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RICHMOND, Va. — A little contact is customary in short-track racing. But the heavy contact that led to the derailment of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s first race since setting his retirement plans in motion came from an unexpected source — a teammate.

Neither Earnhardt nor Jimmie Johnson — his Hendrick Motorsports stablemate — saw each other before Johnson’s No. 48 Chevrolet swept up the track to broadside Earnhardt’s No. 88, compounding an already frustrating Sunday at Richmond International Raceway. Both continued on, with Johnson leading the four-car Hendrick charge in 11th place, but Earnhardt faded to a 30th-place finish in the Toyota Owners 400, two laps down.

"I was running the top (groove) right against the fence and really wasn’t watching the mirrors," Earnhardt said. "I didn’t even know he was there or anybody was coming. T.J. (Majors, his spotter) was giving me pretty good warning about guys getting on my inside, but otherwise when you’re running the top, you don’t have to worry about it. Everybody kind of takes care of you, but Jimmie didn’t know we were there.

"It was an explosion, but the car held up pretty well. It knocked the sway bar arm off it, so we ran the last bit of the race without a sway bar hooked up, but wasn’t a great day."

Johnson, a winner in the previous two races, also remarked about the severity of the impact. After the checkered flag, Johnson sought out Earnhardt on pit road for a team debrief and to apologize for his part in the collision.

"Trying to figure out if I didn’t hear it being told to me or if it wasn’t told to me," Johnson said. "Just feel terrible, obviously. Man, I’m surprised our cars even kept rolling after that because I just bodyslammed him in the wall, and I could’ve easily not heard the clear or something else happened, I don’t know. But it’s the last thing you want to have happen with a teammate."

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Earnhardt started 12th and dropped back in the order with an off-cycle stop for tires. He rallied, but a speeding penalty in the 67th of 400 laps knocked him to 27th when the field reorganized. Earnhardt was busted in Section 15, the next-to-last segment on the .75-mile track’s pit road.

"I was pretty conservative, but they said we sped," Earnhardt said, further explaining that the team adjusts its tachometer to allow for pit road’s curvature near the exit. "We’re real aggressive with our (tachometer) lights. We maybe need to be a little more conservative so that we can get through a couple of these races without issues like that. But all I can do is run the lights like the dash is programmed. I really don’t have a speedometer in there to help you."

With his car struggling to advance on set-up savvy alone, Earnhardt and crew chief Greg Ives opted to gamble with a late green-flag run. Ives kept his driver on the track as other front-runners came in for pit service under green; that strategy moved Earnhardt as high as second in the running order, but on old tires with his team keeping its fingers crossed for a timely caution period.

That yellow flag flew, but for his incident with Johnson.

"Just luck this year is just awful," said Earnhardt, who also spun out 13 laps later after his car developed a tire rub. "I don’t know what else we need to do. I mean, we’re out there just taking care of ourselves and running along, and something seems to always bite us."

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Earnhardt remained stuck back in 24th place in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series points, recording his fifth finish of 30th or worse in the nine events so far this year. With 27 races remaining in his final full season, Earnhardt said his goals for the immediate future might be more modest.

"Greg (Ives) told me last week we weren’t looking at (points) anymore, we were just going to try to win a race," Earnhardt said. We’re so far back. If you’re sitting 15th, 16th, 17th, you probably can’t help but look at points then. We’re sitting so far back, we’ve just got to get this thing to where we can finish. I’m just going to concentrate on trying to get about five or six races put together in a row — top 15s — and see what the points look like after that."

The same could be said for Hendrick Motorsports, which rode the high of back-to-back victories for Johnson in the previous two races — Texas and Bristol — into Richmond. Sunday, none of the four Hendrick drivers finished among the top 10 — Kasey Kahne took 22nd with Chase Elliott 24th — nor did they collect any stage points for running in the top 10 at the two intermissions.

"It’s a competitive sport," Earnhardt said. "You get written off one week and then you’re back in the conversation the next. None of our cars were really that fast, so we’ll probably come back here with a different idea, a different direction on all our set-ups and see if we can’t figure something out. We’ve got the equipment and the resources to run in the top five, but it’s shocks and springs and set-ups that just didn’t pay off today."