For Earnhardt, negotiation may prove the easiest part

Congratulations, Junior. It's beginning to look like you're going to get controlling interest in Dale Earnhardt Inc., the race team your late father founded. You played hardball, and you won. Teresa, your stepmother, really didn't have much of a choice. You're the whole show. You walk, and she's left with a once-promising but enigmatic outfit that chronically underperforms.

Which, incidentally, is what you're about to assume majority ownership of. Enjoy it, boss.

• Send David your thoughts

These negotiations you've been taking part in the past five months, the ones that reportedly grew so tenuous that you and Teresa couldn't be in the same room with one another? They may very well prove to be the easiest part. From the first moment, you've had all the leverage. You've been in control. You knew that you could move to another Nextel Cup organization, and the fans, the sponsors and the marketing empire would all be right behind.

And you played it all very smartly, using the media to up the ante when you needed to -- the "I want 51 percent" proclamation the week of the Daytona 500 was a masterstroke -- yet keeping quiet as things came to a head. You're a much savvier guy than people give you credit for, Junior. You've got nice little operations going on the Busch circuit and Hooters Pro Cup tour. You're smart enough to understand your fan base, and what it expects of you.

You're going to need all of those smarts and all of that savvy to return DEI to the position it once enjoyed near the top of the Nextel Cup food chain. It's never been a Hendrick Motorsports or a Roush Racing, organizations capable of rolling out multiple cars with strong chances of winning the championship. But at its height, and even in the aftermath of your father's crash, this was a team with three cars capable of winning races. Now, there's only one.

That would be your No. 8 Chevy, and even that's no guarantee. Since the start of the 2005 season, DEI has exactly two race wins. There was the epic blunder when, in the wake of six victories and a fifth-place championship finish, management took all your equipment and personnel and gave them to Michael Waltrip in a misguided attempt to strengthen his team. And in the years since that dark day in 2001, as your team understandably tried to right itself, the rest of the sport moved on. One moment, your shop was state of the art. The next, it was outdated. (Continued)