Hendrick flirtation brought Junior to the realization

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- They said it didn't mean a thing.

But then, don't they always say that at the beginning of a friendly but flirtatious relationship?

When an angry Kyle Busch stormed off and left the crewmates of his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team hanging toward the end of the Samsung 500 at Texas Motor Speedway earlier this year, one of the Hendrick team members sought out good friend Dale Earnhardt Jr. and asked him to pilot the car for the final nine laps. Already knocked out of the race in his current No. 8 Chevrolet, Earnhardt readily agreed -- then insisted afterward that it meant nothing.

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Well, maybe it didn't seem so at the time even to the key players. But whatever spark was ignited that day appears to have developed into a full-time romance with the legs to go a long, long way.

As Tuesday progressed, it became more and more apparent Earnhardt was headed to drive for Hendrick Motorsports in 2008 and beyond -- likely taking Busch's place on a star-studded roster of drivers that currently comprises the best race operation in the business. Earnhardt has scheduled an 11 a.m. ET news conference Wednesday at his JR Motorsports shop in Mooresville, N.C., where he is expected to make it official.

Just think of the possibilities. Team owner Rick Hendrick no doubt already has had some mighty fine dreams about them.

Together on one Nextel Cup team: Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Earnhardt and, yes, the suddenly solid and no longer forgotten Casey Mears.

The odd man out is Busch, a talented driver but petulant young man who learned the hard way that sometimes saying and doing the right things in Nextel Cup today are as much or more important than driving faster than the rest of the field -- especially when said driver lacks the patience to turn fast laps into victories without angering all those around him.

Hendrick is where many said Junior would end up from the start. On May 10, when Earnhardt announced he was leaving Dale Earnhardt Inc. and essentially becoming the most high-profile free agent in his sport's history, former driver and current television analyst Darrell Waltrip predicted that Hendrick would be the ultimate match for the free bird.

"If I was in Junior's shoes, there are two owners I would be very interested in driving for: Rick Hendrick and Richard Childress," Waltrip said at the time. "Childress makes sense because his dad drove for him -- but maybe it doesn't make sense if you think about the big picture."

What Waltrip meant was that the shadow of Junior's father might be too great at Richard Childress Racing. That's why he thought Junior and Hendrick eventually would hook up.

"Rick Hendrick will take care of you. He'll treat you like a son. That would be important to me," Waltrip said.

Since the big picture Tuesday included the fact that Richard Childress was off hunting somewhere in New Zealand, that pretty much ruled out once and for all the fact that the younger Earnhardt was going to join RCR.

Junior leaving DEI

Dale Earnhardt Jr. announced he will leave Dale Earnhardt Inc. at the end of this season.

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You have to wonder how much of an impact, if at all, the recent Childress engine-shop merger with DEI, where Earnhardt had just executed a difficult departure, had on the entire negotiation process. Once it was announced that Childress and DEI would share engine-shop technology and presumably lots of other trade secrets over time, it seemed that if Junior went with Childress it wouldn't quite be the clean break from DEI that he wished it to be.

Since Joe Gibbs Racing made it clear that it wouldn't accept Budweiser as a sponsor -- and since it always has been assumed that Budweiser will follow Earnhardt wherever he goes -- that left Hendrick where he seems to have been this entire Nextel Cup season no matter what the event: in the driver's seat. Only this time he was left in the driver's seat of contract negotiations with the sport's most marketable star, despite the fact that it has been well over a year now since Earnhardt has won a race.

Kyle Busch won one earlier this year, capturing the Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway in the very first race featuring the Car of Tomorrow. Then Busch thoroughly embarrassed the venerable Hendrick in the way he bashed anything and everything to do with the COT -- the very car that everyone must learn to drive in the coming months and years.

Add to that some other incidents that did not sit too well with those in the Hendrick organization -- storming off when there were laps to be made in Texas, crashing with older brother Kurt Busch and then dodging the media after the All-Star Challenge at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte -- and suddenly Kyle Busch, even with all his enormous potential, seemed all too expendable.

After his wreck with big brother Kurt and yet another relatively unrepentant session with the media a few days later, where he tried to say the right things and still came off as being half-hearted about it at best, Kyle's driving style was discussed by several other drivers in the garage.

"Kyle is aggressive and Kyle tends to err on the side of [being] aggressive instead of passive, that's for sure," fellow driver Jeff Burton said at the time. "His aggressive nature certainly has put him in some positions he might not have been in -- and at the same time, that aggressive nature has put him in that car. It's a Catch-22."

Not anymore -- because now he is on his way out of that car, sources having indicated to NASCAR.COM on Tuesday that Busch will be released early from the Hendrick contract that was to have run through the 2008 season.

It will be interesting now to see where Busch ends up. Some think it could be DEI, which obviously is looking for a high-profile, top-notch driver to replace Earnhardt. Having the two basically swap organizations and cars certainly would make for some of the fine drama for which NASCAR has become so famous.

Incidentally, Busch has not been alone in bashing the COT. Earnhardt has had some harsh words for it, too, and so have several others, including Gordon. But Earnhardt has become more polished with each passing year and knows how to play the politics game of NASCAR, much the way the gifted Gordon does. They speak their minds without alienating their fans, or upsetting their sponsors.

Earnhardt also can drive a little bit. Critics like to harp on the fact that he's not his daddy -- and he's not. But you can't win 17 Cup races, as Earnhardt has, without having some driving talent to back up whatever equipment you're in.

In the last two years, Earnhardt began to feel that DEI couldn't put him in the best equipment in the business. Hendrick can.

Both Earnhardt and Hendrick hunger to win races and championships. Now they are ready to embark on a marriage that should help them both get what they want, even if they at first failed to recognize the romance that began blossoming in Texas last April.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.