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CUP: Junior Ready To Roll
Written by: Tom Jensen   
01/10/2009
Nashville, TN
 
Dale Earnhardt Jr. said meeting the fans at Sprint Sound and Speed Festival helps him feel like the 2009 racing season is ready to begin. (Photo: Steve Green/Getty Images for NASCAR) ยป More Photos

Dale Earnhardt Jr. said Saturday that the Sprint Sound & Speed Presented by SunTrust festival in Nashville is the perfect way to get ready to begin the long, 36-race odyssey that is the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup season.

Earnhardt was in Nashville Saturday for the annual racing and country music event, which benefits the Victory Junction Gang Camp and the Country Music Hall of Fame.

“The fun part for me is that this is the first interaction with the race fans in several months,” said Earnhardt, who is perennially NASCAR’s most popular driver. “And they’ll tell you how excited they are about the season. They’ll tell you about how they want you to have a good year. They’ll tell you about how they met you last year, or whatever. It sort of gets you back in the feeling of going back to the race track, getting you excited about going back to the race track. That’s the funnest part for me.”

TOM JENSEN BLOG: Nashville Cats

Over the winter, Earnhardt took his uncles, Robert and Jimmy Gee, and his cousin and crew chief, Tony Eury Jr., deer hunting in Missouri, but now it’s time to get back to business. “You sit around and you’ve got a couple of months off and you really get used to being a bum and then this really starts to bring you back to getting to the race track,” Earnhardt said of the Sprint event. “I’m excited about going racing in Daytona, but this is really a little bit of a tease, you know? You’re kind of ready to get there now. Coming out here and doing this, obviously, you get to meet some new people from the country and western world and the music world. You get to see some old friends that you haven’t seen all winter.”

But the big thing, Earnhardt said, is the fan interaction. “Just hearing the fans telling you about how excited they are, sort of gets you excited,” he said.

PHOTO GALLERY: Sound and Speed Fan Festival in Nashville

Earnhardt said he’s ready for the 2009 season and he thinks the absence of testing will play into the strengths of
Hendrick Motorsports, with its vast engineering and financial resources. “We have all the technology, all the things, all the engineers, all the stuff we need to really simulate testing, have an idea of what the cars are going to do, how they’re going to react, so we should show up in the ballpark,” said Earnhardt. “It should be an advantage for us, due to the technology and personnel we have that can simulate and guesstimate where we are and get us in the ballpark when we show up at the race track.”

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or Speed Channel

Tom Jensen is the Senior NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED,” and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the President of the National Motorsports Press Association. Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com. Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to

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