Earnhardt Jr. thirsty for a win in Coca-Cola 600
CONCORD, N.C. — There’s good reason Dale Earnhardt Jr. holds Charlotte Motor Speedway in high regard, much of it owed to the proximity to his family’s hometown of Kannapolis, which shares a border to its south with Concord, the track’s longtime address.
The 10-day stretch of springtime racing that culminates with Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 is often considered a home game for the NASCAR industry with its hub in the Charlotte metro area. But for no other driver does the track hit as close to home as Earnhardt, who wears his North Carolina pride on his sleeve and its flag above his driver’s door.
Earnhardt aims to fill a major void in his NASCAR Sprint Cup Series resume with a win Sunday in stock-car racing’s longest event. Though he’s entered Charlotte’s Victory Lane as an All-Star conqueror back in 2000 and a winner in the preliminary Sprint Showdown in 2012, his career record stands at 0-for-30 in points-paying races at the 1.5-mile oval.
“It’s been on my list for a very long time,” Earnhardt said Tuesday in a promotional appearance at the speedway. “This is our home track. We live 20, 30 minutes down the road and I’ve been coming here ever since I was a little kid, and have just dreamed of being able to go into Victory Circle here after that 600 and celebrate. Really working hard and I think we’ve got a great shot.”
Earnhardt’s earliest memories of coming to the Charlotte track date back to 1981. He was just 6 years old at the time of that year’s 600. Earnhardt said his family typically parked on the ridge associated with the track’s infield road course, alongside longtime family friends the Eurys, and that he often spent his hours at the track playing by rolling scaled-down plastic Ertl-brand cars — lookalikes to those driven by names like Allison and Yarborough — down the hill.
As vivid as those childhood remembrances were, Earnhardt’s other lasting memories were watching his father — inaugural NASCAR Hall of Fame class member and three-time Coca-Cola 600 winner Dale Earnhardt — race in the family’s virtual backyard and how difficult victories were to come by.
It’s a distant memory, but one that still holds true today.
“It’s such a tough race track,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I learned that watching Dad race here, year after year through the late ’80s and into the ’90s and it was always kind of a fickle, hit-and-miss kind of thing as far as the balance and the setup of the car and the speed that he would have. Sometimes he would show up and be able to really get relatively competitive and other times they would struggle.”
Earnhardt Jr.’s own Charlotte troubles have been well documented, none more so than his brush with tough luck in the 2011 running of the 600. In that May classic, the Hendrick Motorsports driver ran out of fuel on the final lap, prolonging a nearly three-year losing skid as Kevin Harvick skipped by for the checkered flag.
Bad breaks aside, finding the proper handle might be the more elusive goal for Earnhardt, who has finished no better than third in points-paying events at Charlotte.
“Just a real hard track to master as far as a setup and a balance of the race car goes, and it’s always kind of been that way for me,” Earnhardt Jr. said.” We’ve had some good cars here and we’ve had some cars that’ve been a bit of a struggle with. Six hundred miles, so once you’re strapped in that thing and it’s not working, it’s a long night.”