Dale Jr.: ‘We got a lot of work to do’ – Nascar

In what could seemingly be called the State of the Union for the No. 88 team at the near-midway point of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series regular season, Dale Earnhardt Jr. proclaimed that the team has “got a lot of work to do” on Dirty Mo Radio’s “The Dale Jr. Download.”

Those words and more below came after Earnhardt’s involvement in an 18-car wreck on Lap 355 in the AAA 400 Drive for Autism at Dover International Speedway left him with a 32nd-place finish, the fourth straight finish outside the top 10 for the Hendrick Motorsports driver. That stretch has also seen the sport’s most popular driver drop from sixth to 11th in the driver point standings.

“Last week, it was ‘yeah, we finished 15th (at Kansas). We’ll get it figured out.’ This week, it’s more we got a problem, Houston,” Earnhardt said. “It’s time to start understanding how severe this situation is and get to owning it. Try to figure something out. We got a long season, lot of racing left.

“Not quite halfway to the Chase deadline (at Richmond) and I’m looking at this teams in the Chase and the teams that are not in the Chase and I know we’re better than them. It ain’t good enough to be just good enough to make it. In years past, we’ve won races, been locked in. We were up in the top five in points throughout the year. We definitely aren’t the team we were the past few years. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on. How we’re getting beat.”

A 26-time winner in the sport’s top series, Earnhardt is coming off seven wins in the past two seasons. In both of those seasons, Earnhardt had already registered a win by this point in the season (The Daytona 500 in 2014 and Talladega in May of 2015), which pretty much sewed up his postseason spot in the 16-driver Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.

This week’s Sprint All-Star Race (Saturday, May 21, approx. 9 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) provides a bit of a real-time laboratory for the team to find some answers. 

“This All-Star Race weekend coming up ain’t going to be the answer to all our problems, but it’s an opportunity to work on some of them. I’ll be honest with you, I’d rather win that (Coca-Cola) 600 a 1,000 times more than I’d rather win the All-Star Race. Running good and running better the rest of the year is much more important to me than stumbling into a million bucks on this all-star weekend.

“If we come out of the All-Star Race winners, but don’t understand how to go into the (Coca-Cola) 600 and be competitive, it does us no good. I put us learning something, us understanding how to get better and us getting better as a team above anything else going forward.”

The team doing most of the winning in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series of late is the Joe Gibbs Racing stable of Kyle Busch (the defending series champion), Carl Edwards, Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth. Those four drivers have combined for seven wins through the first 12 races of the 2016 season. Last season, the foursome combined to win 14 races, including 11 of the final 21 races. 

This season, Hendrick Motorsports has recorded two wins through the first 12 races of the season, both by Jimmie Johnson, among its four-driver lineup of Earnhardt, Johnson, Chase Elliott and Kasey Kahne. 

“As a company, I think everybody agrees that we can be faster. I think with us all working toward that goal, sooner or later the company itself is going to find that extra gear and it’s going to affect all four cars all at once. You see all the Gibbs guys, all quick — practice, qualifying, race. They are all together. That’s because their smart, they figured it out, they got something going that’s working for them and their sharing information.

“Our team’s do the same thing. Once we figure out what’s going on, once we figure out what we need, I think the whole company will step up. I feel positive that will happen before the Chase. … We got to go to work.”