TALLADEGA, Ala. — One of NASCAR’s best restrictor-plate racers going these days wanted to pay tribute to arguably the best of all-time — but came up just short.
Defending race-winner Ricky Stenhouse Jr. led four laps and came home with a top-five finish in Sunday’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway. A great run for a team looking to find its footing in the early stages of the 2018 season, sure, but not quite enough for the Roush Fenway Racing driver to honor one of his racing heroes.
RELATED: Full race results
“I really wanted to win on Dale Sr.’s birthday,” Stenhouse said on pit road following the race. “That would’ve been pretty cool.”
Earnhardt, who won a whopping 10 times at the Alabama track, would have turned 67 on Sunday.
While still a disappointing race in the “tribute category,” the top-five finish comes at a significant time for Stenhouse and crew. A questionable start to the season saw no top-10 finishes for the No. 17 driver through the first seven races and a ticket to the NASCAR Playoffs on points looking unlikely — never too early to start thinking about that, after all.
PHOTOS: All of Earnhardt’s wins
A spectacular fourth-place run at Bristol brought him to 18th in points, but Stenhouse was knocked down to 19th after a 23rd-place run at Richmond. Had he been caught up in either of the major wrecks Sunday, Stenhouse likely would have been looking at clawing his way out of a sub-top-20-in-points scenario throughout the late spring/early summer.
And he’d be working his way back up racing at tracks he hasn’t seen a tremendous amount of success at — the 30-year-old has but one top-10 finish in 43 starts at the next four tracks combined.
RELATED: Stenhouse’s career statistics
Instead, his second top five and top 10 of the season has him 15th in points — and in the provisional playoff field.
“The way our season’s been going and not getting good finishes; running OK but not really finishing it off, I feel really good that we got points in both stages and came home with a top five,” Stenhouse said. “Yeah, we wanted to win … that was a bummer, but all-in-all it was a fun day. Had a lot of fun. …
” … Any time you can come to a speedway and run up front, lead some laps and gain some points on 16th is huge for us,” he continued. “We feel like we’ve not had a great season, but a decent season. And we’re still in the talks of that 16th place in points. That’s really what we wanted to do. We wanted to obviously get a win, but that wasn’t in the mix for us, but a top five is good.”
As far as next weekend’s 400-miler at Dover International Speedway — where Stenhouse owns an average finish of 20.9 and has finished 37th or worse in three of the past four spring races — perhaps those numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“I look forward to going to Dover,” Stenhouse said. “I think we’ve had maybe a little bit more speed in our cars than where we’ve finished the races and that’s just a product of bad luck on a few things; car-wise and mistakes by me. If we can continue to clean that up, we’ll be in decent shape moving forward.”
Either way, Stenhouse continues to grind and improve and isn’t happy with settling for where he’s at in his career right now, in terms of consistent results. And winning on Sunday or not, that’s something that “The Intimidator” would’ve respected the hell out of.