NASCAR At New Hampshire: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Says Team’s Qualifying Results Must Improve In Chase

Before he qualified for last week’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Chicagoland, Dale Earnhardt Jr. pulled out a piece of paper and a pen.

He looked up each of his qualifying results for the 2011 season, and wrote them down all on one sheet. And it was ugly.

With the exception of the restrictor-plate tracks and two good runs at Michigan, every one of Earnhardt Jr.‘s qualifying efforts for this year has been outside the top 15. And many have been outside the top 25.

“That’s terrible,” Earnhardt Jr. said.

So why’d he write all of his qualifying results down? For motivation.

“Just to get ‘em right there in front of me,” he said. “Just to see how poor we’d been doing.”

The way Earnhardt Jr. sees it, qualifying is the “most important” factor keeping him from being one of the top championship contenders right now. Stats back that up: His average starting position of 21.3 is worse than non-Chase drivers like Brian Vickers, Marcos Ambrose and David Reutimann.

Just look at the Chicagoland race, for example: Earnhardt Jr. qualified 19th and worked all race to get toward the front. But at the end of the race, the No. 88 car was really good.

“As good as we ran that last run at Chicago, if we’d had track position all day long, who knows? We might have been able to win that race,” Earnhardt Jr. said Friday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. “Those are opportunities we’re letting get by us by how we struggle in qualifying.”

Earnhardt Jr. noted there are fundamental changes teams make when they switch from race setup to qualifying trim, including dropping the track bar and adding some wedge.

But in his team’s case, the driver said “we don’t change a whole lot from the race setup.” And that’s likely the problem.

“Our approach to that has got to change to get where we can find the speed,” he said. “We’re not going far enough to try to find the speed in the car. We’re lacking...some variable. We need to do something different with one of the variables on the setup. It’s probably a really, really simple thing.”

During the races themselves, Earnhardt Jr. and crew chief Steve Letarte seemed to lose their touch on getting the cars right throughout the summer, as NASCAR’s most popular driver said the feel and comfort he desired from the No. 88 seemed to slip away.

But the comfort level from earlier in the season returned at Chicagoland, which gave Earnhardt Jr. a boost in confidence about his team.

“I’m happy about that,” he said. “I trust in Steve and believe in the team. I never have any doubts about what they want to do. ... I’m on board with what we’re doing and feel confident that we’re all the right pieces of puzzle to make this thing work.”