Dale Earnhardt Jr. overcomes opening lap mishap to finish 2nd at Bristol

Overcoming an auspicious beginning that saw his car stall on the opening lap, Dale Earnhardt Jr. rallied to finish second Sunday at Bristol Motor Speedway.

As the green flag waved on the Food City 500, Earnhardt tried to accelerate only to realize his No. 88 car had lost power. Although he nearly came to a complete stop on the half-mile track, Earnhardt was able to coast to pit road where the issue was identified as a dead battery, brought about by the engine kill switch being accidentally triggered.

By the time the problem was resolved with a resetting of the power unit, Earnhardt was two laps behind. In retrospect, had he known the exact problem Earnhardt says he could have resolved the issue without pitting.

“If your throttle is stuck and you mash the brake to a certain (point), you’re going to mash the (expletive) out of that brake when the throttle sticks, it’ll shut the motor off,” Earnhardt said. “... I just needed to cycle the [unit], reset that. I probably could’ve done it on the track and saved ourselves a lot of trouble, but you don’t know what’s going on at that particular point, and you listen to the first thing anybody tells you when it comes to direction, and the first thing that my spotter said was that if I need to pit, I need to come on now.”

From there, the rest of the day centered on overcoming the two-lap deficit. Sound strategy and a rash of fortuitous cautions aided the effort.

When a caution occurred on Lap 53, crew chief Greg Ives had Earnhardt stay on the track while the leaders pitted, which got Earnhardt one of his laps back. Ives went with the same plan on a Lap 116 that returned Earnhardt to the lead lap.

Earnhardt then set forth on slowly moving up the running order. He was inside the top 10 with 20 laps remaining, and on a restart with five to go he was fourth. That positioned him in the preferred outside lane, a significant advantage making it easier to pass, allowing him to jump up to second when the race resumed.

“We had about a 10th-place car, we weren’t really that good all day,” Earnhardt said. ”... We got real lucky the last three restarts to be on the outside line. We restarted 10th, sixth and fourth, and when you restart fourth you’re typically going to come out in second place after that.

“I was hoping we didn’t have any more cautions after that. So it was good, we’ll take it.”

The runner-up equaled Earnhardt’s best result of the season, having finished second Feb. 28 at Atlanta Motor Speedway and last week at Texas Motor Speedway.

“We had a little trouble early, and it just made (Sunday) more difficult and made the challenge more fun,” Earnhardt said. “To run second, it’s a great feeling to come back from what we did. It’s something to smile about.”