Fuel gamble not trademark for Junior duo, but it works (cont'd)

Sunday's drama
Hence, Sunday's late-race drama presented itself. Earnhardt's last pit stop came on Lap 148. Typically at Michigan, a sweeping 2-mile oval, Sprint Cup cars can run 40 to perhaps 45 green-flag laps on a full tank of fuel, which holds 19.2 gallons.

Eury said that initial calculations for Earnhardt were that he was going to be six laps short in the 200-lap event, meaning they expected him to be able to milk it for roughly 46 laps, taking him to Lap 194. A caution on Lap 153 brought some others, including Earnhardt's Hendrick teammate Jeff Gordon, back onto pit road to pack even more fuel in; Gordon, in fact, came in for fuel on three consecutive caution laps at that time.

Earnhardt stayed out and maintained his track position, while Eury and Hendrick engineer Darian Grubb furiously recalculated the fuel mileage for the No. 88 every single lap. The caution laps saved enough fuel that they figured they had enough to coax it through Lap 198 -- still two laps short.

But they knew there were others behind Earnhardt that had enough fuel to go the distance. So pitting, even for merely a splash of fuel to make sure, would have robbed them of any chance of winning.

"I'm not a gambling man," Eury said. "I don't even like going to Las Vegas to put $20 down. ... But if we ran out of gas, we were going to finish 25th. If we came in and pitted, we were going to finish 25th.

"So I told him we were going to go for it. We were either going to win or run out of gas and finish 25th."

That decision was made with 20 laps to go. They were feeling pretty good about it while leading with two laps remaining -- when a spin by Sam Hornish Jr. brought out another caution and suddenly turned the 200-lap race into possibly a 203-lap event because of a green-white-checkered finish.

"I was pretty sick. I was like, 'OK, we're done. I could make 200, but 202? We're in trouble,'" Eury said. "I told him as soon as the caution comes out, shut it off."

Earnhardt did, and coasted whenever he could until the ensuing restart to conserve what little fuel he had left. No one could tell how much gas exactly this was saving, but Eury said later that "coasting around like he did is probably what got us the win."

And the win was all that mattered. On an afternoon when rain threatened but the skies never opened until just after Junior's lifeless car had been pushed to Victory Lane, for once everything that could go right for Earnhardt and Eury did.

Shortly after the restart, the No. 10 of Patrick Carpentier spun on the frontstretch and the final caution of the day came out just after the white flag flew, freezing the field a final time with Earnhardt out front. If it hadn't happened, who knows if he could have made it around one more circuit of the big 2-mile track without running out of fuel?

Earnhardt didn't even seem to know for sure, saying at first that he couldn't have made it and later stating that, well, maybe he could have. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that he won again.

Finally.

"Man," Junior said, "this is storybook stuff."

It sure was.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.