NASCAR Atlanta 2015: Dale Earnhardt Jr. finishes 3rd, enthused by new crew chief

When the season began there were questions how Dale Earnhardt Jr. would do without crew chief Steve Letarte, who left to become an NBC Sports analyst.

Through two races, the early returns indicate Earnhardt will be just fine with Greg Ives, Letarte’s replacement. Earnhardt and Ives teamed to finish third Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, the second consecutive week they’ve finished in that position.

The strong start has Earnhardt optimistic -- not only about his new crew chief, but the performance of his pit crew, which underwent some other personnel changes over the offseason.

“Happy with the car. Happy with Greg,” Earnhardt said. “Greg is great at communicating. Our communication is natural, feels good. He’s a pretty decent cheerleader, too, for myself, the team. Man, he’s going to be something else for a while around that garage. I’m glad to be able to work with him there. The guys were great on pit road. We’ve got a lot of new guys on the over the wall crew and they did an awesome job.

“To start off like this and get some traction and have a couple of good runs is giving us some confidence and it is helping Greg out a ton.”

Earnhardt was in contention to win the Folds of Honor QuickTrip 500, briefly pulling ahead of leader Jimmie Johnson on a restart with 14 laps remaining. But Johnson -- who had the strong car throughout the afternoon -- re-passed Earnhardt and then drove away for the victory.

“I got outside (Johnson) there on that last restart, but I knew in Turns 3 and 4 I didn’t have the preferred line,” Earnhardt said. “He was pretty quick around the bottom.”

Earnhardt would hit some debris over the final lap, putting a hole in the nose of the No. 88 car. The damage slowed him just enough where Kevin Harvick was able to pass him for second.

“We ran over something on the racetrack, knocked the grille out of it,” Earnhardt said. “It hurt the aerodynamics. Think we might have been able to race Kevin a little bit -- it was pretty much over with when that happened.

“Real fortunate we didn’t have another caution because I don’t think we would have done well with the restart with that grille knocked out.”

Atlanta is one of Earnhardt’s favorite tracks, but he’s struggled at the high-speed oval in recent years. Sunday’s third-place finish was his best since 2008.

“I’m just really happy to run good here,” Earnhardt said. “I love this race track. I just haven’t run that good here in a long time, so it feels good to run well.”

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