Q&A: Dale Earnhardt Jr. (cont'd)

Q: Can you talk about the tests so far, how much have you learned and at this point and how do you see the COT racing here at Richmond?

Earnhardt: I think the racing will be good. A lot of guys are running in the middle, moving the grooves up, so that's a good sign. It's a great racetrack.

I think the type of racing you get is more conducive to what style of track you're on more so than the car. I don't think you can build the car to improve the racing. It's really more about the style of track and what the track characteristics are.

I think that the testing has gone pretty good. We're not really that fast right now but I'm not too worried about it. We were really poor at the Bristol tests and we turned out okay there. I don't know why we can't really run fast laps in testing, but the car is reacting and we're learning.

Q: Are you experiencing problems in getting the car to turn like we hear from a lot of the other drivers?

Earnhardt: The car is no more difficult to figure out than any car we've driven in the past. The other cars, the older cars, you struggled trying to get the car to work in the middle of the corner. It's no worse with the COT.

I've found with the COT it's a little bit easier to get the forward bite and bump the corner. I'm not sure if that's just a fluke with this, but the car seems to be easier to get the forward bite better. I thought the corner of the car, either the width of the car or something to that effect that helps the car come off the corner a little better, a little straighter.

The struggle at the center, that's always kind of been there, it's always been what you concentrate on. If you can get your car to roll at the center better, you're going to have a pretty good night.

Q: Dale, you've had a lot of success out at the Phoenix track. You know all the nuances of the track. How do you adapt the Car of Tomorrow to a track, this mile track, for the first time?

Earnhardt: I think that what we're learning here in Richmond is going to help us a lot when we go to Phoenix. The tracks are similar in certain aspects, and the setups that we ran over years past have been pretty close.

You drive Phoenix a lot like a short track. Even though it's a little bit larger, you drive it like a short track, and the car handling and the way you charge the corners and work the center of the corners is a lot like a short track. I think we'll try to apply a lot of things that work here when we show up in Phoenix and see how it goes.

Q: Dale, after your second DNF in California a lot of people started fretting about your season, the Chase and so forth, and you told everybody to chill out, that you thought everything would be all right. And sure enough, that's what happened, and you've moved up in the points. Can you talk a little bit about the confidence you had that early in the season that things would be okay?

Earnhardt: Well, the season is really, really long, and a lot of the guys are going to find themselves having the same misfortune that we did at the beginning of the year. It sort of evens out, and if you try -- if you show up with good racecars every weekend, you've kind of cut the battle in half.

I was just so happy how our cars were running at the time even though we weren't finishing races and we weren't getting good runs. Our cars were so good and so fast, I knew it was just a matter of time before we started racking up the finishes we needed and we'd be climbing up in the points.

Realistically Hendrick and those guys, they're at the top of the charts right now, winning every week and running up front every week, and they'll be hard to challenge going into the Chase at this point. But if we can just continue to finish good and take good cars to the racetrack, we should be able to make that Top 12.

Q: Would you be willing to give us just a general update on your sister Kelly? There were reports early that she's going to be fine, but the recuperation process will be slow. Can you give us kind of a general picture of that, and also does that keep everything, as you said at Bristol, kind of on hold for a while, or is there room for her to work toward the contract now?

Earnhardt: She's doing a whole lot better. She's going to be sore and she can't lift anything for several weeks. But she's doing really, really good. She's out of the woods, so to speak, and we're all really, really happy about that.

She'll start carrying out her typical duties, and she's starting to phase back into what's been going on over the last six to eight months and get back to work. (Continued)