Q&A: Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Q: As defending champion of the upcoming race here at Richmond, let's just revisit that race quickly last year. Most everyone was chasing the 29 car [Kevin Harvick] but the end of the race turned out to be a pretty good finish between you and the local guy here Denny Hamlin. Can you just take us back to that race?

Earnhardt: Yeah, it was fun. We had a good car. The 29 was fast all night, and they had some troubles, some bad pit strategy or whatever, made some mistakes, not pitting when they should have. That seems to be what the short track race is all about.

All the cars are so easily matched that are running toward the front, it's more about pit strategy and who can get out first on that last stop and try and maintain position, and that's what we were able to do.

Q: It seemed like you had a lot of fun with the burnout at the end, even turned it into a TV commercial for you. Can you rate on a scale from 1 to 10 that burnout that you did last year at the end of the race?

NASCAR making changes to COT

After Kevin Harvick's foam fire at Martinsville, along with several issues at Bristol, NASCAR has ordered changes to the COT which will create more airflow from the exhaust on the right side.

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Earnhardt: I don't know, my daddy never liked them too much so I'm not a big fan of them, but people have come to expect them so you don't want to disappoint anybody. It's a lot of fun. When you win, you're pretty excited and it's a great feeling. It's one I'd like to experience a whole lot more often, but we're working really hard to get there.

Q: Could you talk about the mandated changes for the COT and the foam -- what kind of affect you think that will have and your concerns about safety inside the car?

Earnhardt: Well, they had the fire this past weekend in the 29 and they made some changes and cut the foam out around the exhaust pipe or put in some kind of a fabricated piece, a square, to keep the foam if it did get hot not to move down or change its form, and get down near the pipe.

I think that the COT, we'll learn a lot of little nuances and things like that within the car and make changes as we go with NASCAR. They've done a great job up to this point. They're being real lenient in a lot of areas with the car. As we start to understand it, they'll start to tighten the grip a little bit on the technical inspection and whatnot.

I'm pretty pleased so far, but we've only run some short tracks with it. I'm sure it'll be a new ballgame when we go to the bigger racetracks and it'll be a whole other puzzle to figure out.

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.

Q: As you mentioned, the Hendrick team is very hot right now with the COT. Do you think it's fair that this year's champion very easily could be decided by whoever gets the handle on the COT first?

Earnhardt: I think it's fair. I mean, everybody is in the same boat. We all have to learn it together.

We've ran better than I anticipated we would at the first two races already. We didn't test as early and as often, and going into those races without that much data and knowledge about the car, I was really pleased with how we did.

I was really worried that it was going to be trouble for us because I didn't think we would pick up on it, and we still may run into some roadblocks when we go to the bigger tracks. But with the way my team has been working, with their confidence level, I feel like we're getting that chance, we can make a challenge.

We've had some great opportunities and near misses at points in the last couple of Chases that we've been in. We saw where we've had some opportunities to win a championship, and we just have to put ourselves in that position again and try not to make those same mistakes.

Q: I wanted to ask about coming to Texas. Texas Motor Speedway said they repaired the dip. Are you eager to see if they have? I noticed that you are going to be involved in a roundtable discussion before the movie Dale is shown at the track. Can you talk about that and why it was important for you to be a part of that as they show this on the big screen for the first time in the Dallas area?

Earnhardt: Yeah, I'm excited that they've repaired the dip. What happens is at every racetrack where they put a tunnel in, over the year's water and rain and whatnot settles the ground over the top of the tunnel and creates a dip in the track and a bump in the track.

I used the media, but I told Gossage and those guys at Texas how the track was coming into its own and creating a second and third groove, but the dip was so bad at the top of the corner on [Turn] 1 and 2 that it was hard for us to run through there. We were running on cold bound springs and stuff like that. And when you go over a big old bump like that with a cold bound spring it throws the car in the air, so I told them if they could fix that they'd have a better racetrack. He was upset that I used the media to tell him, but sometimes you guys have the loudest microphone.

As far as the Dale movie, I was really thrilled with how that turned out, very proud of the whole project and just want to give it the best opportunity to be seen by as many people as possible. I'm just trying to help that.

Q: There have been some people complaining that Doug Johnson and Jeff Burton didn't dump Kyle Busch at Bristol. They all cited the way your dad raced, how he didn't care who it was or what it was, he was going to win a race no matter what. Talk about the evolution of racing etiquette and who has it changed?

Earnhardt: I think different guys race differently. You have to understand that Jeff and Jimmie are teammates and they're friends and they know each other really well, and believe it or not, in that situation, it's easier for Jeff to go in there and give Jimmie the bumper. If it were another competitor like Tony Stewart or Jeff Burton, maybe that wouldn't have happened, Jeff would have drove totally different.

But being close friends as long as they have, they can lean on each other harder. It's like me and Tony [Eury] Jr., being able to cuss at each other in the garage area and being able to walk it off, and other crew chiefs and drivers don't have that style of relationship.

I think that the circumstances come down to which two drivers are involved and how they've raced each other in the past. Every situation is going to have a different outcome. I thought it was good to see. I didn't think any driver really had anything to complain about.

If anybody had anything to complain about -- if anybody who was having a bad day it was the guys that missed the race who were sitting home watching it on TV. I was very happy to be running up front with a first shot at the win, and I think that's the way those guys probably felt, too.

Q: Your team really came together through the challenges. There was a sense of panic about you getting to the front where you wouldn't make the races or something like that, and I think Eury, Jr. said that he even went to see the preacher man or he was going to church more often or something, but your team didn't fall apart. What does that say about the fact that you guys did not panic through that time, and now you're 11th in points?

Earnhardt: You can be in this sport or any form of sport, anything you do, and you're going to have a lot of things thrown at you. You just kind of -- you see it through the other side, and normally things work themselves out.

Like I said, it was way early in the season and there was no point to really get too concerned with how things were going, and I've always been the kind of person that you give your best effort and the result is the result and that's what you've got to live with, and like it or not that's what you have.

If I wasn't running as hard as I could we would probably be panicking. But we were giving everything we had, things just weren't working out. We just had to wait until it would.