Dale Earnhardt Jr. pleased with direction of Hendrick Motorsports team
Hendrick Motorsports driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. in 19th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings after 17 races this season. // David Griffin, NASCAR Scene
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Dale Earnhardt Jr. isn’t ready to proclaim that his No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports team has suddenly found the missing link after recent improvements following a crew-chief swap.
However, NASCAR’s most popular driver does believe that the group is on the upswing heading into Saturday night’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway. And he hopes the team, which has posted three top-15s since Lance McGrew replaced Tony Eury Jr. as crew chief five races ago, can build confidence for 2010.
“Making the Chase [For The Sprint Cup] is a goal, but at the end of the year when you’re done racing at Homestead and you run the last lap and you get out of the car, what kind of feeling do you want to have?” Earnhardt Jr. said Friday at DIS. “The one I want to have is that we’ve fixed it, that we’ve got something we can feel good about and work on and get all our stuff ready for next year and feel like we can go in and get the job done. Right now, that’s not how we feel as a team.
“We’ve got a little bit more to go, we’ve got to get a little bit better so at the end of the year we want to feel like we are. We want to have some wins, we want to have some consistency and at the end of the year [be] going, ‘All right, we can’t wait till next year; it’s going to be a good deal.’”
Sitting 19th in the standings, Earnhardt Jr. all be ruled out a rally into Chase contention over the last nine races of NASCAR’s regular season. To be eligible for the final 10-race championship-determining segment, Earnhardt Jr. would need to leapfrog seven drivers to move into 12th, the last available Chase spot.
“We have quite a ways to go to be able to make the Chase,” he said. “It’s going to be a real challenge for us to make the Chase. We’re still mathematically in it, but we’re not trying to catch just one guy that we’re 200 and some points behind, we’re trying to catch four or five guys, and it’s unrealistic to expect all them guys to have enough trouble and for us to top-10 them to death.
“So we’ve got to run better, and even though we have improved, it seems, we still need to obviously get better to be able to compete. Being able to drive up into the top three last week [at New Hampshire] was a lot of fun, but we need to be able to stay there once we get there.”
Earnhardt Jr. seems overall fairly pleased with the relationship between he and McGrew, the interim crew chief who replaced Eury after a 40th-place finish at Charlotte in May.
“I’ve been more comfortable in the car,” said Earnhardt Jr., who has just one top-five and three top-10s in 17 races in 2009. “I’ve liked what I’ve felt from in the race cars over the last couple weeks and Lance and I seem to communicate well. He’s very excited and we are able to kind of root each other on throughout the race, it seems, and the team has got a great attitude and it seems to get better with each run that we seem to show a little more promise. We’re working. Everybody is really working so hard.
“I remember in 2004, even as recently as last year, I don’t remember working this hard and running better than we’re running now. Once we get back to where we want to be, we will appreciate that much more than we probably did in the past.”
Earnhardt Jr., who hasn’t won a race since Michigan in June 2008, says NASCAR’s new car has made it more difficult to recover after falling behind on setups and overall preparation.
“You used to be able to rebound in a week or two, but if you get behind in this sport now, there’s a chance you may not be able to recover for some time,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “It definitely has been a trying time, and it was really hard and our team was really, really low, but just knowing where we were and how I felt two months ago to now, I can definitely say it’s a big difference for us.
“There’s no one person or one thing that really deserves credit. We just made a couple changes and everything seems to be moving in the right direction, so we’ll just try to keep it up.”
