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Dale Earnhardt, Jr. fans got their wish at Michigan. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images) ยป More Photos
The entire Earnhardt Nation can finally exhale: Dale Earnhardt Jr. is back in victory lane.
As every NASCAR fan with a pulse knows by now, Earnhardt broke his 76-race winless streak Sunday at Michigan International Speedway, claiming victory in the LifeLock 400 while coasting on fumes under yellow.
That Earnhardt won should not have been a surprise to anyone. The way he has run this season, it was never a question of if he’d put Rick Hendrick’s No. 88 Chevrolet in victory lane, only how soon and how often. After all, Earnhardt rolled off the trailer at Daytona in February and won both the Budweiser Shootout and his Gatorade Duel 150 qualifying race. That should have announced Junior’s presence with authority, as it were, but his passionate partisans were unsatisfied and immediately began wondering when the third-generation racer was going to win a points race.
Methinks they done protesteth too much. Way too much, actually.
All you had to do was look at the results over the first 14 races of the season, when Earnhardt scored six top-five and 10 top-10 finishes to put him third in points. A more salient point, perhaps, is that he was consistently ahead of his Hendrick Motorsports teammates in points. Sooner or later, he knew he was going to win. So did his crew chief, Tony Eury Jr. and his car owner and the whole team. When you finish in the top five in nearly half
Alas, the millions of Earnhardt fans are a bit of a demanding lot. I can’t tell you how many e-mails I’ve gotten asking the same question: “When’s Junior going to win.”
My answer pretty consistently has been the same: “Soon.” And now that Junior has finally won a points race, it would not surprise me in the least if he ended the season with five of six victories. For that matter, it wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up with the championship, either.
We’re only 15 races into a 36-race season and already there have been four drivers who’ve shown they could win it all this year and a couple of more are sort of waiting in the wings, poised to turn the wick up at championship time.
Earnhardt certainly is one of those guys, as is the mercurial Kyle Busch, already a four-time winner in the first 15 points races of the season. Kasey Kahne, who won at Charlotte and Pocono and finished second to Earnhardt at Michigan is just starting to come into his own. Then there’s Carl Edwards, who has won three races of his own so far. And one can’t discount Tony Stewart, who’s about due to go on his annual summer tear, or two-time defending series champ Jimmie Johnson, arguably the strongest clutch racer the sport has ever seen.
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