Sorry Night At Richmond Marks One Of Dale Earnhardt Jr.‘s ‘Worst Peformances’

While fans of the top 12 drivers celebrated the end of NASCAR’s regular season and looked ahead to the Chase, things hit rock bottom for Dale Earnhardt Jr. fans.

The sport’s most popular driver suffered through what he called “one of my worst performances,” finishing five laps down in 34th place and behind even Red Bull’s Mattias Ekstrom, who had never run an oval race before.

After the race, he spent nearly 30 minutes inside his No. 88 team transporter talking with crew chief Lance McGrew before emerging to speak with a couple reporters in a near-empty garage.

“I’m just really, really disappointed,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I’m pretty upset, you know? And I think Lance feels the same way. Me and him sat in there and talked for awhile. We’re both pretty beat up about how the car performed after what we saw in practice and everything.”

Earnhardt Jr. and his Hendrick Motorsports team had tested at the Gresham Motorsports Park short track in preparation for Richmond and felt optimistic they had hit on something positive. When Earnhardt Jr. qualified ninth for Saturday’s race, the team’s optimism only grew.

And then the race started.

Earnhardt Jr. went backward and backward some more. He said his car was so tight off of Turn 4, “I was just getting killed. The guys were beating the shit out of me.”

The team tried to make changes, but Earnhardt Jr. knew it was going to be an impossible battle within the first few laps.

“We did everything we could trying to get the car even mediocre at best, but couldn’t do anything with it,” he said. “... Even though we were going to try to fix it, I knew the chances of us hitting on anything were real slim to zero.”

Overall, Earnhardt Jr. said, “We were trying something new and it just didn’t work out.”

The team had a new rear spring package and front spindles it had never run before, he said, all in attempt to find something – anything – that would improve the team.

“Running like we’ve been running all year long ain’t good enough, so we figured we’d try to go in a different direction, and it was a bad choice tonight,” he said. “We’re going testing on Monday (at Homestead), and we’ll do as much testing as we can do the rest of the year to figure out what’s wrong and to get a package that will work.”

In the meantime? Earnhardt Jr. said he didn’t know what else to say.

“You’ve got to go home and figure out how to get over it real quick,” he said. “Show up and go to work Monday.

“I’m going to go to the Redskins game (Sunday). Maybe that will cheer me up. If they get their ass kicked, that’s not going to be good. Monday will be a bad day.”