July 8, 2010
By Doug Demmons
It’s amazing how much winning solves everything.
Well, almost everything. But if it could be bottled and sold it would still be priceless.
Consider, for instance, Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s win in the No. 3 in last Friday’s Nationwide Series race at Daytona.
Junior has spent the last year-plus being gloomy and depressed, at least when he’s talking to reporters. His media availabilities have been exercises in agony.
He always does them. He always answers whatever anybody asks him. And he’s brutally honest, which is always refreshing.
But he often looks like he’s in a dentist’s chair and the Novocaine never kicked in.
And who can blame him? He hasn’t won a Sprint Cup race in more than two years. The weight of NASCAR’s TV ratings and slumping attendance sits squarely on his shoulders -- or at least he thinks it does.
So he must have been insane to agree to drive the No. 3 at Daytona, right? What in God’s name was he thinking anyway?
Just imagine the criticism, the ridicule that would have rained down if Junior had finished 15th in his dad’s No. 3 Wrangler Chevy?
Junior imagined it -- and it didn’t look pretty. Nothing less than a win would have been good enough, he admitted after the race. But he also admitted he didn’t quite come to grips with just how big a deal it was when he first agreed to do it.
“I'd run the number before in this series, so I didn't really put a lot of stock in the fact that the 3 was coming back like a lot of people did,” he said in his post-race news conference. “I didn't approach it that way mentally, where everyone else was thinking, you know, 3 is back, Earnhardt's 3 is back.
“But when I started hearing all that, you know, how everybody was making such a big deal about it, I was like ... man, this is like pressure, man, this is a big deal. So I was a little nervous.”
It was a remarkable news conference that went on twice as long as the usual post-race winner’s news conference. He was upbeat, even happy. You’d think he had just won a championship. In a way, he had.
And maybe that’s what he needed -- a do-or-die situation -- to break the lethargy of the last two years.
Could his win carry over into this week at Chicago or Indianapolis and even further down the road? Absolutely.
Nothing succeeds like success.
Consider, for instance, the fact that Junior didn’t do a burnout after his win. You’d think that a driver who had been subjected to as much why-aren’t-you-winning criticism over the last two years would have smoked those tires to the rims and burned that engine to a crisp.
But that Hendrick engine was special, a science experiment of sorts and he wanted to save it. They tried some new things with that engine and Junior didn’t want to lose it all in a cloud of smoke.
So even if Junior doesn’t set Chicago on fire this week, keep the July 2 Nationwide race at Daytona in the back of your mind when Halloween rolls around.
Because that restrictor-plate engine package might be just the thing to restore Junior to his throne as King of Talladega.
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.