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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Welcome Home, Junior
In his first season at Hendrick Motorsports, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has found the home he was looking for...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted July 04, 2008   Daytona Beach, Fla.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. has found a happy home at Hendrick Motorsports. (Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images Photo)
Dale Earnhardt Jr. talks with teammate Jeff Gordon in the garage area. (Jim McIsaac/Getty Images Photo)

In his first season at Hendrick Motorsports, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has found the home he was looking for.

Earnhardt, who will appear live on SPEED’s NASCAR RaceDay on Saturday, has spent his first year with team simply concentrating on being a race-car driver and not having to deal with the emotional baggage and expectations that came from working for his stepmother, Teresa Earnhardt, at Dale Earnhardt Inc.

The results, on track and off, have been encouraging for the third-generation racer. Earnhardt enters Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway third in the NASCAR Sprint Cup points standings, 144 markers behind Kyle Busch, the man he replaced at Hendrick.

And while Earnhardt has not come close to matching Busch’s victory total so far in 2008, on balance, he’s had an exceptionally strong season. Earnhardt won the season-opening Budweiser Shootout exhibition race and last month broke a winless streak in points races that stretched back more than two years with a victory in Michigan. An even more telling statistic, perhaps, is that for virtually all season, Earnhardt has ranked higher in points than his high-profile Hendrick teammates, Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, who between them have six NASCAR Sprint Cup championships.

All of that has Earnhardt loving life these days and convinced he made the right decision to move to Hendrick. “I'm real happy,” Earnhardt said Thursday at Daytona International Speedway. “I landed a hell of a good job with a good company. Got a good program, great crew chief, really innovative. He's got other great crew chiefs around him to work with, learn and feed off of. We're just trying to be a really — you know, just trying to be a sponge the whole time, learning as much as we can from the other teams in our organization. I feel fortunate, really fortunate.”

Without question, Earnhardt and his crew chief Tony Eury Jr. now have resources at Hendrick Motorsports that they never dreamed of at DEI, and that makes their jobs easier, too, because they don’t have the inconsistency and reliability issues that plagued Earnhardt in his last two years at DEI.

“I know that when we show up to the race track I'm gonna have a great chance to run good,” said Earnhardt. “That used to worry me to death, like not knowing how we were going to be when we rolled off the trailer because you never knew we were so hot and cold. It's more miserable obviously to be cold all the time but to be hot and cold was pretty stressful too. The struggles at DEI were such a heavy burden and I feel a whole lot more calm and relaxed.”

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Tom Jensen

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