RELATED: Dale Jr. through the years
LOUDON, N.H. – Over the course of a career going on two decades long, a driver tends to pick up a few things.
There's also a tendency to lose a little off the old fastball as the years tick off the calendar, but typically, what a driver surrenders in youthfulness, he or she collects in veteran guile.
"There's things that you lose and there's things you gain," Dale Earnhardt Jr. said at a Goodyear tire test Wednesday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. "A young guy … sometimes being ignorant is a blessing. These guys come into the sport and if you can get in good equipment when you're really young, you can just go out there without any knowledge and just power through and just drive on instinct.
"Sometimes that produces very quick laps and you can be successful, but as you get older you gain some experience and understand how to keep yourself out of bad situations and maybe finish some more races and get more out of your car and get a better result out of your car, and over the longevity of the course of the season, you maybe have more consistent finishes."
Just looking at the career arc of the Hendrick Motorsports driver, it's obvious he knows what he's talking about -- having lived just that.
The now-41-year-old burst onto the Sprint Cup Series scene at age 24, picking up 15 of his 26 career victories just past his 30th birthday. A dry spell full of frustration and changing faces and scenery around him from 2005-13 produced just four race victories and just three points finishes within the top 10.
Since 2014, we've seen the 'Juniorenaissance,' with seven wins, career highs in top-five and top-10 finishes, and the feeling that championship No. 1 for Earnhardt Jr. is actually within reach for the first time in a decade.
It didn't happen overnight.
Junior has taken the lessons presented to him through his challenges over the years and finally put the pieces together to succeed in both his personal life (see: his upcoming wedding to Amy Reimann along with successful business ventures, including JR Motorsports) along with the clarity that he knows what to do behind the wheel – not brashly, but intelligently.
"I think you're smarter and a lot more thought goes into what you're doing, and you understand how to be a better asset to your team as a person and individual; how to be in the mix with conversations with the crew chief and how to be accountable and ready to work," said Earnhardt, who is 13th in points as the series turns this weekend to a race at Pocono that he won in 2014.
"When you're young, you're just going and doing and you're just trying to have as much fun as you can away from the track. As you get older, you realize the more you put in the more you get out of it.”