Dale Earnhardt Jr. is Excited About Sophomore Season with Hendrick

Does the Sophomore slump only refer to a driver’s second season behind the wheel in general… or does it also apply to a driver in their second season with a new team?

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is optimistic that his second campaign in a Hendrick Motorports Chevrolet will go better than the first.

Things started off great for Earnhardt in 2008, when he opened with a win in the Budweiser Shootout, and a win in his Duel Race at Daytona.

From there, it appeared Earnhardt was on tap to compete for the championship—running second most of the first half of the season.

Then, when the Chase came, things went sour, and Junior Nation was fed a 12th place finish (or last for those who don’t know!)

Heading into 2008, Earnhardt said he is excited about the possibilities and is looking forward to a better season.

“I'm really excited.  I'm looking forward to going into the season.  It will get here when it gets here.  We've got a few more weeks of off season left, Super Bowls to watch and whatnot.  But just being around the racetrack today has been exciting, truly, to drive in and see the banks and the school cars going around, to sit here with the trophy and see some of the press and some of the other drivers really sort of gets your blood boiling a little bit and gets you excited about coming back and getting going,” Earnhardt told reporters during a press conference held over the weekend.

He also said he was interested to see how the no-testing ban would affect teams, saying he felt it would have “zero effect” on his team.

When asked if it was hard to “switch back on” following a long off-season, Earnhardt said, “No.”

“That really only takes a couple laps really to get reacclimated with everything going on, the speed and the senses and all the things you're trying to do.  But it should just be like an old shoe, you know, your favorite pair of slippers or whatever,” Earnhardt said. “It is an on off switch for me I feel like, and I'm glad to turn it on, and I'm glad to turn it off.  Just whatever I need to be doing, whatever the job is at the time.”

During the off-season, Earnhardt said he and crew chief Tony Eury Jr. spent some time together, and even went hunting together in Missouri.

One thing the duo didn’t talk about: Strategies.

“We really never talk much about strategy until we're actually there at the race weekend.  Depending on the racetrack there's a certain way you do things.  I've got to go over there next Tuesday, sit in a few seats and sit in a few cars and shoot the breeze a little bit with the guys.  We're having a company luncheon that we always have, a quarterly company luncheon.  So that's always fun.  They always have good fun and everybody gets excited about that,” he said.

“Yeah, we haven't really spent a whole lot of time talking.  Like I said, we went hunting for four or five days together and took our uncles, Robert and Jimmy Gee.  But we just talked about everything else or nothing at all, really.”

Not only is Earnhardt in his Sophomore season with Hendrick Motorsports, but the Car of Tomorrow also enters its second year.

When asked if the new car changed a lot of the previous strategies that worked, Earnhardt said the car is a bit more difficult to move through the pack with.

He continued to say the car punches a bigger hole in the air, and that when you get three or four lined up, the center lane—once an option—is no longer available.

“There's no air on the car and you really just lose the front or the back, one or the other trying to go into the middle and make something happen.  It's just really hard to get any grip out of the car.  The car has a lot less down force, especially it has a whole lot worse down force package in the draft or behind other people, it's a lot worse than the old car.  It's just a challenge trying to get it run, trying to make a run happen on somebody and trying to get up alongside of them and get by them.,” Earnhardt said.

“The great thing about the 500, though, is it starts in the daytime and ends at night, so when the sun goes down the temperature goes down, the grip comes up a little bit, so the racing    right at the end of the race it's a whole lot better than what you've seen all day long.”

Just last week it was reported that Memphis Barbecue had offered Earnhardt a life-time supply of their product, if he would show up for the Memphis Nationwide race.

After making sure the person asking the question wasn’t an employee of the company, Earnhardt laughed it off.

“I don't know, those kind of deals kind of get under your skin a little bit because obviously I haven't raced there since 1999, and I probably won't be going back there any time soon, and they just use my name to try to sell tickets and try to start some gimmick.  They were saying in their press release that they watched a television show called Cribs where I talked about Memphis barbecue and I specifically pulled out the package of barbecue that I liked, and it's called Rendezvous and I mentioned that on the show. 

"So they knew that Rendezvous, if anybody has ever been to Memphis and ate there, they know it's great barbecue ribs, so they know that that was my favorite.  But they mentioned their track sponsored barbecue place so they got a plug for no damn reason, and Rendezvous who has been there forever doesn't get a word in.”

After a little laughter, Earnhardt said if Rendezvous upped the ante to include the ribs, he may begin talking with them.

In all seriousness, Earnhardt said, he knew they were just trying to do their jobs and with the tough economic times, the company was just trying to get fans in the seats.

“They're definitely in between a rock and a hard place trying to get people to come out there and watch races, but I was really more upset for the guys at Rendezvous that have been around for years, and everybody knows that's the best place in Memphis, hands down.”

Getting back on the topic of his Sophomore season at Hendrick, reporters asked Earnhardt to sum up his first year with a new team.

“As far as last year, I mean, I was real happy how we started the season.  The first half of the year was great.  We were second in points, we ran great right out of the box.  We were actually one of the better teams in our stable for the first couple, two, three months.  Then the last half of the season was a steady stream of disappointments, especially in the Chase.  I was very disappointed with how we ran, but the whole team was.  I was not disappointed in any one individual or anything, we just    we just didn't get it done.  We damn sure didn't get it done.”

He added that it was frustrating to start so well and falter at the end, and that all he could do was work even harder at it this season, to ensure it didn’t happen again.

As for the merger at his former team, Earnhardt said he didn’t know much more than what had been reported in the papers and on line.

“You know, as far as the merger, I'm pretty happy, I think, for them.  You can't get a word out of Martin [Truex Jr.].  He's like talking to a rock.  I see him on the Internet all the time, try to talk to him, just get… I have no idea what's going on over there.  The only thing I know about what's going on over there is what you guys are printing, and I don't know whether to believe half of that because you just don't know.  Hell, y'all might not be getting the truth.”

Earnhardt continued to say that from what he has seen, merging usually benefits everyone.

He added that Chip Ganassi has real strong views and is a strong competitor in all levels of auto racing.

Another positive for the merger is the visibility at the track that Ganassi will bring.

Teresa Earnhardt spends very little time at the track, and Earnhardt expressed how important the track time was.

“Now they've got one of the owners that will be at the racetrack.  A driver has questions and he needs to talk to an owner sometimes on a Friday night or a Saturday, so that will be good.”

Moving onto a different topic, Earnhardt was asked who he had met over the years that he was most surprised was a NASCAR fan.

“I mean, I met a lot of different people.  But it surprises you, I guess, to    more so to meet the people that don't know much about the sport and then run into them down the road after they've experienced it.  You bring a lot of guys like [Mathew] McConaughey and people like that who have never been around this and then they experience it and you see them six months down the road, and they've become a fan.  That's what's really great.  That's what I like about it.  Everybody we show this to typically falls in love with it.”

When it comes to the new format for the Budweiser Shootout, Earnhardt isn’t impressed.

“I wish you wouldn't have asked me because I didn't want to talk about it.  I don't like the new format.  You had a race for guys who won poles, you had a race for guys who won races in the middle of the season, and now neither one of those are hardly recognizable.  I mean, if NASCAR    I haven't asked NASCAR why they changed it, so I don't feel like I can rightfully say much without giving them the opportunity to defend themselves for their reasons.  But apparently there were some reasons they changed it, and it's obviously better for the manufacturers with this new format for the Shootout.  But it's less about why the race was started in the first place.”

"It just sucks because I'm such a historian of the sport, and I just like all the history and I like all the cool things about the history, and I like looking back on the guys who were in this race in the '80s and '90s and why they were in it and how they got in it and who missed it the next year and made it the next year.  I don't know, just sort of    things change.  Maybe there's nothing wrong with this new format.  Maybe I just hate change.  But I don't like it.  I like the old format.”

Earnhardt’s old car—the No. 8 at DEI—will be attempting the Daytona 500, but may be parked the majority of the season.

While Earnhardt left the team, he said he still has an emotional connection to that car.

“I hope that it's able to run all year.  You know, I think probably more so for Aric because he's had to sort of put off this season, this full season, that he's been so excited about having for a couple years now, and he's not had that opportunity.  I hope that he gets the chance to run this year and run all year, and I hope he's with a good group of guys that will do a good job.”

“Obviously he had a good group last year with Tony and them guys, but they moved on.  You know, it's just unfortunate.  So much has changed in the last six months in this sport, in the last 18 months a bunch has changed, and I just hope we can get all settled down somehow and start having a little bit of order around here and start rebuilding, everybody getting some stability financially to where we can have more expectations than we have questions.”

As for any advice he was given growing up, Earnhardt said the number one thing was to not get involved with drugs.

“For some reason my daddy was real adamant, and he mentioned it almost on a daily basis or a weekly basis at least about staying away from it, stay away from people who were doing it.  I think he was worried because he was out of town racing.  He just didn't know what me and Kelly were doing on the weekends.  But he talked about it a lot, talked about it all the time.  I had no idea how close it was to me.  I had no idea    I assumed that that was miles and miles away.”

Earnhardt enters 2009 with 18 career victories in nine full-time seasons.

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Source: NASCAR Media (PR)