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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Junior Looking To Improve On Road Courses
Dale Earnhardt Jr. qualified 24th on Friday at Infineon Raceway...
Kenny Bruce  | http://www.scenedaily.com  |  Posted June 19, 2010   Sonoma, CA
Dale Earnhardt Jr. is no fan of road-course racing. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Dale Earnhardt Jr. knows what it takes to run fast at Infineon Raceway. What he isn’t so sure about is what it takes to win on the winding, 11-turn road course.

“You don’t race cars, you don’t race corners individually, you put the corners together in a series to make it fast,” Earnhardt Jr. said Friday after qualifying 24th for Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350.

“You put corners together like a puzzle to make that stretch [of track] quick, which completes the lap. And the guy that can continuously do that without any regard to what’s happening around him on the race track is the [guy to beat].”

Earnhardt Jr. has a forgettable record at Infineon, and the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series’ other road-course stop, Watkins Glen International. His average finishing position in 10 career starts at Infineon, where he has failed to register a single top-10, is 21.4. He has three top-10s at The Glen, the most recent of those coming in 2005.

So what gives? Aside from his general preference for the series’ more common ovals, that is – “I raced ovals all my life not to make it to Formula 1,” he joked shortly after his qualifying run.

“I guess my biggest problem is I get to racing everybody around me,” the Hendrick Motorsports driver said. “The guy in front of me, I want to catch him and the next corner, I drive into [it] like it’s a short track, trying to roll in on him and get in the throttle sooner, and then we’ve got another corner coming up and I’m totally off line for it and I’m slow. Everything I’ve gained, he gets back.

"We sit there and do that [crap] all day long, all of us back there in 20th, 15th, whatever.”

Earnhardt Jr. isn’t alone when it comes to coming up short on the series’ two road courses. Four-time champion Jimmie Johnson, who will go off second in Sunday’s race, is likewise still seeking his first road-course win.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. navigates the Infineon Raceway road course on Friday. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

“But he’s been fast,” Earnhardt Jr. said of Johnson. “You have to put it together, put yourself in the right position in these races. That’s about as far as I can go on it, because that’s about as far as I’ve gotten at this place.

“I can’t sit here and tell you how to go about getting in the top 10 here because I ain’t ever done it. I’ve either run into the side of somebody racing too hard in the middle of the race with a car that should have finished in the top 10, or you’re getting stacked up in the slow corners and get run over, mixed up in something like that.

“Guys that run good are guys that aren’t in that stuff somehow. They’re either in front of it or their strategy has put them behind it or whatever. But you never see the typical [Tony] Stewarts or [Jeff] Gordons getting in stackups and foolish pileups that happen all the time.”

A broken gear during Friday’s lone practice at Infineon slowed any progress the team had hoped to make, but Earnhardt Jr. said the team still has setup notes from a year ago, when he ran in the top 10 before running into trouble, that it can fall back on if necessary. But that, he said, is more of a last option than a preferred choice.

“We’re going to try some things [in practice Saturday] … we’ve got a setup sort of in our back pocket that we know can run a top-10 if the driver does everything right,” he said. “But [they’re] just trying to help me out a little bit, trying to get something a little better there. But we’ve been unsuccessful so far.”

Although he was burned in a fire while racing at Infineon in a sports-car race in 2004, Earnhardt Jr. says that incident hasn’t affected his stock-car performance at the track, noting that “I’ve been running that way since I got here.”

His aim for now, he said, is for small improvements to his road-course record.

“Hopefully we can improve from mediocre to subpar this weekend,” he said.

Told that subpar would be a step backward, Earnhardt Jr. replied: “Is it? Subpar is worse? What’s better than mediocre without really giving myself too much credit?”

Average, perhaps, he was told.

“I’m already average,” he said. “I’m average now.”

SceneDaily.com • Erik Spanberg: Tracks, TV networks ready for big boost from NASCAR return of Danica Patrick

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Kenny Bruce

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