June 7, 2011
By Doug Demmons
It wasn't that long ago that Dale Earnhardt Jr. was moping around Charlotte Motor Speedway with a hang-dog look on his face, telling reporters he didn't know what the heck was wrong and maybe he just needed a dicatator as a crew chief.
That was two crew chiefs ago.
Considering how well Junior has been running this season it was light years ago.
Following his second-place finish at Kansas on Sunday, Earnhardt is in third place in the standings. Barring a summer swoon of biblical proportions, he's a lock to make the Chase -- win or no win.
By every measure except one Junior is having a career year, certainly his best since joining Hendrick Motorsports.
There's just that one nagging sword still hanging over his head -- winning a race.
Junior is well aware that Junior Nation has hung with him throughout his 106-race winless streak and is hungry for a victory. He knows that he's teased his fans a few times by coming tantalizingly close -- to the point where he almost apologizes when he doesn't win.
"When I get home by myself that's how I'll feel about it," he said after the race about savoring a second-place finish. "But in the grand scheme of things I've got a lot of people that are?- there's a lot of people who will remind you throughout this sport of how fortunate you were and how lucky you were and all those things.
"So I like to beat them to the punch and let them know I realize how fortunate I was today to get second place," he said.
And maybe it's his turn to have that golden horseshoe lodged in a part of his anatomy like Jimmie Johnson and Kevin Harvick.
"We've had some runs where we drove ourselves into the positions where we finished," he said. "We finished well by running well and by getting lucky. And that's what championship teams do.
"And you always scratch your head when Jimmie and them guys look like they're out of it and next thing you turn around at the end of the race and they're right there in the middle of it," he said. "And you're like, 'How in the world?' So now I guess I'm on that side of the fence. I see some of it and I see why it happens. But it's just rolling the dice, man, that's what it was. You know how the dice is, sometimes it works for you and sometimes it don't."
The dice might finally be on Junior's side, but what's it going to take to deliver a win?
Junior figures that qualifying better would certainly help.
"Our best qualifying effort was 20th at Martinsville outside of Daytona and Talladega," he said. "And everything else has been worse than 22nd. That's terrible. Terrible. But everything's out of control when I go drive it. When I race, I'm fine. We just gotta figure out what we need to do. It can't be that hard."
It won't be that hard.
Junior and crew chief Steve Letarte have finally found their mojo.
Look for the No. 88 in Victory Lane before the summer is over.
Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes daily and weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow
Follow Doug on Twitter: @dougdemmons
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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