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Auto Racing
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Dale Earnhardt Jr. calls 200 mph at Darlington “Pretty Insane”
By Mike Mulhern
DARLINGTON, S.C. Speed, speed, speed. New asphalt here, and these guys are making the most of it. Fast. Too fast? That’s what some worry. “The speeds are pretty insane…the grip is good,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. says. “I think it’s possible for somebody to maintain a really fast pace (for all 500 miles). But it’s going to be very physical driving that hard and that fast. It’s going to be very physical.” Maybe the tires won’t take it. Maybe the asphalt can’t take it. Maybe the drivers can’t take it. Toyota’s AJ Allmendinger was one of the fastest here in Thursday’s practice, at 178.679 mph, and Earnhardt Jr. wasn’t far off, at 178.640. In fact just about everyone on the track was faster than Ward Burton’s all-time qualifying record here of 173.797 mph, set in 1996, just after the last repave at this 1950s-vintage track. But what happens in pole runs this evening (5 p.m.) for Saturday’s Dodge Challenger 500 is up for debate.
With speeds like this – 200-mph-plus into the corners, on such a relatively small track (1.366 miles)—there are plenty of questions. To put this speed into some perspective, Clint Bowyer was on the pole here last spring at 164.897 mph. So speeds here this time around are a full two seconds a lap quicker. That is astounding. It might also be scary. Or at least it should be scary. Too fast? Well, remember what Dale Earnhardt Sr. once told his fellow drivers: “Why don’t you just tie kerosene-soaked rags around your ankles so the ants won’t climb up and eat your candy (expletive-deleted). “Don’t come here and grumble about going too fast. Get the hell out of the race car if you have feathers on your legs.” Speaking of The Big E, his son Dale Jr., is getting more than a bit frustrated with the way things are going this season. Not that he’s running bad. Au contraire. He is running very strong. But he’s still winless. And at Talladega he angered teammate Jeff Gordon with some late-race moves while fighting for that win. And then at Richmond last Saturday, well, he’s still kicking himself for not doing a better job in the closing laps and taking himself out of the hunt during a stretch battle with Kyle Busch. Busch, on the other hand, is one of the hottest drivers on the tour, and – as much for his amazing driving talents as for his still rough-around-the-edges personality— Busch is now being looked at in some circles as maybe – sacré bleu! – the next Dale Earnhardt Sr. “On the track, there may be some comparisons there,” Earnhardt Jr. says. “Kyle’s fast. He’s running well. He’s quick. He’s aggressive. “This is Dale Earnhardt in ‘89 and earlier. Daddy quit doing that stuff after a while. But that’s the way Dad raced, and Kyle has that same style. He’s very aggressive.” But attitudes? “Personality-wise, they are polar opposites,” Earnhardt Jr. insists. “Give me a break. You knew my dad better than that. Give my dad a little more credit than that.” Well…….the elder Earnhardt, of course, was booed for years by angry fans who took exception to his hard-driving wheel-work and his general disdain for criticism. “Don’t worry about the boos,” he once told another driver. “It’s when you walk up on that pre-race stage and they don’t do anything at all when you’re introduced…that’s when you need to start worrying.” Earnhardt Jr. says he’s not second-guessing the Richmond drama. “There are a bunch of different things you probably could have tried to do. But I don’t think anything would have won the race for me. “We were all going down in the corner too hard. But I couldn’t go in the corner any harder. “The points were the toughest part of it, because I want to make the chase. I feel we’ve got a good shot at challenging for the championship the way we’re running. “I know we’ve got a long ways to go, but we can’t give up anything because we don’t know where we’re going to be.”
The cool way both Earnhardt and Busch handled their controversy was remarkable, considering some of the short-track incidents other drivers have had over the years (like the many Rusty Wallace-Dale Earnhardt Sr. run-ins). “My schedule is so busy I just ain’t got time for it,” Earnhardt said about not getting all riled up. “I’m in a bad enough mood just with the grind of the season that I don’t let those things get to me. “I don’t want to make an issue worse for me. I don’t want to give anybody ammunition. We’ve got a lot of critics…and a lot of supporters too, and I know they would have rather me have been a little more vocal and a little more angry about it. “But I’ve got better things, more important things to worry about.” Earnhardt said he and Busch still haven’t had a beer over the situation: “No, we haven’t. We probably will. It ain’t no big deal. There ain’t no big rush. “It was a big deal. Somebody was saying the other day that was a bad deal. But it was a bad deal for me, and I was pretty frustrated by it. “But it’s exciting for the sport. And whether I want to deny it or not, there are people out there that enjoyed it. Kyle has got some fans, I’m sure. And there are a lot of people that might not be his fans but just don’t like me. “But it wasn’t good for us, and that was disappointing. I wanted to get a better finish than 15th. “It was hard racing, and it was avoidable. But I went in the corner…I blew turns one and two real bad, and he saw that, and he almost had me cleared off turn two. I got back beside him down the back straightaway and had a pretty good run, and I went in the corner—I didn’t go in as high as I had been running, I went about a half car-length lower…and I think he was anticipating me going in where I had been running.
“I anticipated him going on the bottom, because he’d been running real tight on the apron. “We both sort of ran into each other. It don’t make it any better watching the replay. I can see where a lot of people think it was intentional. I don’t think it was, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.” After the race one of Earnhardt’s crew men, Rick Pigeon, briefly confronted Busch. Earnhardt’s crew this year is pretty much the same crew Busch had last year. But Tony Eury Jr., Earnhardt’s crew chief, quickly calmed the situation. “Pidge felt personable about it…but we had a lot of family watching at home, and we didn’t want to embarrass them,” Earnhardt said. “We’ve got a lot of fans that appreciate how you handle yourself, how you conduct yourself properly. “It was a bad deal, but there wasn’t nothing I could do after the race to change it. “Tony Junior told everybody to be cool. That was cool of him. Smart. It saved us from making comments we would most likely want to retract….or starting a fight with the media jabbing back and forth. That ain’t no fun. “So we saved ourselves a lot of grief.”
THE NASCAR NOTEBOOK Bill Elliott, once a terror here, and winner of the Winston Million way back when, knows Darlington Raceway probably better than anyone in the field. And he was a bit stunned by Thursday’s opening rounds of practice for Saturday night’s Dodge Challenger 500. “It’s not the same Darlington,” Elliott says. “It’s going to be a little bit harder to race on, because everybody seems to be running closer to the same speed. The new (winged) car has probably made that a lot more apparent. The cars aren’t going to give up as much (speed over a 100-mile run), and the times are not going to slow down as much. “It’s just different. “I was just thinking that I had to get my act together and get back in the groove because I haven’t been here since 2003. “There’s a lot of grip—and that’s one of the pluses and minuses of new pavement: You’ve got a lot of grip until it finally gives up, and when it does give up, it’s pretty big. “But it’s still typical Darlington – you’ve got to race the race track.” If that’s what a Darlington veteran thinks, imagine what’s going on inside the heads of these rookies. Patrick Carpentier was just laughing about it all: “I was lost. I’ve never been on an oval in my life where you turn twice in the same corner. “In the beginning I was in everybody’s way, but as we kept running it was good – I could see those guys run and see where I’m losing time. Most of it is in turns one and two. That’s a trick corner—just go up against the wall, down against the wall, and back down against the wall again. Then it (the groove) closes down very quickly at the end of two. “At first it was surprising. I was kind of zig-zagging on the track, so I don’t think the other guys enjoyed my presence.” The new pavement may also change the way drivers run this place in another respect, rookie Regan Smith says: “Darlington because it used to be all ‘tire management.’ If you ran one quick lap, you were going to pay for next 10 laps. You really had to conserve your stuff and run hard enough to stay in front of the guy behind you. “In testing (last month) they said at one point they were two seconds quicker (than the track record), but they tried some different compounds on the tires (to slow the cars down, with harder rubber). But I’d say it’s almost got to be every bit of a second quicker than what it was. “The main thing is they’re turning their quick lap with 20 laps on tires, which has never happened here.”
Brian Vickers has picked his former home-school teacher, Cheryl Martin, of Thomasville as his ‘hometown hero,’ and she will be featured on a new series of NASCAR vignettes on Speed TV, May 14th. Martin also home-schooled Austin and Adam Petty, Justin Labonte and other NASCAR kids.
Other personal ‘heroes’ in the one-hour telecast include David Reutimann and father Buzzy, Ryan Newman and high school teacher Frank Cackowski, Ken Schrader and fellow dirt-racer Don Klein, David Ragan and father Ken Ragan, Carl Edwards and long-time friend Timmy Kahoots, and Matt Kenseth and father Roy.
As part of NASCAR’s two-week stop in Charlotte at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, car owner Roger Penske will be hosting an open-house for fans, on Friday May 23 (8 a.m. to 1 p.m.), which will include an autograph session with Kurt Busch, Sam Hornish Jr. and Ryan Newman. We want your reaction, so please comment on this story and offer your own opinions, on this story, on our NASCAR videos, and anything about NASCAR:
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