NASCAR Daytona 2016: Dale Earnhardt Jr. seeking return of restrictor-plate mojo

Restrictor-plate tracks are Dale Earnhardt Jr.‘s forte. They’re where he’s been best throughout his career, with 10 of his 26 wins coming at either Talladega Superspeedway or Daytona International Speedway, the site of Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400.

Thanks to drafting and the horsepower-sapping restrictor plates that lump cars together in a large pack and equalize the field, these races are often viewed as the NASCAR version of a crapshoot. Earnhardt’s ability to regularly contend in them is such that it’s almost taken on mythical proportions.

How the competition views Earnhardt Jr. is similar to how his late father, Dale Earnhardt, was viewed when it came to racing at plate tracks. Dale Earnhardt won 13 times at Talladega and Daytona before being killed on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500.

Earnhardt Jr.‘s approach, though, is rather straightforward. He’s as aggressive as his car will allow, and unlike many drivers he relishes the nuances of restrictor-plate racing, which requires running side-by-side with speeds flirting with 200 mph.

“You’ve got to get yourself out there and put yourself in some pretty compromising situations that are touch and go,” Earnhardt Jr. said Thursday. “If you want to go up there and win the race, you’ve got to put yourself in some situations that are really sketchy.

“Sometimes in plate racing it’s as hairy as you can stand. It’s about as much excitement and nerve-wracking anxiety as you can stomach.”

But as good as Earnhardt Jr. typically is at Talladega and Daytona, he’s struggled in 2016.

Earnhardt rolled into the Daytona 500 in February brimming with confidence. His optimism was buoyed by having a familiar car underneath him, named Amelia, that he had used to score two wins, a second and a third in four restrictor-plate races the previous season. The perception Earnhardt would win the Great American Race for the second time in three years was furthered when he won his qualifying Duel in commanding fashion.

There would be no third overall Daytona 500 victory. Instead, Earnhardt lost control of his car off Turn 4 and crashed into the inside wall, badly damaging Amelia.

Although Amelia would be repaired for the May Talladega race, a similar outcome played out. Earnhardt got loose in a pack of cars and wrecked. He was involved in another incident when Carl Edwards careened into Earnhardt, pushing them both against the wall. Earnhardt’s car briefly caught fire.

With Amelia permanently retired after Talladega, Earnhardt will drive a different car Saturday night. Amelia is now sitting in Earnhardt’s de facto car graveyard that he has on his North Carolina property, where cars Earnhardt has collected from infamous accidents -- involving both him and others -- are scattered about in the woods.

“We brought a new car that’s hopefully going to be a much better race car for us,” Earnhardt said. “We went back to our setups that seemed to work so well. The guys are always working and trying to find speed and that really made the car unstable, so we dialed some of that back out and went back to our older setups. Hopefully, that is going to be all we need to be competitive and be able to get up there and be aggressive.”

Earnhardt admits that because Amelia had proven to be such a successful car, his Hendrick Motorsports team went back to it one too many times instead of switching to a new chassis. That contributed to the handling issues Earnhardt experienced in February at Daytona and May at Talladega.

“There are newer ideas and theories and better ways to do things that car didn’t have,” Earnhardt said. “But we assumed, ‘Hey, it was doing so well, why wouldn’t it keep going?’ But it seems like over the offseason there’s so much improvement and gains made by every organization that you can’t afford to rest on what you did the year before.”