Dale Earnhardt Jr. keeping it simple with season on line
TALLADEGA, Ala. — His season is on the line, his team is reeling amid misfortune and mechanical woes, and his last Talladega Superspeedway result left him virtually inconsolable for hours.
Surely, Dale Earnhardt Jr. exhaustively has assembled a laundry list of preparatory measures for Sunday's Geico 500, which will determine which four drivers won't advance to the next round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
Just what is the 11-time most popular driver planning to do before strapping into his No. 88 Chevrolet for 500 miles at the treacherous 2.66-mile oval infamous for breeding multicar wrecks that will derail championship bids?
"Nothing," he said Saturday before qualifying 29th at Talladega. "Been racing here a long time. I got it. I just got to get my suit on and get in the car. Ain't much to it, man. You just get in there and do it. I just don't need to eat any bad fish, or a bunch of junk food.
"I'm ready to race and ready for the race to begin and have some fun. I like the challenge."
In a Sprint Cup garage engulfed by the pervasive sense of dread fostered by Talladega, Earnhardt's cheery disposition was a notable exception among the fear and loathing.
"The car is real smooth; like a bass boat across the lake at 5 a.m.," said Earnhardt, whose team was burned by broken shifters last week at Charlotte Motor Speedway after a tire blowout a race earlier at Kansas Speedway. "It was smooth as glass. So that was nice."
Ranked 12th in the standings and 26 points behind the eighth-place cutoff position, Earnhardt's best route to avoiding Chase elimination is a victory Sunday that automatically would secure a transfer into the next round.
The past two champions of the Sprint Cup Series are in the same predicament as Earnhardt, and Brad Keselowski (10th in the standings, 19 points behind eighth) and Jimmie Johnson (11th, 26) have expended a lot of effort analyzing their options.
Essentially, it's a choice between diametrically opposed approaches that are aimed at the same objective: Avoiding the massive pileups fostered by the large packs that form because of restrictor plates used to tamp down horsepower and keep speeds low to prevent cars from going airborne.
Either race hard to stay ahead of the inevitable bedlam, or lollygag far enough behind to dodge the wrecks when chaos erupts.
"I've put a lot of time and thought into my approach," Johnson said. "There really isn't a clear vision for how to make it work. Racing for it can get you in trouble. Riding can get you in trouble.
"If you ride, at some point you have to go to the front. With this rules package, it's much more difficult to (improve) position. It seems like with maybe (75 laps) to go, you need to at least be in first or second to give yourself a chance to win."
Keselowski wasn't revealing any clues about his intentions Sunday, but the 2012 champion did concede heavy deliberations.
"Talladega is very easy to overthink," Keselowski said. "I'd rather overthink it than underthink it."
Earnhardt, meanwhile, seems to have fallen into the latter camp by mapping out a tactical plan that is quintessentially Talladega in its paradoxical: Stay forward by counting backward.
Earnhardt said his team will strategize similar to the blueprint for a road course, where teams start with the final lap and calculate in reverse when to make pit stops to ensure finishing with a fuel tank on empty.
That theoretically should keep his car near the lead and in the best position to manage the outcome at a track where so much is out of a driver's control.
"If I understand this style of racing, we need to be in the front," he said. "We need to control the restarts, being able to choose the inside and outside line, who's pushing you. With this package, the leader is not impossible to pass, but he really has the upper hand, and with how capable our cars are at plate tracks, I feel we can fend off most challenges."
In the May race at Talladega, Earnhardt started 30th and slowly clawed into the lead for 26 laps. Once in front, his car seemed faster, and Earnhardt seemed poised for his sixth victory at Talladega (and first in a decade).
"I felt I had control," he said. "Guys were making runs, and we were able to fend them off relatively easily."
Until a pit stop for fuel shuffled him into traffic with 38 laps remaining. Earnhardt stalled out and finished 26th — illustrating how difficult gaining positions is even with a fast car.
"It's really difficult to infiltrate the top five with this package," he said. "There's really no easy answer to get there. You have to do it on pit road. You can steal a bunch of spots on restarts as everyone tries to get organized. Once they do organize, it's very difficult to move forward if you're not there."
"I need to be in the lead and toward the front every lap so we're there at the end of the race. We won't magically pull something out of our hat. We can't flip the field on the last few pit stops and miraculously use a strategy no one else has. Knowing I've got to win definitely will be on the back of my mind every lap throughout the race."
The same will hold true for Keselowski and Johnson — and quite probably the other eight drivers aside from Joey Logano and Kevin Harvick who aren't guaranteed to advance to the next three-race segment of the Chase.
"Guys will be driving and thinking about the situation and understanding how dire and critical things are," Earnhardt said. "That's going to trigger guys to do things with more urgency than typical at one of these races. We've seen the field line up and run the top and knock off 150 miles to get it out of the way, you might not see that so much."
But will that make for a wilder finish? Not necessarily — particularly if many Chase drivers are trying to protect their points position late in the race.
Last October's race at Talladega ended with a stretch of 103 consecutive laps under green and a mostly single-file parade before a last-lap crash when a scramble finally began on the backstretch.
"We've seen races here that are very aggressive and competitive, then we've seen races where the lead group of cars decided to run along the top and make it a single-file race," Johnson said. "There is no rhyme or reason why that happens, so I think it's hard to predict what the race will be like. But I can promise you that with four guys needing to win to transfer, at the end of the race, there will definitely be some racing.
"It may be the four of us on the bottom trying to find our way around in a different lane trying to get to the front. But there are at least four that have a really good reason to take chances."
Since the eradication of tandem drafting two years ago, though, it's unlikely teammates will have as much of an impact. While Hendrick teammates Johnson and Earnhardt won't have as much incentive to aid, Keselowski isn't expecting much of an advantage from having Team Penske stablemate Logano locked into the next round.
"It seems like if you get locked into counting on someone else, you don't make the moves you need to make to win," Keselowski said. "It's certainly great to have teammates, and I want to work with them as much as I can. It's not as significant as with the tandem drafting.
"Last fall was probably the least aggressive Talladega race I've ever seen. I would have never predicted that. To try to tell you it's going to be highly aggressive, I have a feeling it won't. I have a feeling it will be a very, very conservative race. But I don't know."
Said Earnhardt: "These races are like snowflakes at this place. They all play out differently. The people and players up front are a little different every time. What happens and how you get to the front and who you work with is never the same. There are so many variables."
Earnhardt will try to limit it to two: Leading and winning.
"I feel like I have some fortune and a little bit of luck to still have a shot," he said. "After how bad we've run the last couple of weeks and the troubles we have, to even have an opportunity is pretty neat. I'm looking at it in a more positive manner than 'we're in panic mode and we've got to go crazy here.' We have a shot, and we know what we need to do."
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