A good portion of drivers in the Chase found some sort of trouble in the Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. Junior had some issues but was able to overcome them for a ninth-place finish. A loose wheel brought Junior back to pit road on Lap 123 and left him a lap down. On the download, the three-time 2014 winner took us through a driver’s mindset when that happens.



"You’re going to have loose wheels, you just are. That’s going to happen. Those guys are working their guts out," he said. "They have those air wrenches tuned to do the job as fast as they can and try to cut some time off of the overall stop. In talking to my right front changer, I think that also opens the window for those kind of things to happen so there’s a balance there between having a gun that can do the job quickly but also being able to get those things tight every time and being consistent on that. I wasn’t too worried about it. I’ve had loose wheels before. You just gotta understand that the wheel’s going to come off eventually. So you need to get your butt on pit road as fast as you can because you can’t run well or run in the top 10 if you back it in the wall. You just come down pit road, you’re going to lose a little time. Steve (Letarte) was smart to put four tires on it because we were going to lose a lap anyways."



The No. 88 team battled back and got the beneficiary of the free pass on Lap 189.



"We were patient, we got our (free pass) eventually, it was a little bit late in the race when we got it, but we were able to pass a lot of guys on restarts. Not every restart is going to be awesome but we were able to make a lot of ground up on restarts," he said.

Earnhardt recorded 29 quality passes, the third-most in the race, according to loop data. A late restart on the inside hindered Junior’s chances for a top-five finish, but overall Junior seemed happy to avoid a big issue that affected other Chase drivers.



"After everything that happened, after everything we went through, we dodged a big bullet."


The attention now shifts to the final race of the Challenger Round, the AAA 400 at Dover International Speedway (2 p.m. ET, Sunday, ESPN). In 29 starts at the Monster Mile, Earnhardt has one win, six top-five finishes, 11 top-10 finishes and a pole, which he earned last fall. In the past five races at the 1-mile track, he has finished no worse than 11th place.



Junior enters Dover in sixth place in the standings with a 28-point cushion to move on to the Contender Round, a fact not lost on the Hendrick Motorsports driver.



"We are going in with a little bit of a cushion, 28 points. If we give up 28 points and don’t make the next round, with that kind of finish, I don’t know that we deserve to go any further. But that’s not what we’re going to worry about. We got a good cushion and that makes the whole weekend a lot easier. And we’ll try to get on through this round. Try to go out there and win the race. We get to move on to some tracks that I think we have a better shot at to be more competitive at and we’ll try to continue to improve on consistency. We’ve had some good speed so we just got to get the results to match with the way the car’s been running.



"Hopefully we can avoid all the nonsense. We love to win races and we’re going out there to try and win races. Trust me, I want to finish as high as I can. We’re working every lap trying to pass cars but as long as we’re in that last round with a shot, that’s all that matters."

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