While Martinsville may be one of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s best tracks now, it didn’t start out that way. In his first trip to Martinsville as a rookie, he finished 26th and 36th on the paper clip short track.
“I remember the first several races I ran there, I ran into everything,” he said. “I ran into other race cars, walls, pace cars, just about everything that could be ran into, I found it. And you know, it was real frustrating because I had thought of myself as a short track driver, and I thought that I had honed these skills on these short tracks in the Southeast, and this should be where I excel the most.”
There was one point in the race where he hit the ambulance, giving it a little bump ’cause it wouldn’t move. Even though the first start there was somewhat disastrous, there were a highlight.
“Somewhere in the race I had started on the inside a lap down, and I took off and yarded the leader by a straightaway,” he said. “I was so proud of myself, and that’s the only thing I took away from the race.”
Though one of the things that the young driver was not noticing at the time was the need to be patient due to the race being 500 laps, versus most short track events that are at most 100, 200 laps. He says he learned to preach patience to himself and control his emotions, knowing that he couldn’t push hard into the tight corners every single lap.
“It took me a few trips to really learn to be more patient, to let the race sort of come to me, that the track is going to come and go, the balance of the car is going to change, that you don’t do all your work in the first 100 laps, and you’ve sort of got to wait out the competition and let your crew make good choices and good strategy that keeps you in the thick of things and then have an opportunity at the end,” he said. “It just took a really — it took a while for me, it seems like a while anyways, to really understand that. Now I do feel like I do do well on the short tracks because it takes a totally different mentality than what you think coming in, even though you might be coming from the short track ranks.”
Since picking up his first top five at Martinsville in 2002, Earnhardt has ran up front at Martinsville, in the thick for the win, scoring 10 top 5s, 14 top 10s in 26 starts – but no victory.
Coming into the weekend, many are thinking that Earnhardt could pick up his first grandfather clock as he has had a good season so far, leading the points by 12 over Brad Keselowski and finishing in the top 10 in the first five races thus far this season. Earnhardt attributes the success to the adjustments that crew chief Steve LeTarte has made late in the race in helping them gain positions.
“Two races really come to mind, and that’s Bristol and California, with just a handful of laps to go, we’re not in the top 10 in either one of those races,” he said. “Steve made some pit calls in the last 25 percent of those races that set us up to be able to make up a lot of ground at the end if everything went according to plan. I don’t really know if that was his plan, but he surely makes it look good.”
The success they’ve had, Earnhardt also attributes it to “circumstance and good fortune”, in saying that they’ve been good, but not great.
“I think we’re a better team than we were last year but still — I just feel like that we need to be winning races,” he said. “We need to be running up in the top 2, 3 all day long, we need to be just — we just need to run a little bit better. There’s just a little bit there for us to gain until I feel super comfortable and feel, I guess, like our statistics and our points position really reflect on our performance.”
Many fans and people within NASCAR have been waiting for Earnhardt to return to the top of the points standings, predicting that it would fix some of the sports’ popularity problems. However, in the week that Earnhardt led the points standings, he wasn’t the focus of the attention. That was directed towards Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano feud and how it blew up in the final laps at Auto Club Speedway. Earnhardt is fine with saying, saying that it allows them to focus on what they’re doing.
“We’re still not — we’re not winning races, and I don’t expect to get much attention until we can win races,” he said. “And I know a little bit more about — I guess the way we’ve ran doesn’t really reflect well on our finishes, meaning that I think we should run better. We’ve finished well, but I think that there’s a lot of areas that we can improve, and we get to focus on that sort of being out of the scope and out of the spotlight. We can pay more attention to how do we get better as a team.”
Earnhardt Jr. added that when he can begin to win some races, they’ll get the credit that is due, but till then, they’re in the right spot – attention wise – based on what they’ve done in comparison to other drivers up front. For now, the focus is getting better as the season goes forward.
“We’ve got time in the season to get there, and we did that last year; we got faster throughout the season,” he said. “And by mid-summer we were really one of the best teams out there, I thought. So I’ve got good confidence in the team that we’re going to be able to gain what I think we need to gain to be able to compete once the Chase comes around, and hopefully we’ll have that opportunity to be in the Chase at that point.”
