Earnhardt Jr. goes spinning while moving up in field – Nascar

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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Dale Earnhardt Jr. possessed a world-beater car in all of Daytona’s Speedweeks, but once the flag flew for the main event, it was a night-to-day difference.

Earnhardt crashed out of Sunday’s Daytona 500 after completing just 169 of the 200 laps, abbreviating his day and shortening the Hendrick Motorsports No. 88 Chevrolet that was the class of the field in the fortnight’s preliminaries. The early dominance made Earnhardt a heavy favorite to take his third victory in the Great American Race, but the car lovingly dubbed “Amelia” was unable to replicate the strength.

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Earnhardt led twice for 15 laps early, but was shuffled back as Joe Gibbs Racing‘s fleet of Toyotas — including race winner Denny Hamlin — asserted their power. Any chance for a comeback was stunted in the waning laps, when the No. 88 pitched sideways as he raced alongside Brian Vickers and Austin Dillon off Turn 4. Out of control, Earnhardt’s car thumped nose-first into the inside retaining wall before pit entry.

“It caught me by surprise,” said Earnhardt, who wound up 36th in the 40-car field. “I was trying to side-draft a guy beside me and boy, it pinned the right front. All the downforce there. We have been working on the balance all day. That was our problem. We really underestimated how important handling was going to be today. We’ve had a rocket all week, but it was in single-car runs and at the night races, the car has handled great.

“We gotta do a little more drafting I think there the next time we come back and be ready for the balance and the things they threw at us today. We were starting to move forward and get aggressive and I just lost it.”

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The reasons for the disparity in handling characteristics? The warmest of all eight days of on-track activity since teams arrived in Daytona two weeks ago and the unfamiliar territory for Earnhardt’s car behind the front-runners in a 40-car draft.

“The car was fine,” crew chief Greg Ives said. “Just got mired back in traffic and you’ve got to work your way back up, whether it’s race car or pit strategy and it looked like we were on our way back forward and just got a little loose off of (Turn) 4.”

Momentum or not, Earnhardt said the team could never quite adjust to the curveball that the car’s imbalance threw at them.

“Yeah, well it’s fast when it don’t have to handle good,” Earnhardt said. “But today, it needed to handle and we weren’t handling.”