Promising run for Dale Jr. hits the wall

“I don’t know; just the whole surface of the tire unwound like a string,” Earnhardt said after emerging from the wreck. “It just came off the tire and it popped off the corner. I felt it coming apart through the corner and the surface of the tire is gone. The whole cap came off. Must have been a recap. But I’ve got to hand it to the guys. Man, that was a great race car. We hadn’t been running very good the last several weeks. But man, when we came in here with a great attitude and a great fast car; this is the car that we won Pocono with both times.

“It’s a good car. Hopefully we didn’t hurt it too bad and we’ll just try to go to the next one.”

Earnhardt’s complaint with the three-race stretch in the opening Challenger Round came in large part because of mediocre finishes of 11th, ninth and 17th without leading a lap. The three performances weren’t spectacular but were free of major miscues, enough to keep him championship-eligible heading to the Contender Round.

Earnhardt’s effort Sunday at Kansas was the type to make a convincing opening statement. He led three times for 45 laps with a brilliant show of speed at the front of the pack before disaster struck.

“I don’t know. I’m going to keep my opinion to myself,” crew chief Steve Letarte said over the team radio, trying to diagnose the crash’s cause. “We’ll just work on it, try to put it back together.”

“Yes sir, that’s all we can do,” Earnhardt said. “You boys showed up; I liked it.”

As Earnhardt slowly crept back to the garage, Letarte asked if he was OK after the severe hit.

“I guess my head’s back to normal,” Earnhardt said, referring to the concussion that sidelined him during for two races during the 2012 Chase. “I can take a lickin’.”

After the race, as his crew loaded the scraped No. 88 back onto the hauler, Letarte said everything up to that point had gone according to plan with the car that swept both Pocono races this year.

“We’ve been saving this car for this track. It’s a repaved, smooth surface a lot like Pocono, a lot like Michigan — not really track-wise, but surface-wise,” Letarte said. “We knew that the first three (Chase) races are very unique race tracks and they don’t really carry over. You just have to be OK, and we were just OK, probably worse than OK at Dover, but did what we needed to do. Coming here, I thought we did what we needed to do, too.

“I can’t ask any more of the team or Dale or pit stops. We came, qualified better than we did all year long, and we were leading, so I don’t know what else to do.”

Earnhardt said in a Friday news conference that he welcomed the new-look Chase format’s reset of the points after each three-race round. Now he’ll face the other edge of that sword, needing to rally from first-race adversity with powerful results in the next two events to make the cut from 12 drivers to eight.

That task starts Saturday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway, then will culminate with the Contender Round finale in two weeks at treacherous Talladega Superspeedway, where the next elimination will take place.

“The way the points is, it’s gonna hurt, but it is what it is,” Earnhardt said. “We’ll just have to go to the next race and try to win.”

Letarte agreed, but said the team’s approach won’t turn to panic mode.

“There’s no pressure now,” he said. “You know, we need to go try to win. If you don’t win, you just try to run in the top two or three, and you hope for some people to have some issues. You always hate for someone else to have some issues, but short of a win, I think that’s our best chance now.”

MORE: