FORT WORTH, Tex.–Dale Earnhardt Jr. had his worst finish of the season Saturday night at Texas Motor Speedway after his Hendrick Motorsports Chevy lost power.
While Earnhardt Jr. was running third during the NRA 500, he was forced to pit when his car suddenly lost electrical power.
“We just had a battery go dead and didn’t diagnosis it correctly to just switch it,” said Earnhardt Jr. “We have two batteries in there was have a switch in the driver’s seat that goes from one to two. I didn’t it know it was a battery until we got down on pit road.”
Because of he had no power, he couldn’t tell how fast he was going, speeding into the pit stop. So NASCAR slammed him with a penalty, forcing him to come in for a stop and go.
“Yeah, all the gauges went bad. All the gauges just went haywire and so I couldn’t read the gauges to really diagnose what was happening,” said Earnhardt Jr. “but once you start to think about it you are like, ‘well if all the gauges are going bad we have an electrical issue.’”
But when Earnhardt came in to serve his stop and go penalty, his crew chief Steve LeTarte told the crew to change the tires on the No. 88 Chevy. Under NASCAR’s rules crews can’t change tires during a stop and go penalty. Earnhardt was forced come back in again. When all was said and done Earnhardt was a total of four laps behind.
“It’s just I don’t know what else we could have done different aside from me understanding better what was going on with the car and diagnosing it on the race track, and switching to the second battery and not losing any laps,” said Earnhardt Jr. “It was just my mistake. You know things just break on these cars; you don’t know right away what it is and it’s just real easy to have hindsight and say ‘man you know that was pretty simple.’”
Earnhardt finished 29th. Last weekend, he finished 24th during the STP 500 at Martinsville, Virginia. But Earnhardt was still optimistic despite a bad couple of weeks.
“It has been rough, but we had a really good car tonight,” Earnhardt said. “If we were running bad and having these kinds of nights we would have a hard time making that Chase, but running good eventually things will turn back around for us. We will get going. We have a lot of confidence. We’ve got a lot of positive attitude and feel like we will have no problem rebounding.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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