Dale Earnhardt Jr. left Pocono Raceway on Monday with a love-hate finish.
Earnhardt hated to finish second to race winner
Kurt Busch in Monday’s race, not to mention also losing what may have been the best chance he had to reach victory lane this season.
“I could have been a little more aggressively doing some things
differently,” Earnhardt said. “But we ended up getting tight and not
really having anything anyways right at the end of the race, and (Busch)
saved enough (fuel).”
But at the same time,Earnhardt loved his second-place finish – his best finish since placing second six races ago at Bristol.
Since that Bristol race, he’s struggled with five consecutive
finishes outside of the top 10: 13th (Richmond), 40th (Talladega), 15th
(Kansas), 32nd (Dover) and 14th (Charlotte).
“Yeah, (finishing second) certainly feels better
than finishing 15th,” Earnhardt said. “When you get just a little bit
behind in this series, holy moly, it takes so much work to just regain
what you lost, not really even to have an advantage, just to get back to
where you were. A tenth out on that racetrack is impossible to find.
“It’s a good step in the right direction. I felt like we could come
in here and run good, and I think we learned a lot that we can
understand how to get better for the next race here. I’m looking forward
to Michigan, and obviously it’s going to be a different package, but I
think we’ll run good on that track, too, and anticipate having a good
run at Kentucky.”
Earnhardt is relieved that his slump could be over. He also has high
hopes he can capture that elusive first win of the season, which would
all but guarantee him a spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
“We certainly finished better than we should have,” Earnhardt said.
“Our car wasn’t quite a second-place car. We started off really tight
and really slow, probably about a 15th-place car. Greg (Ives, crew
chief) and the guys made a lot of changes and made the car better.”
Earnhardt criticized NASCAR for the minimal amount of practice at
Pocono this weekend. While much of the reason was weather-related –
including the postponement of Sunday’s race to Monday – Earnhardt
suggested NASCAR should reevaluate its practice policies for Sprint Cup
teams.
“We just didn’t get any practice,” he said. “The drivers have been
asking NASCAR to take away the morning practice and add a little bit to
the second one to make that Saturday practice an hour and a half, and we
didn’t — it was just an hour.
“It takes you a minute to run around this track. You can’t get but 13
damned laps in practice. I don’t know how you’re supposed to figure out
what your cars are doing. So we came into this race with no idea.
“We made a lot of changes last night. We basically put in an old
setup that worked in the past, and it started off missing the mark
pretty bad, but we worked on it and got it better, and we’ll take the
points. We’ve had a rough month, so this is a decent finish for us.”
