Remember Me? Dale Earnhardt Jr. Wins Atlanta Pole

Maybe there’s light at the end of the tunnel for Dale Earnhardt Jr. after all.

On a chilly night at the fast 1.5-mile oval south of Atlanta, Earnhardt Jr. won the pole for Sunday’s Kobalt Tools 500, meaning he’ll start from the top spot for the first time in nearly two years.

Earnhardt Jr.’s qualifying speed of 192.761 mph was the fastest ever in NASCAR’s new model car, and the Hendrick Motorsports driver edged Kyle Busch (192.280) to win the pole.

“It’s good to be on the pole and I’m real proud of it.,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “But we’re just so hungry to do much better on Sunday. We’re starving for a good finish and for something like this to happen on Sunday for us, and that’s really all we can think about.”

Juan Pablo Montoya was third, followed by the Hendrick duo of Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon.

Kasey Kahne, Ryan Newman, Elliott Sadler, David Reutimann and Carl Edwards rounded out the top 10.

The pole was the ninth of Earnhardt Jr.’s career, but only his third in the last eight seasons.

It was the second time he has won the pole in Atlanta, where he is a past winner.

“It looks like we got some things working better,” Earnhardt Jr. said, suppressing a smile. “We’ll just try to see if we can’t keep improving our team. These kind of runs help the guys’ confidence on our team. When the confidence gets better in what you’re doing, you can kind of feed off of that and you’ll see things around you sort of steadily improve, so hopefully that’ll happen to us.”

Earnhardt Jr. was pleasant and chatty after his qualifying run; not to the point of being openly happy, but a bit lighter than the serious tone he had taken in the opening weeks.

The sport’s most popular driver spent all day in qualifying setup, a strategy which helped him last week and he estimated was shared by about a quarter of the field at Atlanta.

Are things really turning around?

“A lot of things can happen over time, and we’ve seen race teams be able to completely change their identity in the offseason before,” he said. “I’m just hoping to start to see this difference in the car on Sunday.”

He pledged to make sure his car worked on the bottom groove during practice tomorrow – believing it would pay off later – and said he’ll keep with his Atlanta tradition by flying back to North Carolina to sleep in his own bed on Saturday night.

“Them buses are better than sleeping in a hotel room, but them buses get cramped and you get cabin fever every once in awhile,” he said.