Dale Earnhardt Jr. looking for performance to match luck

By SceneDaily.com Staff

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is 11th in points heading to Chicagoland Speedway.

LaDon George
NASCAR Illustrated

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Dale Earnhardt Jr. doesn’t necessarily want to change his recent luck on the race track, but he would like to see a bit of a change in his team’s performance.

With finishes of seventh, 11th, eighth and fourth in the last four races, Earnhardt Jr. has vaulted from 16th to 11th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series point standings.

But the team still wants more speed.

“We’ve had a competitive car the past couple of races,” the Hendrick Motorsports driver said in a news release. “We are getting lucky more than I’d like, but I’m proud of the guys and their hard work.”

With the Sprint Cup Series headed to Chicagoland Speedway for this weekend’s event, Earnhardt Jr. returns to the track where he won in 2005, and where he has three top-10 finishes in nine career starts.

“I like racing at Chicago,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “We had a pretty good run there last year [finishing 15th] and probably should have finished a little higher than we did.”

Earnhardt Jr. has a 46-point cushion on Hendrick teammate Mark Martin, who is 13th in the standings, just outside the Chase For The Sprint Cup cutoff with eight races left before the 12-driver field is determined.

“It’s all about that effort and everyone doing everything they can,” said Earnhardt Jr. crew chief Lance McGrew. “At the end of the day you put the best product you can on the race track and hope you get the finish.

“We’ve managed to do that, and we’ve had some good luck along the way. We’ve also had good race cars the past five or six events. Dale has been really positive and upbeat. We have a positive thing going right now so we are going to keep on with it.”

Earnhardt Jr. finished 25th in the standings last year and was 21st in the standings at this point. He has earned 367 more points through the first 18 races of this season.

“There’s been a lot of races where I don’t think we had the speed we needed to have,” McGrew said. “Recently, I feel like we have been considerably better. … There’s always room for improvement, and that goes across the board.

“I was pretty excited when I looked and saw that we were [considerably] ahead of where we were last year, which is impressive. As far as points go, I’m pretty excited and looking forward to the next eight races and hopefully keep this momentum going.”