Promising Weekend Goes South For Dale Earnhardt Jr.

An promising start to the weekend ended with a forgettable night for Dale Earnhardt Jr., who qualified eighth but finished three laps down in 29th place on Saturday night at Charlotte.

Earnhardt Jr. began the night with a decent car, but said it started landing roughly in the corner and “wouldn’t go.”

“Getting off into the corner into (Turn) 1, it just slammed real hard on the nose and I couldn’t get in there deep enough,” he said. “I was getting my ass beat pretty bad down in the corner.”

The splitter started hitting the track – Earnhardt Jr. said he felt like the bump stops deteriorated during the course of the race – and the team could never recover. Drivers have a tough time turning their cars when the splitter hits the track, because the car wants to go straight.

Adding to the frustration was an early pit call to take four tires (when most other teams took two) that left Earnhardt Jr.‘s car mired in traffic.

“That hurt me pretty bad, yeah,” he said. “You can put a lot of good cars back there and they’ll have a tough time getting back to the front. We were maybe a 10th-place car tonight, and you stick us back there and we really couldn’t get anywhere.

“It was some odd things happening with cautions there at the start of the race that caught us in the cycle that got us back there, and we never could really recover from that. But the car was never really quite good enough to do it anyway.”

So will Earnhardt Jr. continue to run the semi-experimental setup he said was in the No. 88 car this weekend?

“We’ll keep running it,” he said. “We gotta find something. It ain’t no better than what we’ve been doing, but we’ve just got to keep looking.”

He paused, then repeated, “We just gotta keep looking.”