Earnhardt Jr. admits to recent swoon, but heading to tracks he prefers
LONG POND, Pa. – Dale Earnhardt Jr. considers a certain stretch of races in the summer portion of the Sprint Cup tour to be his Achilles' heel, and he’s hoping to fix that in future campaigns.
Since joining NASCAR’s top circuit full time in 2000, Earnhardt Jr. has consistently performed better early and late in the season than in the middle. This season, Earnhardt Jr.’s first at Hendrick Motorsports, has been much the same where the summer is concerned.
Despite getting off to a solid start, he hasn’t been as strong in recent weeks.
Earnhardt Jr. pinpoints a few tracks that the series visits each summer – Pocono Raceway, Watkins Glen, Infineon Raceway, Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Michigan International Speedway – as the reason for his struggles. Among those tracks, the driver has just one victory.
“This part of the season has typically been a stretch where I haven’t been productive in any of the seasons that I’ve been around,” Earnhardt Jr. said Friday at Pocono Raceway, site of Sunday’s Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500. “I’ve been more productive this year, I think, at the Poconos and Indys in [car owner Rick] Hendrick’s cars. He’s given me an opportunity to do that. We weren’t able to capitalize really, but we’ve been able to maintain.
"That part of the season is almost over. I get the opportunity to try again next year during the heat of the summer to try to do better at the Poconos.”
Since winning at Michigan on a fuel-mileage gamble on June 15, Earnhardt Jr. has just one top-10 finish, an eighth at Daytona. During that stretch, he has maintained his second-place spot in the series standings. But he’s not entirely pleased with his overall performance.
“Even the Michigan win, we need to run more dominant at those places,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “We’re going to start going back to tracks that I traditionally have had a lot of success at and do better at, and I’m really anticipating that and am excited about it. We need to look back on earlier season notes, what we’ve learned and what we can apply to that stuff because you’re going to go back to those tracks, and everybody will be just a little bit better from what they learned this year with this car.
“We’re all learning so much with it over the span of the season, so I can't expect to go back and be just as good as I was at Atlanta and places like that. We just have to hope that we’ve learned enough and stepped our game up enough.”
Earnhardt Jr. says some of the burden for not running as well he would like falls squarely on his own shoulders.
“I’ll take a little bit of the responsibility, sure. It’d be pretty stupid not to take some of the responsibility,” he said. “We run pretty good here [at Pocono]. We’ve got some second - [place finishes] and stuff. There’s a couple tracks in there that we struggle at, the Sonomas. I don’t feel like I get it done during the summer like I do at the beginning of the year and the end of the year. I feel like that’s been the case … Maybe over the next couple years I can erase all that. But, yeah, the summer seems to be … if there is a part of the season where we have to buckle down to watch out for a slump, that’d be it.”
As for the exact reason for his summer woes, Earnhardt Jr. says it’s the tracks themselves more than anything.
“It’s just tracks that aren’t typically favorites of mine, a couple road courses we have to go to that I really don’t enjoy,” he said. “Pocono’s a challenge, Indy’s a tough race track. There’s just a lot of different tracks that we go to ... that aren’t necessarily my cup of tea. But I’m open-minded about it and [want] to get it right and get going, and [I'm] hoping to get some wins during the summer.”
