Insider's View: Dale Earnhardt Jr.

By now, most of you know of -- and have seen -- a replay of my accident at Dover eight days ago.

I feel pretty good. I'm feeling a lot better every day. We had a little bit of a concussion and I was unconscious for a little bit, but I it wasn't anything as bad as California (previous concussion 4/02 at California Speedway).

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It's hard to explain what (the concussion) feels like. It just takes a little time to get over it, I guess. It's no fun.

I had a gauge to go off of for exactly how bad my concussion was, unfortunately, being in that accident. The biggest problem was just the (right) foot. The foot is getting better. They said it probably wasn't going to get better for a long time, but it has.

We've done everything we could this week just to get the swelling to go down and get it to where I could walk on it at least a little bit. It's just getting a lot better every day.

I blacked out in the car because my foot hurt so bad, mainly. Because after I hit the wall, I was still conscious. I put the net down and took my helmet off and then I realized how bad my foot was hurting.

It was just night-night. It's so much pain, you'd rather be unconscious. Your body just shuts off. I don't understand it, but it was weird. I was maybe just a little dizzy. That was it.

I've probably had six or seven circumstances in my career where I've hit the wall hard enough that it makes you dizzy. I had that one major concussion last year (California) and a bunch of minor concussions. The minor ones aren't that big of a deal.

More than anything, you think about all week is that you're just fortunate it isn't worse. Concussions aren't anything to be fooling around with. So I feel fortunate and lucky that the impact wasn't harder and I didn't suffer a worse or real bad concussion.

I feel lucky that I'm able to race this weekend and to get cleared by all the doctors. I've seen a lot of different doctors this week. I've been run through all kinds of machines and tests.

Bill Elliott had a similar (foot) injury in The Winston and he had a carbon fiber piece. We learned of that technology and we're trying to see if we need to use that. I don't know if it's necessary, but I'm sure my doctors would rather have me do something or have something in there just in case. A bunch of tendons are torn in my foot.

There aren't any breaks or anything. It needs to be immobile in order to heal. I really shouldn't even be walking on it that much. It just takes a long time to heal.

I knew I was all right to go (at Talladega). I wasn't in a big hurry. I wanted to make sure everything was cool with my foot. It hurt so bad I thought for sure something was broken in it. We kept getting x-rays and MRI's on it and finally found what most of the problem was (tendons) and it's something you can't really do much about.

There is an option to get some surgery done to it, but that's only if it doesn't heal and if I put too much weight on it and walk around on it a lot and mess it up.

You're concentrating so hard on driving you can drive with that type of injury with no problem at all. It was hard not to be able to walk for a couple of days. That was the worst part. Those crutches aren't any fun either. I'm not walking with them.

I think it's more painful to walk with the crutches than it is to walk on the foot. I just sat around and iced it 24 hours a day. The swelling went down and that's when I could start putting pressure on it. I got to where I could hobble over to the shop little bit.

Now, I can walk pretty good. I think it's kind of a non-issue. Hopefully I don't do anything stupid and take off running across the garage or something like that.

I'm just trying to concentrate on the end of the year. This is the toughest part of the season. I just want to really concentrate on what I'm doing at the racetrack.

Sometimes I just feel like there's a little too much Dale Jr. out there in the press. I don't want to oversell the story too much. I used to get real excited when I'd see myself in the paper. But over the last few years, I've just read the same story over and over.

The (Dover) crash was a disappointment. It was kind of a letdown for the team. We made a real poor decision there to put on two tires. We learned a lot. Matt (Kenseth) has such a big lead. We'd all but done everything we could to win the championship this year.

We were pretty much trying to fight for second (place). We still are. We're still going to concentrate on trying to do the best we can. It's already time to start preparing for next year. It's time to start preparing the team for next year and start trying to build on how we can be better.

That offseason takes so much out of a team. We don't want to build up too much rust over the offseason. It's time to start concentrating on that now.