[media-credit name=”Dan Sanger” align=”alignright” width=”225″][/media-credit]“When you see a car and a driver get momentum, and all the cars are running real well, they’re sharing information, and Dale is just switched on,” Rick Hendrick says. “He’s got the confidence, Stevie has the touch and every week they’re the best by far. I think he’s sitting in the cat bird seat to win his first championship.”

In 15 races so far this year, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has finished in the top five in almost half of the races (six) and finished in the top 10 in 80 per cent of the races (12) while completing all of the laps. He currently sits second in points to Matt Kenseth.

Now with his 143-race winless streak snapped with a win at Michigan International Speedway, it just continues to showcase Rick Hendrick’s words that Steve LeTarte and Earnhardt Jr. are a perfect match.

After all, statistics don’t lie and they show that this is the best start Earnhardt Jr. has had to a season since his first season at Hendrick Motorsports in 2008. With Tony Eury Jr. atop the pit box, Earnhardt Jr. had a win, 11 top 10s and seven top fives in the first 15 races while sitting third in points. The win was a fuel-mileage victory at Michigan, versus an all-out dominance, like the one he had on Sunday. The chase didn’t work out in their favor that year as they had four bad finishes and ended up finishing 12^th in points.

You could say that through the year, Eury Jr. and Earnhardt Jr. were riding the wave of joy due to a new start at Hendrick Motorsports after the trials at Dale Earnhardt Inc. The joy shrunk into the following season and the bickering started between the cousins as there was only one top five and three top 10s in the first 15 races. As a result, a change was made and Eury Jr. was removed from the pit box.

Lance McGrew was brought up from the Nationwide Series as the replacement, however that didn’t work out as Earnhardt finished 25^th in points in 2009, followed by a 21^st place finish in 2010.

Rick Hendrick knew something needed to be done, so he made a big switch throughout the organization. McGrew was made the crew chief for Mark Martin, while Martin’s crew chief Alan Gustafson moved over to work with Jeff Gordon, while Gordon’s crew chief LeTarte, became Earnhardt Jr.’s crew chief. All three teams were struggling so it was worth a shot, right?

The 2011 season was LeTarte and Earnhardt Jr.’s year to jell. They started off the season well with three top fives and eight top 10s in the first 15 races, though fell off as the season went on, finishing seventh in points. Earnhardt Jr. mentioned on SPEED TV’s victory lane that the reason for that was they stayed the same, while never continuing to improve.

However, that’s the difference this year. Both Earnhardt Jr. and LeTarte have been working on continuing to make improvements to their program, along with the rest of the team, and that is showing on track. Now they’ve got fellow competitors looking at them as the ones to beat for the championship.

So what is it about the partnership between LeTarte and Earnhardt Jr. that makes it works well? Attitude. While Earnhardt Jr. had fights during the race with both McGrew and Eury Jr. and get the confidence level down, LeTarte keeps that confidence up. He is always rallying behind his driver, giving him words of encouragement and staying positive.

As a result of Earnhardt Jr. keeping a positive attitude, his feedback in the car has been better with LeTarte than with any other crew chief as he’s been able to say exactly what is going on. This makes LeTarte’s job easy as he’s able to see what needs to be changed and make that change accordingly.

This weekend’s race was the ultimate test of how well they work together as a result of the curveball they were thrown with the tires.

With the high speeds and soft compound, teams were blistering tires throughout both the Thursday test session and Friday practice session. As a result, NASCAR announced that Goodyear was bringing in a new left side tire and they’d give teams an added practice on Saturday after the Nationwide race to figure it out. Earnhardt Jr. says that he was disappointed going through the process after the work they put in to set the car up right through Thursday and Friday.

“But we worked a couple of days getting the thing to work with what we brought here,” Earnhardt Jr. explains. “Then we were thrown into a deal where we had about an hour to figure it out, but we only had 25 laps on our motor.  Our motor tuner would not let us run more than that, even if we — I told Steve, ‘We are going into this practice with 25 laps, and what if my car is junk?’. He said, ‘We can’t practice no more.’  That’s how strict of a deal it is.  I was desperate in that last practice to get something to work and when it ended, I still wasn’t really sure if we were where we needed to be, and I woke up this morning just antsy not knowing how this was going to play out.”

Earnhardt Jr. started the race by falling all the way to the 21^st position, though after an early race pit stop and putting a rubber in the left rear, the car was on rails from that point and he found himself in the lead.

It’s the ability to go through that process and be able to come out on top that shows they can be championship contenders as they know how to fight adversity and get the car handling during the race.

[media-credit name=”Geoff Burke / Getty Images” align=”alignright” width=”266″][/media-credit]Marcos Ambrose has been very consistent at the road courses in his NASCAR career and took home his only Sprint Cup series victory last season at Watkins Glen.

This weekend the series goes to Sonoma, a track where Ambrose has only competed on four times but has some impressive stats, including three top-10 finishes in his last three races along with a driver rating of 108.8.

Add that he has four road course victories  in the Nationwide Series (three at Watkins Glen and one at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve) and he certainly comes into this weekend as one of the favorites.

Ambrose does feel a bit of pressure on him as he sits 17th in the point standings.

“The expectation of me succeeding at a road course race is obviously very high. But that doesn’t change. I’m driving the No. 9 Stanley Ford Fusion for Richard Petty to win every race, not just two road course races. I apply myself the same every week. The pressure is not much different, it’s just the weight of expectation I guess this weekend and for Watkins Glen as well, the expectation of success is what we have to balance out. I can’t change the way I drive. I’ve got to keep doing my best out there. If I do my job well and the team does, we know we’ll be a contender for the race win.”

As if that wasn’t enough, Ambrose will have a little more incentive this weekend. He will also be racing for a $1 million dollar purse which will be donated to the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals should he win.

“Well, there’s nothing like added pressure” he says, “trying to race for $1 million for sick kids is definitely up there on the stacks of just trying to win the race. We did this last year; came up a little bit short. I’m doubly determined this year to try to win the race and help those kids and help our race team achieve success we all hope.”

But regardless of where he finishes Sunday’s race, Stanley Tools and Ace Hardware will still donate $100,000 to the charity.

“We’re going to shed a bit of sunshine on their day. We’re going to go to the Children’s Hospital on Thursday, bring the car, do some pit stops for them, say hello, some carnival activities to give them a bit of fun and try to get them to forget about why they’re in the hospital in the first place.”

His car will carry a special paint scheme that will include the names of the four “Honorary Crew Members,” as well as one child from each U.S. state and Washington D.C. Each name featured on the car is a current or former Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals patient who has met their unique medical challenge with courage.

NASCAR cars were never really designed for road courses and presents a unique challenge, especially at the narrow Sonoma.

“Sonoma is a very twisty, tight, narrow racetrack with a lot of elevation change. These cars are dinosaurs as far as race cars go. They’ve got way too much power, 900 horsepower, they don’t have enough tire grip, they’re too heavy, and they don’t have enough brakes.”

“As a race car driver, these cars are really hard to handle and you really have to manhandle these cars around the racetrack. You have to take it by the scruff of the neck and force it to go around. You’re fighting physics at this point when you have a car that heavy and that powerful. It’s hard to get it around a tight, twisty road course.”

“I guess the fact is that everybody is driving the same vehicles. No matter what they throw at you, you have to deal with it. This is one of the most challenging and rewarding racetracks we go to. I think all the drivers would tell you they love driving the cars around Sonoma, it’s just really hard to race with all the competition.”

Being a technically challenging track, some bump-and-run may be in order.

“It’s hard to make passes. Going bumper-to-bumper and side-by-side when you make a pass, even when it’s clean, it’s hard not to make contact. It’s a sellout crowd at the track. One of the best races to watch. You’re going to have to do a few bump-and-runs and make a few contacts to win the race. We’re all prepared for that and all understand the consequences of that.”

He has had some close calls here in the past couple of races at the California track.

Last season it was pit strategy that left Ambrose out of contention for the win. Despite being the quickest car on the track, late in the race, he gambled by coming down pit road for tires. The #9 team was certain that another caution would come out but, it never did and he settled for 5th.

In 2010, he couldn’t re-fire his car after switching it off to save fuel in the closing laps, ending his hopes of a win NASCAR’s premier series.

Expect him to be a strong threat for his second career Sprint Cup series win in Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350.

The race can be seen at 2:00 p.m. ET on TNT