When Dale Earnhardt Jr. made his first trip to Martinsville Speedway, it didn’t go well as he hit everything, even the pacecar. In his eyes, “it looked like that it was going to be quite a challenge to sort it out and understand what I needed to do.” However, a test in the early 2000s paid dividends as Earnhardt was able to hit on something during that time and has since done well at Martinsville, scoring the victory last year.
“The secret really is to have a good car; a car that has good drive off, rolls through the center real nice,” he shared. “You’ve got to take care of the tires, which I learned quite a bit about here trying to keep the rear tires on it up off the corner is real important for the long run. And it took several races really to kind of understand it and what you needed to do here to be good.”
Knowing the secret of a track can be huge, as seen by other drivers, like Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, who were able to rip off multiple wins on the paperclip shaped oval. Earnhardt says knowing the secret and being successful is huge because it adds confidence and the driver knows what they need to look for during practice to do well in the race.
Though beyond knowing the secret of success, there’s also knowing how to balance being aggressive and being patient, something that Earnhardt says is based on a “case by case” basis.
“It’s whatever is happening at that moment and whether you can reign in your temper and control your emotions,” he commented. “There have been races where we have gotten about 100 laps in and had to dial it way back because we weren’t going to have enough race car left after 100 laps, we had done tore the sides off of it. You get mad at guys, but you have to understand that if you want to run over a guy 100 laps into the race he is going to have 400 opportunities to get you back.”
Earnhardt added that it’s about knowing when you should start pushing guys around, and knowing that you better have a “damn good reason” because payback is always possible.
“A lot of guys when they do something, if they do something out of line, they got to know it is coming,” he continued. “Sometimes you just kind of take it. If you put a guy in a bad position or run over a guy accidently running a little too hard or something you just have to know you are going to get it back. You just sometimes got to take it and go on and let that be the end of it. So you can get on with your race. That is what makes this fun. I think as drivers we enjoy getting scrappy out there and rubbing on each other and moving each other around.”
There’s also a balance in knowing how hard to push someone, as Earnhardt says you don’t want to ruin somebody’s day due to contact. While he won the event, he remembers the contact that he made with Jamie McMurray’s tire, ultimately causing McMurray to blow his left-rear tire out and hit the fence.
“You don’t want to do that to somebody because you wouldn’t want that done to you,” Earnhardt said. “But I think we enjoy getting to be a little rough for a change because we can’t do that on some of the bigger tracks. To a point you kind of look forward to it, you look forward to putting some doughnuts down the sides of these things.”
