Earnhardt's future begins with glance back at past

For Ed Clark and his staff at Atlanta Motor Speedway, this race weekend is going to last one additional day. Rather than arriving Monday at an empty facility, wearing jeans and ready to oversee the big clean-up that follows any Nextel Cup event, they'll open up sections of the grandstand to anyone with a stub from Sunday or a ticket for next March's race. They'll have a couple of concession stands ready, and a public address announcer conducting interviews in the infield.

• Send David your thoughts

And why not? Monday brings perhaps the most anticipated event of this extended Atlanta race weekend, one that has nothing to do with the Chase or who might win the championship. Monday is the first day that Dale Earnhardt Jr. will slide behind the wheel of a Hendrick Motorsports vehicle for a real -- his nine-lap emergency substitution for Kyle Busch at Texas doesn't really count -- as part of a Car of Tomorrow test that will keep much of the sport's media corps in metro Atlanta for an extra day, and likely attract a throng of spectators ready to see their hero debut in his new colors.

"We're going to try and make a little bit of a show out of it," said Clark, the track's president. "Instead of coming in in jeans and picking up the trash on Monday, we'll come back in race mode. It will be a good way to wind down from Sunday, I guess. We're thinking we'll have certainly a few thousand people or more here, and we may be surprised."

Only four more races remain until Earnhardt will slip out of his trademark No. 8 car at Dale Earnhardt Inc., leave his Budweiser colors behind, and move into a No. 88 vehicle fielded by a team that seems a lock to win its seventh championship on NASCAR's premier level. But don't look for Junior in a No. 88 on Monday -- sources have indicated that his test car will instead be a No. 5, but not the one currently driven by Busch. It will be a reproduction of Rick Hendrick's first Cup car, which was a red and white Chevrolet driven by Geoffrey Bodine for an organization known at the time as All-Star Racing.

Somehow, it all fits. Earnhardt and Hendrick have long been linked by the late Robert Gee, the driver's maternal grandfather, and an ace fabricator who hailed from the same small Virginia town as Hendrick and helped the future car owner break into the sport. Earnhardt may be the sport's hippest driver and Hendrick may own the sport's most modern team, but the two share old-school bonds that stretch back decades. Sure, Monday's retro paint scheme will sell a few die-casts, but it just seems appropriate that Earnhardt should begin his tenure at Hendrick Motorsports by driving a car with a big red star on the side that serves as a rolling appreciation of the past.

It's a heartwarming story -- how Gee co-owned the Busch car that won Hendrick's first race on a NASCAR national series, how the fabricator worked for Hendrick until his death in 1994, how Hendrick helped Gee find medical care after he suffered a stroke, how Dale Jr. saw all of it and quietly looked up to a man who in less than a month will become his boss. But Monday, despite the paint scheme, isn't about the past. It's the first tangible step in Earnhardt's future, the first time he'll be in a Hendrick driving suit, the first time he'll debrief with Hendrick drivers, the first time he'll be surrounded by Hendrick technology and engineers. Crew chief Tony Eury Jr. made the move a few weeks ago. Now it's time for Earnhardt's new beginning.

"I think it's really going to be the icebreaker for the way things work at Hendrick," said reigning champion Jimmie Johnson, Earnhardt's future Hendrick teammate. "We've been fortunate enough to have Tony Jr. in here working to understand the system. Time is everything, and the offseason is so short, every chance we can have to get Junior into a car around our engineers, around our managers, around the other drivers, it's only going to help. So I'm happy to hear he's going to be able to drive a Hendrick car at Atlanta."

Earnhardt won't be the only driver sporting new colors Monday for the first time. The COT test will be a veritable preview of the 2008 season, with Busch behind the wheel of the No. 18 car of Joe Gibbs Racing and J.J. Yeley piloting the No. 96 car of Hall of Fame Racing. But make no mistake about it, Earnhardt is the reason grandstands and concession stands at Atlanta will be open an extra day. The spotlight hasn't shone very brightly on NASCAR's most popular driver since his quest to make the Chase for the Nextel Cup literally went up in smoke, the victim of one failed engine after another. That all changes Monday, when Junior again becomes the main event. It will be just a small taste of what's to come next year. Thought driver No. 8 was a big deal? Wait until driver No. 88 saddles up, with all that Hendrick promise behind him.

Earnhardt is entering something of a new realm. He's existed to this point as a combination of driver and pop icon, a mixture that leads some old timers to grumble that the kid hasn't done enough to deserve the attention he receives. The 58-race winless streak and the battle for control he's waged with stepmother Teresa have overshadowed everything else. Amid all the failures and frustrations of this season, it's easy to forget that he's won 17 Cup races and three times finished inside the top five in final points. It's easy to overlook that in seasons where he hasn't waged a cold war against his car owner, or hasn't had his crew whisked out from underneath him, or hasn't seen engines explode as regularly as popcorn kernels, Earnhardt Jr. has proven that he can compete and prevail against the best.

But now he'll have to prove it all over again, to a restless and sometimes doubtful fan base full of people wondering if he's subsisting less on his ability and more on his last name. It's unfair, but it's reality. DEI and all the hurdles it presented offered him one excuse after another, whether he needed them or not. Now, there are none. Now Earnhardt has to do more than make funny commercials and move merchandise. Now he has to win, to live up to a standard of excellence set by teammates Johnson and Jeff Gordon, who will have six titles between them by the end of this year.

No more Teresa. No more Pete Rondeau. No more suspect engine department. Now the weight of expectation settles fully on a driver who recognizes that fact more than anyone else. In fact, he seems to welcome it. In a strange way all these high expectations have freed him to focus solely on performance, something that was often lost amid all the distracting tangential issues that always seemed to crop up at DEI. For Dale Earnhardt Jr., next year is all about winning. And next year begins Monday.

The opinions expressed are those solely of the writer