No Junior in New York caps off disappointing season

So it's Champions Week in the Big Apple.

It's time to rain down more confetti on the head of Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, who became the first driver (and only second ever) in 30 years to win three consecutive championships in 2008. It's maximum exposure time for other drivers and their sponsors as well.

But something will be missing in New York this week -- or at least during this Friday night's gala wrap-up festivities in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

The most popular driver in NASCAR will be sitting this one out. Again.

When the top drivers of the 2008 season are introduced one-by-one to come up on stage and be recognized Friday, Dale Earnhardt Jr. will not be among them for the third time in four years. Since the Chase format was introduced in 2004, he has made the main stage at the end of a season only twice -- placing fifth in points in '04 and again in 2006.

This year was supposed to be different, and it certainly started out that way.

Starting anew

Ditching the supposed wicked stepmother, Teresa Earnhardt, and the company she was busy running into the ground that was founded by his late and legendary father, Earnhardt Jr. was starting anew in a No. 88 Chevrolet fielded by the most successful owner currently operating in the business, Rick Hendrick.

Former champion Darrell Waltrip predicted Junior would win the season-opening Daytona 500 and "at least" six races during the 2008 season. When Earnhardt opened up Speedweeks in Daytona by winning both the Bud Shootout and his 150-mile qualifying race for the 500, Waltrip was looking like a genius.

So was Hendrick. You got the feeling early on that if Mr. H would have been pressed hard to predict a champion from his crop of drivers at Hendrick Motorsports, he would have at the very least hemmed and hawed a good bit before picking Jimmie over Junior.

Earnhardt seemed that hot, that focused.

When he finished in the top 10 in five of the first six races, including second at Las Vegas, third in Atlanta, fifth at Bristol and sixth at Martinsville in consecutive weeks, the Juniorella story still seemed plausible. He hadn't won in nearly two years, but who cared? Surely that was only a matter of time, and then he would go on to contend for the title.

He eventually did win one race -- at Michigan in June -- but even some saw that as being tainted because he did so only by milking fuel mileage. He might have won another earlier at Richmond, but he got run over by Kyle Busch.

The fact is, he led laps in 22 of the 36 races on the season. Only Johnson, Carl Edwards and Kyle Busch led more miles. Only that triumvirate, in fact, rated ahead of Earnhardt Jr. in driver rating and average running position.

Outside looking in

But while he placed fourth in some of those key statistics to Johnson, Edwards and Busch, Junior literally lagged miles behind when it came to actually chasing down victories. The aforementioned Terrific Three accounted for 24 Cup victories between them.

Junior never won again after Michigan in early summer.

He made the Chase, starting the 10-race "playoff" seeded, appropriately enough, in the respectable but hardly feared fourth position. Arguably the only driver who faded from real contention for the title more quickly than he did was Busch, who tumbled from first all the way to 12th among Chase drivers before coming to his final resting place in 10th following more late-race troubles for Earnhardt in the season finale at Homestead.

That left you-know-who in 12th in the final standings.

Hendrick admitted he was disappointed in this, citing at one point that it was the result of having "tremendous little gremlins bite us, from tire problems to things you can't control."

The truth is, it wasn't all the fault of those tremendous little gremlins. There were some things that could have been controlled and weren't. Crew chief Tony Eury Jr. might have gambled more at times for victories, risking those precious "positive points finishes" in the process. The entire No. 88 team might benefit from Earnhardt not panicking and ripping into them every time he feels something vibrate in the car after running in the top five most of the day.

The great drivers just deal with this stuff. The great crew chiefs just get it fixed if the car isn't turning the way the driver wants. The great teams work together and keep chipping away even when nothing seems to be going their way.

Let's just say the No. 88 team didn't always deal with even the slightest of adversity in the most positive of ways -- like, say, the No. 48 Chevy team of Johnson or the No. 99 Ford team of points runner-up Edwards.

"I was super excited about the way the season started," Earnhardt said at Homestead. "I couldn't wait to get to work this year. It was a long year, and we worked really hard. It went good sometimes and it went poorly other times. For the most part, I was real proud of just getting this season in the bank and getting done and looking forward to next year."

Yeah, well, most of the rest of us expected a whole lot more than that. Most of the racing world expected Junior to at least be walking up on stage this Friday night at the Waldorf-Astoria.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.