RELATED: Full race results
CONCORD, N.C. -- As badly as he wanted to win the Coca-Cola 600 before stepping away from full-time Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series competition, Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s 10th-place finish in the sport's longest race offered a little gratification. Earnhardt, who has not won a Monster Energy Series points race at Charlotte Motor Speedway in 34 tries, kept digging through the 400-lap, 600-mile event and jumped into the top 10 at the end of Stage 3. From there, he withstood a fuel-mileage frenzy at the finish of the race to score his second top 10 of the 2017 season -- his first since last month at Texas. The result was a strong turnaround from last week’s result in the Monster Energy All-Star Race at Charlotte where Junior came in 18th out of the 20 cars in the event. "We think we should be running in the top five every week as a team, so that is still not really good enough, but compared to last week it’s a huge improvement," Earnhardt said. Entering the race weekend, Earnhardt said the team "totally eighty-sixed all that stuff we ran last week." Instead, the team turned to a setup used by Jimmie Johnson, a Hendrick Motorsports teammate of Junior's and an eight-time winner at Charlotte. Earnhardt was very appreciative of the time the seven-time champion spent with him. "We've got to thank Jimmie (Johnson) and the No. 48 guys, Jimmie especially," Earnhardt said. "He was communicating with me all week, calling me, talking on the phone. He would come across the garage and get in my window even during practice. Get out of his car and come talk to me. What a great teammate. I hated to see him run out of gas." Johnson was one of several drivers to gamble on a fuel mileage strategy late that ultimately paid off for Austin Dillon, who led the final two laps for his first win in the Monster Energy Series. Was that play something the No. 88 team considered? "Right now, we need to get finishes under our belt and we weren't really in a position to gamble with the fuel mileage we were getting," crew chief Greg Ives told NASCAR.com. "Being four laps short is really a hard place to be. When you're looking at 3 or 2 (laps) … I've calculated fuel mileage for a lot of years and when you’re trying to save four laps of fuel it is not an easy thing to do. If we are in a position with maybe three laps (short), I think we could have been able to do that." Earnhardt will now turn his attention to Dover, where he has one career win in the sport's top series and will go into Sunday's AAA 400 Drive for Autism (1 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) 23rd in the points standings.