Junior's twin worlds of popularity, performance

NEW YORK -- The official awards banquet isn't until Friday night, but that didn't stop Jimmie Johnson from adding to his trophy collection one day early. At NASCAR's annual Myers Brothers Media Luncheon, the three-time champion received an award for leading the most laps. He received an award for winning the most poles. His crew chief won an award, his pit crew won an award, his sponsor won an award, even one of his engine builders won an award. And Dale Earnhardt Jr. upstaged them all with one thing.

Facial hair. Lots of it. "I called him 'Mountain Man' when I first saw it," Jeff Gordon said of the Grizzly Adams-like growth sported by his Henrdrick Motorsports teammate. Hey, Junior is going hunting with some of his uncles in a few days. And he had never grown a beard before.

"I figured, I'd see what happened," Earnhardt said. "I got through the itching and I was all right."

Besides, it's not like the guy has to be all clean-cut for the annual year-end awards ceremony, a black-tie affair held within the refined, opulent environs of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Despite making the Chase after a one-year absence, despite winning a race to snap that 76-event winless skid, Earnhardt isn't on the program for Friday night. His late-season swoon relegated him to 12th in the Sprint Cup standings, and only the top 10 appear on stage. Junior was in New York on Thursday to pick up his sixth consecutive most popular driver award, a trophy only Bill Elliott (16 times) and Richard Petty (nine times) have won more.

It was one of those moments when Earnhardt's popularity and performance, not always directly proportional, stood side-by-side. Clearly, there is no driver that fans adore more. He earned 1.2 million votes in balloting for his latest most popular driver award, which was never in doubt. His value to sponsors is rock-solid even in a recessed economy. He moves merchandise and sells tickets. But even Earnhardt, smart and savvy guy that he is, realizes his on-track performance isn't quite where many believe it should be.

"I don't know what I'm doing to get that," he said, sounding somewhat confused by his own popularity. "I don't know what I'm doing to make that happen. I'm just lucky."

It's easy to forget, with his two-year-long winless streak and his acrimonious departure from Dale Earnhardt Inc. still fresh in the memory, that this is still a driver who's won 18 times on NASCAR's premier circuit and was a championship contender right down to the wire in 2003, 2004, and 2006. The expectations were stratospheric when he joined Hendrick, then a seven-time championship organization, prior to last year. And he seemed to deliver, running as high as second in points early in the season, benefitting from the months of ground work that crew chief Tony Eury Jr. had laid, and finally unshackling himself from that long winless skid with a fuel-mileage run at Michigan.

And then it all went away. In the 20 races after that Michigan victory, Earnhardt finished inside the top 10 only five times. Back flocked the doubters, the cynics who wrongfully believe he's living off his last name, the sizeable anti-Junior contingent that doesn't believe his popularity is justified. And now he nears his second season with Hendrick, and he has to prove himself all over again.

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"If we could have run the second half like we did the first half, we would have been in the top five in points for sure," car owner Rick Hendrick said. "And we had a shot to win some races we didn't win. We just kind of, I don't know what the deal was, second half, about three-quarters of the way, we just started having all kinds of problems and tire issues. A lot of it was bad luck, and a lot of it was not being as sharp as we needed to be. So we've been working on that. We've been making some changes inside the team, some support people. He's fired up. He was off a week, and he called me. He's bored and wants to go racing. That's different. We haven't heard that in a long time."

That stems partly from the fact that he hasn't had much to do this off season; before Thursday's appearance, his sole post-Homestead duty was to ride some contest winners around Charlotte on a Polaris ATV. And of course, it stems partly from the fact that this past year didn't exactly finish with a bang. Earnhardt didn't even complete the final race, going out 21 laps early with a bad wheel bearing.

"We sort of didn't finish how we wanted to, and the season before that was a little bit of the same thing, we were struggling at the end of the season. Anytime that's happening, you really don't want it to end," Earnhardt said. "You want to keep going, and so a week later you're ready to go back to the race track. You just get into the grind of going week in and week out, and doing it every weekend. You're used to the travel, your mind is used to that rotation week after week of going home and going back, and going home and going back. It only takes a week or two before you're ready to go back to the race track again."

And please, no excuses about needing a year at Hendrick to get acclimated. "We were really, really prepared at the beginning of the season, and I don't think we can use the excuse that we've had a year under our belt and we're going to be much better," he said. "We were actually pretty prepared when we started out. We just have to figure out some of the things that were keeping us from doing better, what those things are, and fix them. But I don't think having a year under your belt so much gives you a better opportunity, because it was really good at the start of the year."

Hendrick wonders if all the changes within his team's 5/88 shop last season -- the move of driver Casey Mears to the No. 5 car, crew chief Alan Gustafson moving from Kyle Busch to Mears, Earnhardt and Eury taking over the No. 88 -- had some kind of cumulative effect on everyone there. Already a few pit crew changes have been made to bolster Earnhardt's 2009 campaign. Eury will remain atop the pit box.

"I'm a firm believer of, if you can't identify how to make it better, you've just got to try to help it where you can," Hendrick said. "I just have a good feeling about that team for next year."

Good enough to finally win a championship? That much is yet to be determined. But for Earnhardt, another shot at the big silver Sprint Cup will have to wait. Thursday he picked up another most popular driver trophy, which for the time being seemed good enough. Would he trade any of them for a title?

"Probably not. I don't think I would," he said. "That's a tough question. I would not trade anything that I've ever been involved in, or anything that's ever happened to me for a championship. I want to win a championship, and it's important for me to win a championship, but I wouldn't trade anything that's happened to me in the form of accolades for that."

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer