this weekend, I will get in the car Sunday and I firmly believe in what Lance is going to do, what my team is going to do, the information that he is getting from his engineers, what he hears from the other three teammates and their teams,” Earnhardt Jr. said.

“I firmly am behind that and trust them in our effort. If I feel I see a weakness in the team, it bugs the [crap] out of me. I don’t see a weakness there. You make the right call or the wrong call and you don’t know at the time which one you’re making until the race is over.”

It was pit strategy that won Earnhardt Jr. his last race as he played the fuel-mileage car to capture the Michigan victory two years ago.

His car for this weekend has potential, he said.

“We worked on the car in race trim when we first got here and felt like we had a really good car but there was really a lot of grip in the track in the morning,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I like the balance of the car.

“We went into qualifying trim and ran an OK lap but the car wasn’t glued and gripped up into the race track like it had been, like it normally feels in qualifying trim. It actually felt better in race trim than in qualifying trim. We went out there and ran just now and it really was about the same. It wasn’t very good. But it felt like what we unloaded this morning felt pretty good to me.”

PDF > STARTING LINEUP BY ROW: HELUVA GOOD! 400 - MICHIGAN INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY
LINK > QUALIFYING RESULTS: HELUVA GOOD! 400 - MICHIGAN INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY

SceneDaily.com • NASCAR to evaluate whether Pocono needs catch fence in non-grandstand areas