Dale Earnhardt Jr. pleased with qualifying run at Las Vegas, determined to bounce back from setback at California
Dale Earnhardt Jr. was pleased with his team's qualifying effort Friday at Las Vegas. // Sam Cranston, NASCAR Illustrated
LAS VEGAS – Dale Earnhardt Jr. said his team suffered a setback last week at Auto Club Speedway, and the first step toward bouncing back was to concentrate on qualifying during practice Friday for the Shelby American at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Earnhardt Jr., who will start the race Sunday in fourth, was happy with his qualifying run, and crew chief Lance McGrew figured that if practice gets rained out Saturday (there’s a 90 percent chance of rain), the team can lean on their Hendrick Motorsports teammates for information.
“If it rains tomorrow, we can go off what they learned,” Earnhardt Jr. said after his qualifying lap. “Our car is obviously pretty good. We should be pretty proud of what we’ve done and accomplished so far and I feel pretty good about our chances.
“Sometimes we show up in race trim and sometimes we show up in qualifying trim. I don’t discuss that with Lance. It’s whatever he thinks we should do.”
Last week, axle and drive-plate problems resulted in Earnhardt Jr. spending several laps in the garage and finishing 32nd. That dropped him from second in the standings to 16th after two races.
“We’re just trying to turn our team around,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “Last week was a little bit of a setback and very frustrating for us. But we feel pretty good, even after we got the car fixed, about how it ran when we got back out there.
“We feel like we’re doing better. I feel last week, we really didn’t get to show how much we changed the team. But I think over the next several weeks, maybe we can be able to do that.”
That process started with focusing on qualifying Friday at Las Vegas. Last week, Earnhardt Jr. qualified 27th.
“We qualify like crap all the time, and I’m sick of it,” McGrew said. “In California, we were going to do nothing but qualifying runs and the weather talked me into doing race runs and then it turned out Saturday was fine so we qualified like crap for no reason.
“Here, I know the weather doesn’t look good tomorrow but it is the desert and they’re not really good at predicting precipitation out here so I decided we would work on qualifying runs.”
The plan at least produced dividends early in the Vegas weekend.
“Last week, we were in race trim and then actually tripped and struggled to try to get the car into qualifying trim before the end of practice,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “We got nothing done, nothing accomplished and then we had the brake problem.
“It was just a cluster from the very end of practice on and we just wanted to avoid that. If it does rain, the car is good. This gives us a lot of information.”
McGrew said if practice gets rained out Saturday, Earnhardt Jr. likes a setup similar to Gordon.
“We’ve come a long way with our simulation programs,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “So it’s pretty easy to predict where we need to be. Balance is balance. If this was a really good balance, we can change everything and still come back to that balance.”
It might not be as easy to know if the axle issues from last week are solved.
“One-hundred percent, do I feel really confident that we’re not going to have any issues? No,” McGrew said. ”It’s going to take a little time and warm and fuzzies before I feel really good about it.”
What Earnhardt Jr. feels good about is just racing on the 1.5-mile oval. He has finishes of 10th, second and 11th in his last three starts at the track.
“I like this place,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I like the new configuration. I like banking and speed and all that good stuff. I like how this track is done.”
