Dale Earnhardt Jr. Says His Team Won’t Try Any Wild Setups During Chase

Coming off a fourth-place finish at New Hampshire that snapped a streak of eight straight races without a top-10, Dale Earnhardt Jr. described his Dover car as having decent handling, but not a lot of speed.

That resulted in the continuation of a recent trend for the No. 88 team on Friday: Less-than-satisfactory qualifying efforts.

“We’re missing something really, really big in qualifying the last six months,” Earnhardt Jr. said after qualifying 33rd. “We started the season off doing good at Vegas and Atlanta and a couple other places.”

Not lately, though. In the last 18 races, the No. 88 team only has two top-10 starts.

The good news for Earnhardt Jr. fans is that last week’s great run at New Hampshire wasn’t one of those. The team qualified 32nd there but managed to post a strong finish anyway.

“I like that track, and I always seem to run pretty good there,” he said. “When the car was in race trim last week, it was awesome. I felt real confident all day. And when it started the race, it ran good. We just kind of micro-managed it all day long and just took care of the balance and the setup.”

Will something similar be in store on Sunday? Earnhardt Jr. has seven top-10s in 21 Dover starts, but hasn’t had much success at the Monster Mile in the last few years.

“We worked on race trim for awhile today, and I think we felt like we learned some things in the first couple runs there to start (practice) tomorrow,” he said.

One interesting note: Earnhardt Jr. said his team isn’t trying any wild setups at Dover (as it did at Richmond) and likely would stick to conventional setups for the entire Chase.

“We probably won’t do that during the Chase at all,” he said. “We’re trying stuff that we think works, not really trying to discover any planets or anything, you know what I mean? Not really trying anything too crazy.”

A return to Dover brought up the memory of Earnhardt Jr.‘s May visit to the track, which could be seen as one of the low points of his entire season.

“That’s hard to say,” he said with a half-smile, a bit of gallows humor.

But he recalled thinking at the time that things could still turn around.

“I was still optimistic at that point that we could fix it and get it right,” he said, then added simply: “A lot of time has passed since then.”

The relative quiet and lack of attention surrounding his team since the Chase began (there were no other reporters waiting to speak with Earnhardt Jr. after qualifying) hasn’t exactly been a welcome feeling, he said.