Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his crew chief threw the dice at the Kobalt Tools 400 in Las Vegas and it came oh so very close to working. They were about 300 yards short of the checkered flag when Oh, Drat!… the number 88 car ran dry of fuel and the big 600 horse power Chevy engine stopped running.
Dale was so close to victory that he was able to drift across the finish line and still finish second behind Brad Keselowski in his #2 Ford who gratefully whizzed by Junior when he started to slow down. Keselowski’s crew was jubilant in the pits while Earnhardt’s guys looked like they had just had a bad round at the craps table in one of the nearby Casinos.
But that’s the breaks in NASCAR racing and it has already happened to Dale Earnhardt Jr. before at Pocono back in 2008 when he ran out of gas with only two laps to go and raised hell when he got back to the pits. Junior now looks back on the day as an educational experience.
As he tells the story, “We were supposed to be fine on fuel until the end of the race, and then we ran out with like two laps to go and I came in, took my helmet off and bashed a fender on the car and just made a real ass of myself. I learned a lot from that experience.”
Apparently Junior did indeed learn from the experience at Pocono because he handled the situation at Las Vegas with calm acceptance. They took a gamble and lost, it almost, almost worked, but they lost. But this time Jr. was cool.
Dale even remarked after the race, “Throwing a tantrum and getting upset and mad about it don’t do any good for your team. They don’t feed off of that. If anything, it brings your team down.”
Coming in second was an OK compensation for the gamble. Dale will still win a bunch of money and rack up some more points toward the Sprint Cup Championship at the end of the season. Even with just three races done, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is practically a shoe in for the NASCAR Chase which this year has been expanded to 16 drivers competing for the coveted cup.
Junior summed it up by saying, “But you have to stay positive. We can’t let this be a negative, running second and having a chance to win. Can’t let the team get down; we’re going to Bristol and need to stay positive and productive.”
