Dale Jr.: Problems Pitting ‘Broke the Camel’s Back’

(By Reid Spencer NASCAR Wire Service)

Posted: Wednesday,January 27th, 2010

For those who write about motorsports, the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Media Tour, hosted and administered by Charlotte Motor Speedway, makes up the most interview-intensive four days of the year.

There’s a lot of predictability to the tour. Before competition on the racetrack has a chance to separate the wheat from the chaff, almost everyone is optimistic about the coming season. Drivers and crew chiefs who have changed jobs are full of praise for their new situations.

Owners promise to field stronger teams than they did last year—even Rick Hendrick, who has won the past four Cup titles with driver Jimmie Johnson.

Dale Earnhardt Jr., driver of the #88 National Guard/AMP Energy Chevrolet. (Photo by John Harrelson/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Nevertheless, there were surprises, and here are four major ones from this year’s tour:

To hear Dale Earnhardt Jr. tell it, a succession of pit-road mistakes during Speedweeks at Daytona derailed his entire season. After sliding through his pit stall in the Feb. 14 Nationwide Series race, Earnhardt drove past his pit box under caution early in the following day’s Daytona 500. Later in the race, he drew a one-lap penalty for pitting on the front white line of his pit box. Trying to regain the lost lap, Earnhardt subsequently triggered an eight-car wreck that took out several of the strongest cars in the field.

 
“Nothing is easy, but coming down at Daytona and getting in your stall is like breathing,” Earnhardt said when the media tour visited the Hendrick Motorsports campus. “It’s like shifting—you don’t think about when you’re doing it. You just do it. But it made me start thinking about it, and I started to backtrack and I didn’t progress and fix it, actually I got a complex about it and became sort of definitely not confident about doing it.
 
“I didn’t anticipate missing my stall. That was kind of the beginning of it. Who knew that would be the little straw that broke the camel’s back?”

Status quo would please Juan Pablo Montoya. Unlike most drivers interviewed on the tour, Montoya is more interested in validating the strong run his No. 42 Earnhardt Ganassi team had in 2009 than in setting his sights higher in 2010. Montoya qualified for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup for the first time last season, and he’d be happy with a similar result this year.

 
“If we could match last year, it would be an awesome year—because you look at where the team was before and what happened last year, and you need to make sure it wasn’t a one-off,” Montoya said. “I think if we could run the same and have a very strong foundation for the team, it would be great for the future of the team.”

If Speedway Motorsports Inc. chairman Bruton Smith ran NASCAR, so-called start-and-park teams would be a thing of the past.

 
“(Something) that has to be stopped—and I hope NASCAR will do something about it, and I think they will—is start-and-park.” Smith said during the announcement of a four-lane NHRA drag racing event, the Four-Wide Nationals, at zMAX Dragway, scheduled for March 25-28. “That’s a disgrace to our sport. I haven’t understood that yet, but they’ve learned now that they can make a lot of money by doing that ’cause they’re not expending any if they go out and run 10 laps and park. So I hope NASCAR will put a stop to that.”

There’s a huge divergence of opinion about the possible effects of a spoiler on the Cup car, despite almost universal agreement that the switch from the rear wing to the spoiler is the right thing to do. Driver Jeff Burton, who tested a spoiler recently on the large and small tracks at Rockingham, cautions against thinking the transition will be plug-and-play.

 
On the other hand, Brian Pattie, Montoya’s crew chief, said wind-tunnel data varied only marginally between the spoiler and the wing and that an anticipated lack of sideforce wasn’t an issue, given the right and left quarter panel extensions that will be added to the car when the switch is made to the spoiler. NASCAR hopes to have the change in place by mid-April.
 
Teams will learn a lot more—including how the car behaves in traffic—during a full-field test at Charlotte in late March.

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