DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- The speed has been there. The results, in terms of wins, have not.
Dale Earnhardt Jr., considered perhaps the best restrictor-plate racer competing in NASCAR today, is 12th in points as drivers and teams arrived this week at Daytona International Speedway, site of Saturday night's Coke Zero 400 Powered by Coca-Cola (7:45 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
His last victory came last November in Phoenix, 17 races ago. Not an extraordinarily long time, but notable just the same.
Notable, in part, because Saturday's race kicks off a 10-race run leading up to this year's Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. Earnhardt Jr. plans on being one of the 16 drivers competing for the title.
"Obviously we need to get a win to put all that to bed but nothing is guaranteed," Earnhardt said Thursday at DIS. "If we don't get a win going into the Chase we're going to have to do well in these next 10 races and just be real consistent."
Consistency has been something of an issue for the No. 88 team, one of four fielded by Hendrick Motorsports, this season. And his involvement in on-track incidents has been more frequent.
Sixth in points after back-to-back runnerup up finishes earlier this year, Earnhardt has scored just one in the eight races that followed.
The month of May, he said, was both disappointing and frustrating.
"We're a little frustrated with how we ran through the month of May," Earnhardt said. "We've seen more speed out of our cars (but) had some bad finishes, wrecks … tore up a lot of cars this year, uncharacteristic, I think, for us to be in so many accidents.
"So where we are in points is very frustrating. It creates a lot of anxiety between me and Greg (Ives, crew chief). I think we are both not happy with where we are in the points.
"Wondering and worrying about trying to make the Chase shouldn't be something that we're concerned with. I think we're way better than where we are. In the past several years, we've sat around the top five in points throughout the season. Things just came easier for us. They're not coming so easy today and we've just got to keep working."
Earnhardt has qualified for the Chase for five consecutive years and eight times since he made the move to Sprint Cup full-time in 2000. Recent efforts have been promising, in spite of the end result. He was 11th at Sonoma, "a place that I really don't like to race and don't really think I'm very good at," he said.
He finished 39th a week earlier at Michigan, where he said the car was fast, but "we just didn't get a chance to see it and get up there and see where we could go with it.
"So I'm not real worried about our speed because I feel like we've had good speed over the last couple of weeks; certainly in May we didn't and that was hard to do and frustrating. Hopefully we just get to Richmond and we don't have a lot of pressure about trying to make the Chase. We've just got to put a string of races together that will give us a cushion between us and the next guys fighting for those last few spots."
That string could start this weekend. Ten of his 26 career victories in Sprint Cup have come in restrictor-plate races (four here at Daytona and six at Talladega Superspeedway), making him a favorite anytime the series visits the two mega-facilities. He's the defending winner of this weekend's race.
But this year it was rival Denny Hamlin (Joe Gibbs Racing) scoring the win in the season-opening Daytona 500 and some two months later Brad Keselowski (Team Penske) was celebrating in the Winner's Circle at Talladega. Both races ended long after Earnhardt had exited the scene.
In order to contend for the win here, Earnhardt said, a driver needs a car that is nearly perfect in all aspects. With rain delaying the majority of Thursday's practice sessions, just how good his No. 88 entry is this weekend remains an unknown.
"That really makes the driver's job a lot easier when the car is a dominant car," he said. "I've had plenty of dominant race cars down here. And when you're out on the race track and you have such a good car, you gain more and more confidence as the weekend goes and your confidence really starts to create more opportunities.
"When you're confident about your car, you're trying more passes and trying to do more things. If you don't feel confident in your car, you might second-guess a decision or not do something. Every little move you make out there sort of puts you in position to win."