Amid banners at Hendrick, Junior looks for his place

When the hot water heater in Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s motor coach broke down during last year's fall race weekend at Richmond, Va., his future employer stepped forward with a potential replacement. Rick Hendrick wasn't traveling to the next event in New Hampshire, so the car owner offered Earnhardt the use of his new motor coach, which would otherwise sit idle. Even though the driver would be working for Hendrick Motorsports in a few months, the proposal made him uneasy.

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"I can't take your coach," he told Hendrick. "I haven't earned the right."

Earnhardt may be the most popular and most marketable driver in NASCAR today, but those facts have never diluted his very clear sense of place. He is well aware of his role in the sport, what his legions of fans expect from him, the weight and legacy carried by his last name. He's as passionate about the circuit's history as he is its present. He knows he has no Cup-level championships, he knows he has no race wins in more than a season, and he knows he's joined an organization with an abundance of both.

Debates about how Earnhardt will fit in at Hendrick often center on the purely visual, on how a driver who likes to wear facial scruff and untucked shirts will mesh with a race team where everyone else is freshly shaven and outfitted in crisp Oxford knit. And it's true, there is often a stark contrast in both personality and appearance between Earnhardt and his new teammates, who aren't often seen publicly in just a T-shirt and jeans. But as much as Earnhardt burns to be the best, as much as longs to unleash that championship driver that he believes dwells inside him, his immediate acceptance at Hendrick centers around one thing -- humility.

It's not a personality trait often associated with an Earnhardt. But it's there, in his willingness to fly to Daytona for a test session he wasn't scheduled to drive, just to show support for teammates who were. It's there in the eagerness and anticipation that led him to be the first Hendrick driver to show up for offseason photo shoots. It's there in the way he keeps quiet and listens when he's on the sprawling Hendrick campus in north Charlotte. It's there in his admittance that teammates Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson are the drivers with all the championships, and his uneasiness with the fact that his very move from Dale Earnhardt Inc. may be upstaging them.

"There have been a lot of references to me coming over here, and it's sort of taken over the headlines here, so to speak. I'm kind of uncomfortable with that. I don't want those guys to resent me for that. I'm just trying to come in here and do well," said Earnhardt, who hasn't won a Cup points event since his triumph at Richmond in the spring of 2006, now 62 race weekends ago. (Continued)