Earnhardt less than thrilled by finishing eighth

Saturday night's Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway didn't provide Dale Earnhardt Jr. the finish he wanted, but the race did provide plenty of excitement from his vantage point.

Maybe even a little too much. Despite finishing eighth and having a dominant car throughout portions of the event, Earnhardt was less-than-thrilled with some of the on-track aggression in the final laps of the NASCAR Sprint Cup race.


Earnhardt, who led nine times for a race-high 51 laps, got shuffled back in the late stages and ended up in the eye of the storm as accident after accident slowed the event as it neared its conclusion.

"I was happy to be able to save it a couple of times because we shouldn't have, and I don't think a normal man would have saved it," he said. "But I was lucky on a couple, too. But I was real happy to come home where we were. Those last few laps I saw so much ignorance and just saw some real risk-takers out there. Some of it was ignorance even though it was still amazing to watch. And we kind of got beat around there and didn't get a top-five.

"We should have finished in the top five today. We should have won, you know; [I] had the best car. But there at the end though, man, I didn't want to be racing with any of them guys out there I was around."

Earnhardt lost the lead to teammate Jeff Gordon on lap 134 of 160 and never led again.

"Those last several laps it was rough out there and we tried to do the best we could," Earnhardt said. "Jeff got a great run on me and went to the outside and got the lead doing what he can to win the race. That's what you got to do. I hate feeling obligated to my teammates too, so I don't blame him. . . . But it shuffled us back a little bit and we tried to work our way back up to the front and we got back into third a couple of times.

"Matt [Kenseth] got a good run. I wasn't up on my toes there watching him. And he got a good shove and got on the outside of me. The bottom wasn't where I wanted to be so I was trying to get back to the top and we was getting turned into everybody and wrecked and it bent something in the front end."

It didn't stop there, either.

"On the back straightaway Clint Bowyer turned me into [Kevin Harvick] real hard and it bent the front end. The steering wheel went off-center and I was just trying to hang on from there."

The outcome wasn't a total disappointment for Earnhardt, however. Jeff Burton spun twice in the race to earn a season-worst finish of 37th, which allowed Earnhardt to move past him into second in the series standings. That's the highest Earnhardt has been all season.

But he still wanted more on Saturday. He has two points victories and several more wins in non-points-paying events at Daytona.

"We've got to better capitalize on these types of wins at these types of races than we have been. I haven't done what I think I should be able to do on [restrictor]-plate tracks," said Earnhardt, who trails race winner and points leader Kyle Busch by 182. "I've been given great equipment and I've just been not making the right decisions at the end. I need to change my mentality or something going into those last 20 laps or something, and just have a little luck."