Posts tagged DaleEarnhardtJr at FanHouse

Dale Earnhardt Jr. chose to race in Saturday's Nationwide Series race because he doesn't consider himself a great road course racer and wanted to get more experience to help his team get a better finish for Sunday's Sprint Cup race at Watkins Glen.

Next year, he might think about serving as crew chief in the Nationwide event so he can overcome blunders like the one Tony Eury Jr. got the No. 88 into Sunday afternoon while Earnhardt Jr. was leading.

The Hendrick Motorsports driver led 33 of the race's 90 laps, but he didn't lead anymore after a caution came out while he was leading on lap 64.

For the fourth time in five years, Sprint Cup qualifying on the road course at Watkins Glen has been canceled due to rain.

With results like that, is it time to look at moving the road race at Watkins Glen to a different point on the Sprint Cup schedule? Or does it just always rain when the calendar says August in upper New York?

Either way, Kyle Busch -- who won the other road course race in California this past June -- will start out front thanks to his owner point standing. Self-proclaimed road course racing novice Dale Earnhardt Jr. will start second.

NASCAR canceled qualifying and practice because there just wasn't enough time to get both in after rain had previously delayed the Friday schedule.

Since sweeping the weekend with a win in both the Nationwide Series and Sprint Cup Series races at Chicagoland Speedway in July, racing in NASCAR has been a little rough on the Sprint Cup points leader.

Yep, Kyle Busch has simply cooled off for the past two race weekends. Cooled off, that is, from a high point somewhere on the momentum scale just past red hot.

His two finishes in the last two Sprint Cup events at Indianapolis and Pocono? Try 15th at the Brickyard and a staggering 36th at Pocono. Combined, those finishes have dropped 86 points off his lead over Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the standings to a smaller 176-point advantage.

Both Indianapolis and Pocono are flat tracks -- a venue that the Joe Gibbs Racing driver admittedly hasn't found a great handle on yet in 2008. The 15th-place finish at Indy was about how good the No. 18 was that day, but the 36th-place finish at Pocono was a matter of the team running out of fuel at the end of the race.

He does have a win in the Nationwide Series Kroger 200 at O'Reilly Raceway Park, but on the previous night in the Craftsman Truck Series, he struggled heavily with what he called "the worst truck" he's ever driven.

So, is this the point in the 2008 season where we see Kyle Busch come back to the pack? It very well could be.

In what was, by far, the most entertaining moment of any press conference this weekend at Chicagoland Speedway, Dale Earnhardt Jr. was asked by the media to tell how he spends his time during a rain delay.

The conference happened Thursday night as the rain came down in buckets outside the media center, and Dale Jr. happily obliged.

"Really?" said Earnhardt Jr., a little surprised by the question. "I go on iTunes a lot."

"Does everybody remember the mini-series 'Lonesome Dove'? That just came out on DVD, they just released it, and iTunes has released it, so I downloaded that. I've got it on VHS, but the picture is horrible because it's so old. But I watch that, because I like Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call – those are my two heroes," said Earnhardt.

Yep, for Dale Earnhardt Jr., who could do anything he wanted in the world, true happiness lies a 1989 four-part TV mini-series featuring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.

The Hendrick Motorsports has even turned to YouTube to fulfill his "Lonesome Dove" kick.

"You can see a couple good quotes from 'Lonesome Dove' on YouTube," said Earnhardt Jr.

While I don't know which YouTube Lonesome Dove quote is Earnhardt Jr.'s favorite, he did tell the media of his favorite YouTube video, which is featured here:

FanHouse's Geoffrey Miller is in Chicago for Saturday night's LifeLock 400.

The only thing driving Thursday night at Chicagoland Speedway was the rain.

Rain canceled the last 12 minutes of the Sprint Cup Series' first practice Thursday afternoon at Chicagoland Speedway, but storms of a stronger magnitude wiped out the first night-time qualifying session to be ever held at the speedway.

The earlier rain had pushed qualifying back over an hour and a half as crews worked to dry the track, but drivers and teams were still gearing up for the session as bigger clouds began building northwest of the speedway.

Eventually, those clouds got darker and quite a bit scarier, forcing fans from the grandstands and causing a manic rush in the garage area to get the cars off of pit road and back under cover. The pictures on the right show a time period of about 20 minutes as the clouds got progressively closer and ominously darker.

Tony Stewart apparently just had to scratch that itch -- you know, that itch that Dale Earnhardt Jr. scratched enough in 2007 to find his way to Hendrick Motorsports.

And now that we know that Tony (or at least we think we know) won't be piloting the No. 20 Toyota in 2009 for Joe Gibbs Racing in favor of owning his own team, we need to look at Stewart the team owner/teammate. In other words, who is going to work best with Stewart as a teammate in 2009?

Let's start with the most-rumored candidate, "Flyin' Ryan" himself:

Ryan Newman - Newman seems to make the most sense for a number of reasons. Newman is a fellow Hoosier like Stewart, has a dirt track and open-wheel background just like Stewart, and he's in the final year of his contract with a struggling Penske. And, oh yeah, dude is fast.

Newman has 43 career poles and 13 wins -- including the 2008 Daytona 500. You put Newman into a fast car, and he can put you in victory lane. He's also got some pretty sweet wrestling moves, too. The only thing he doesn't bring is a sponsor package, though it wouldn't be hard to find one.

Martin Truex Jr. - Truex could be next great defector from the idling ship that is Dale Earnhardt Inc. With one career win coming last summer at Dover, Truex made the Chase for the Championship in 2007 but his chances don't look as good this time around.

Casey Mears is officially leaving Hendrick Motorsports, effective at the end of 2008.

Mears, currently 24th in the Sprint Cup standings, leaves Hendrick after never doing anything that impressive while in the driver seat at the premier organization -- with the exception of one lone win at Lowe's Motor Speedway in 2007.

It's been a constant struggle for Mears this season to produce results like the rest of his Hendrick teammates Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. despite driving equipment built out of the same shop as Earnhardt. Dale Jr.'s No. 88 is currently 3rd in the standings.

Oddly enough, Mears' best finish of 2008 was just one week ago at Infineon Raceway when he brought the No. 5 Chevrolet home in fourth. Five finishes lower than 35th in 16 races this season, though, aren't wiped away with a single Top-5.

I like Casey Mears a lot -- he's a nice guy and doesn't cause problems on track -- but the statistics are much too telling about his performance at HMS. Granted he hasn't had the best of conditions to work under are switching racing teams and crew chiefs multiple times, but at some point, the results just have to come.

Mark Martin is rumored to be getting in the No. 5 for a last-ditch effort at a Sprint Cup title in 2009. From his performance in a few races in 2008 -- most notably at Phoenix -- the part-time Dale Earnhardt Inc. driver could really make some waves with the appropriate equipment.

Martin in the No. 5 for 2009? Sounds good to me.

I don't call myself a Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan, but I was happy Sunday afternoon to see driver No. 88 in victory lane after the LifeLock 400 at Michigan International Speedway.

Earnhardt Jr. managed to squeeze every last drop of fuel from his Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet to win the 406 mile race extended by a late caution brought out by a spinning Sam Hornish Jr. It was Dale Jr.'s 18th-career win.

Something just felt good about the day, and Sunday night, looking back on the day's event, it still just feels good.

There's so many things riding on the entire saga of Dale Earnhardt Jr. that have been pressing matters for so long for the driver who would much rather be much more recluse than he's allowed to be.

Kasey Kahne truly had the best car Sunday afternoon at Pocono Raceway, and despite the interesting race strategies applied by Top-5 finishers Brian Vickers and Dale Earnhardt Jr., he managed to muscle his No. 9 Dodge to his second win of 2008.

Vickers, Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon, and a host of others got off the pit sequence in the race's final 70 laps. The move especially played out well in terms of track position for Vickers and Earnhardt Jr., while Gordon deviated from the strategy on the final caution flag by choosing to head to pit road.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. said earlier this week that he's been a little too hard on his JR Motorsports driver Brad Keselowski.

After Saturday night, he's going to be pretty happy with his young driver after Keselowski won the Federated Auto Parts 300 at Nashville Superspeedway. It was Keselowski's first career win in the Nationwide Series.

Towards the end, the race was a lesson in fuel mileage as the leaders stretched their fuel tanks to the limit. Clint Bowyer, David Reutimann, and David Stremme all raced towards the front at the end as some late cautions allowed them to conserve fuel.

On the last restart, David Reutimann led until Clint Bowyer tapped his rear bumper to take the lead. Keselowski also got under Reutimann and stayed glued to Bowyer's rear bumper. He finally got under Bowyer with just a few laps to go and set sail for the finish line.

Bowyer and Stremme got together coming off turn four coming to the finish line, shooting Bowyer up the track. He wasn't real happy with Stremme after the event.

But for Keselowski, I'd say winning the traditional guitar trophy was much less important than the pressure he may have relieved from his owner Dale Jr.