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LOUDON, N.H. — The Hendrick Motorsports No. 88 Chevrolet team, currently winless and 13th in points, could use a shot in the arm.
After five consecutive finishes outside the top 10, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Co. might’ve just gotten the boost they needed Wednesday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
“This is a great opportunity to be at the track and just changing stuff (on the car),” said Earnhardt Jr., at the 1-mile track for a Goodyear tire test. “Practice on the weekends is just so hectic and so short and quick and you really can’t make these long changes that take 20 or 30 minutes because you can’t give away that much track time. … We don’t really get to try everything we like to on the race weekends so this is really the only opportunity to do stuff that you can’t get done (then).”
The extra track time is crucial for the struggling group, especially coming at a venue that has heavy Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup implications both to get in it (July race) and advance (September race marks the second race of the Round of 16).
After Junior experienced a stellar year in 2015 (three wins, career high in top-five and matching a career-high in top-10 finishes) with new crew chief Greg Ives, expectations were lofty coming into 2016.
Unfortunately for the 88 team, so was the learning curve for an altered aero package.
“Greg’s an extremely smart, talented guy. He’s won races in the XFINITY Series and a championship,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “We won races together last year and we had a very consistent season. We started this year off very good, but some rule changes have thrown us for a little bit of a loop and we’ve just got to kind of get back some of that lost speed.
“We had some great speed at the start of the (Coca-Cola) 600 and our car got a little bit off but we were still consistently in the top 15, where we really, I don’t think, have been able to do that over the last month. … That’s a great sign that we’re going in the right direction and we’re trending in the right direction.
” … I’ve been in situations before where you’re not running well and you’re not very confident that there’s going to be an answer (to fix the situation) or that the people can find the answer. It’s just … I’ve been in some situations that were very, very difficult to be positive about, and this isn’t one of them.”
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Earnhardt Jr. said his fans demand he runs in the top five, and he agrees that’s where he belongs. But only four out of 13 races in 2016 have resulted in top-five finishes, a year after notching one in nearly half the races (16). There’s work to be done.
He’s confident that the engineers at Hendrick Motorsports have what it takes to “science it out” and regain the speed they seem to have lost over the offseason.
Of course, it helps to have a little guidance from the teams that didn’t.
“The good thing about it is, in the garage, secrets don’t last for long because it’s such a small area and everybody’s working on top of each other,” said Earnhardt Jr., whose last win was at Phoenix in November. “When you figure out someone’s idea, you’ve got enough smart people to take that idea and make it your own and improve it.
“The season when Brad Keselowski won the championship (2012), Hendrick cars dominated the whole year. We had an advantage on the competition all the way up until the Chase. Brad and those guys figured out some of the things we had going on, they took it in-house and made it better and beat us. I think the same kind of thing happened with (Joe Gibbs Racing) last year, where they weren’t doing that well, struggling to be competitive.
“Stewart-Haas (Racing, whom HMS has a technical alliance with through the end of this year) and our cars were running really good all year and then they sort of looked and saw several things that we were doing better, took it back home and made it their own and improved on it and they were fast when they needed to be fast at the end of the year.”
At the halfway point of the regular season and with a spate of tracks that he is strong at (Pocono, Michigan, Daytona, New Hampshire) on the immediate horizon, Earnhardt Jr. has a real opportunity to take what they’ve learned from a two-week stint at Charlotte and a test at the “Magic Mile” — that only included three other drivers in Denny Hamlin, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Aric Almirola — to find a leg up on the competition and settle into consistent speed over the summer.
“At this particular point in the season, it looks like we’re in that boat of watching someone else be competitive. Once we figure out what we need to be doing to get that type of speed, we’ll put our own little spin on it and it’ll hit right when it should be right around the time when the Chase begins,” Earnhardt Jr. said.
“Hopefully we’re going to peak right at the right time of the season, when we need to for a championship.”