Dale Earnhardt Jr. expects to be fast at Atlanta, where he won his last Sprint Cup pole
Dale Earnhardt Jr. is looking forward to this weekend's race at Atlanta. // Jim Fluharty, NASCAR Illustrated
Dale Earnhardt Jr. will return to the track where he won his last pole as the Sprint Cup Series visits Atlanta Motor Speedway for this weekend’s Emory Healthcare 500.
Earnhardt Jr. sat on the pole for the March race at Atlanta. He was running sixth during the race when he pitted under green for what he thought was a wheel or tire issue. The crew couldn’t find anything wrong with the tires and Earnhardt Jr. returned to the race 31st in the running order and salvaged a 15th-place finish.
He won’t have the same car for Atlanta as crew chief Lance McGrew has a new car ready for the Hendrick Motorsports driver this weekend.
“We laid down a fast lap there last time, and I had great engine,” Earnhardt Jr. said in a prerace news release. “We have a good starting point for practice on Saturday.”
Sprint Cup teams will practice from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. EDT and 1:45 p.m.-2:30 p.m. Saturday but the race won’t start until 7:30 p.m. Sunday.
“Atlanta can get pretty hairy pretty fast,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “It will be fast for the first several laps on tires and then they’ll fall off enough to where you can try different things and try different lines.
“We’ll see some incredible lap times on new tires late in the race. It can be hard to get a feel for the track because we practice during the day and race at night.”
In this race a year ago, Earnhardt Jr. started 31st and finished 17th. It was the first time that Cup teams had raced a full event under the lights at the track.
“It’s valuable having that one year of notes to go back and look at because the track temp during practice is going to be drastically different than what it is going to be during the race,” McGrew said. “The fact that you have those notes and go back and look at the changes we made for different conditions – that’s pretty valuable information.”
The other valuable information the team has is the information of what worked well in March.
“The balance of the car was really good,” McGrew said. “We’ll start in race trim for first practice and when we switch to qualifying trim we’ll go straight to that setup and we’ll tune on it from there to see how much the track conditions actually have changed.
“We feel like we have a lot better package – the car makes more downforce. We have a more fundamental idea of what’s going on with the packages we are running and, hopefully, we can duplicate that effort.”
Atlanta historically has been good for Earnhardt Jr. as he has two poles, one win and eight top-five finishes on the 1.54-mile track. He has led 632 laps there.
“It’s a place where power really shows up and you’ve got to have good aero balance,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I like Atlanta because you can hunt around for different lines – it’s a driver’s track.”
Earnhardt Jr. is 18th in the standings and 170 points out of 12th with two races left before the 12-driver Chase For The Sprint Cup field is determined.
“Our goals haven’t changed,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “All season long we have tried to win races and run as well as we are capable of running. Whether you are 10 points or 1,000 points behind, you don’t approach the weekend any differently.”
