Earnhardt in position, but knows work still to be done

JOLIET, Ill. -- The blue and yellow No. 3 car is parked, perhaps sitting in a garage somewhere, likely bound for an appearance in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s Nationwide victory last Saturday night at Daytona in a retro paint scheme his father made famous was stirring and emotional. Now it's behind him, giving way to a hot, sweaty, and anxiety-filled present.

The hard work of trying to mold the No. 88 team into a championship contender continued on a steamy Friday at Chicagoland Speedway, where for the first time since April, Earnhardt rolled onto the race track on the good side of the Chase cutoff mark. He's now 11th, with a 46-point cushion, and eight events remaining until the playoff begins. Ever the realist, Earnhardt hardly seemed ready to celebrate. He moved off the Chase bubble by virtue of his fourth-place finish in last week's Sprint Cup event at Daytona, but he knew he was a beneficiary of all the multi-car accidents that left so few drivers on the lead lap.

The idea that his program is the 11th best on the Sprint Cup tour seems "slightly generous," Earnhardt conceded.

"I just think we need to keep working hard, and we need to get better," he said. "We didn't have a good car last weekend, and we were real fortunate to finish where we did. We would have been lucky to get in the top 20 if they all hadn't been crashed out. That isn't good. But we're working really hard, that's all we can do. I know probably everybody says this, but I feel like we're one of the hardest-working teams in the garage. I don't feel like we slack off at all. I don't feel like we lack anything when it comes to determination, passion. So hopefully we'll just be smart. We just have to use our heads."

They were certainly using their heads at Chicagoland, trying to get a handle on a track where Earnhardt won in 2005 and hasn't finished better than 10th since. Friday brought debates over taking the high line versus the low line, work to free up the vehicle and make it run better in the corners. They made some headway, improving from 29th in opening practice to 14th-fastest in the final session. Most drivers made only a handful of laps in Happy Hour, which was paced by Juan Montoya at 181.002 mph. Jamie McMurray, his teammate at Earnhardt Ganassi Racing, was second.

As far as the bigger picture is concerned, Earnhardt is walking a narrow tightrope right now, and he knows it. A few tracks that have been especially unkind to him stand between the No. 88 team and a Chase berth. But he admits, he's nervous about all of them. A slipup could occur anywhere.

"I'm nervous about losing points, not making the Chase, just having a bad week," he said. "I don't think I'm any more nervous about it than I usually am. Everybody hates to fail, but people are saying that we have to think about Pocono or Watkins Glen or a couple of other tracks, and I agree. But I think all of them have to be held to a certain accountability. We need to be able to not take any track for granted. We need to approach them all with the feeling that they're all as dangerous. One is as dangerous as the other as far as how they could affect us in the Chase."

Getting in, of course, is the goal. But the Chase can bring a disappointment of its own for teams that squeeze in and then quickly realize they're out of their depth. Earnhardt has been there before, finishing 12th in the Chase during his most recent postseason appearance in 2008.

"It's real frustrating to make the Chase and not be able to compete well enough to be in the center of it," Earnhardt said. "You feel like an odd man out when you miss the Chase. And then you get in there, you're happy to make it, and about halfway in you feel like the deficit is too large to overcome. It's a frustrating feeling. You're happy to get there, and then you find out maybe you weren't good enough to be in it. That's frustrating."