RELATED: Junior's title hopes up in smoke
Dale Earnhardt Jr. said he is proud of his team's second-place performance on Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway, even more so than any of the No. 88's victories this season, but he said he's never going to watch a replay of the race, look at pictures of it or seek out others' opinions about it.
Appearing Tuesday on the Dale Jr. Download on Dirty Mo Radio, Earnhardt Jr. spoke openly, and at times emotionally, about the outcome of a race that ended under caution and denied him the chance to advance in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
Last week, NASCAR changed the rules at Talladega in order to limit a green-white-checkered finish to one attempt, and when a wreck happened shortly after Sunday's final restart, the race ended under caution with Earnhardt Jr. on the verge of passing eventual race winner Joey Logano for the lead.
"A lot was going on at the end of the race," Earnhardt Jr. said. "... From inside the car, I felt like I got a pretty good restart on Joey before they called that restart off, the one we didn't make it to the (start-finish) line on.
"The next time, Joey got me a little bit better, I mean we were still kind of side-by-side, but I wasn't quite as far up on him. And by the time we got to where they called the next yellow, I was just passing him."
But even if the race were allowed to continue for another 100 feet and Junior passed Logano, the Hendrick Motorsports driver wasn't sure he would have felt much differently.
"I got a little knot in my stomach, little sick about how it ended," Earnhardt Jr. said. "... I don't know if we could have celebrated that kind of victory as hard as a well-earned victory.
"It sucks. Sucks for NASCAR. Sucks for us. Sucks for everybody. I don't want NASCAR to get a black eye over this deal, because I really love the sport. I think they did the best they could under the circumstances. We got a rulebook and we went by it, and that's the results. I like that."