If you listened to Dale Earnhardt Jr.‘s scanner during the Auto Club Speedway race on Sunday, you know the sport’s most popular driver was even more animated than usual.
Fired-Up Dale Earnhardt Jr. Finishes 16th At Fontana (Warning: Strong Language)
Earnhardt Jr. was fired up in a big way on his 36th birthday, engaging in several eyebrow-raising exchanges with crew chief Lance McGrew.
At one point, McGrew even told Earnhardt Jr. he was “out of control” on the radio.
But after the race, Earnhardt Jr. said the back-and-forth with McGrew was “fun” and said he drives harder when he’s pissed off.
“I gotta get intense; I gotta get in the game,” he said. “I can’t just fuckin’ pillow-fight with everybody all day long. I wanna fuckin’ win. I’m sick of fuckin’ runnin’ like shit.”
“I’m intense!” he added, slapping a reporter on the shoulder for emphasis.
Earnhardt Jr. said “Hell no!” when asked if he would evaluate his day as frustrating.
“Finishing 22nd two weeks in a row is frustrating,” he said, referring to 23rd at Dover and 22nd at Kansas. “We actually got to running kind of competitive there at one point.”
At Dover two weeks ago, Earnhardt Jr. said his team didn’t plan on running any experimental setups during the Chase. He said the team would spend the final 10 weeks with standard setups for next season.
But that changed at Fontana, where the No. 88 team ran a “wicked, weird” setup Earnhardt Jr. called “alien.” The information will be shared with the other Hendrick teams in hopes of helping Chase drivers Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson.
“I’ve never run nothing like it in my life,” he said. “I was surprised it ran as good as it did. Maybe we learned something – we’ll work on it a little bit more, see if we can get it better.”
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