Junior OK with Hendrick's intense testing sked

Truth be told, Dale Earnhardt Jr. would rather be back in North Carolina celebrating his protege's first victory and recovering from Sunday's grueling race at Pocono.

But team owner Rick Hendrick wants even more success from Earnhardt and his team in their first season together, so he added Tuesday's test session at the Milwaukee Mile to an already intense midweek testing schedule.


Although Earnhardt admits he might grumble when he's asked to work more in the middle of the week than he did in previous years, he knows it's for the right reason: winning.

"I told Rick, 'I'm going to complain, but I'm going to do it anyway,"' Earnhardt said during a brief break Tuesday afternoon. "And I like to shoot off at the mouth and complain about things, but everybody likes to blow off some steam. I'll test as much as I need to test -- whatever we need to do as well as we need to do."

Earnhardt is having success since leaving the team his father founded, Dale Earnhardt Inc., to drive for Hendrick Motorsports this season. He is third in the Sprint Cup series points standings going into Sunday's race at Michigan International Speedway.

But he has yet to earn his first win with the new team, and Hendrick as a whole hasn't dominated the way many expected. So Hendrick sent them back to work.

"Rick personally wanted to add some tests, and I hear that that's not uncommon for him to come in and say, 'Guys, get to work for a couple of weeks and go to the racetrack during the week and see what you learn,"' Earnhardt said.

Earnhardt isn't being singled out. Hendrick had three of its four teams at Milwaukee on Tuesday, including Casey Mears and Jimmie Johnson.

"We work hard every year, but this year we've tested more than pretty much any other year," two-time series champion Johnson said. "I'd say my rookie year was the only year we tested more. We're running well, but we want to run better. We liked the success we had last year, and we're trying to find out the areas we need to work on."

NASCAR places restrictions on teams' ability to test at tracks where the Sprint Cup series runs races, so Cup teams often use Milwaukee to simulate racing conditions at tracks such as New Hampshire Motor Speedway and Phoenix International Raceway.

Most top teams test frequently, but Earnhardt was surprised how much more testing he's doing at Hendrick.

"We've tested six, seven times in the last two months," Earnhardt said. "And I wouldn't test six or seven times in a year before."

Earnhardt had to work in a celebration around his test, hosting a beer toast for his JR Motorsports team and driver Brad Keselowski, who won the Nationwide Series race in Nashville. Mark Martin gave JR Motorsports, which has partnered with Hendrick, its first win earlier this year -- but Earnhardt considered Keselowski's win a milestone.

And it was a reward for all the hard work his employees had put in since Earnhardt founded the team.

Earnhardt started with about 20 full-time employees. Now he has 105 -- including about 15 who have been with him since the beginning.

"When we first started, we were in a tiny, tiny building, and I made everybody go through so much crap, with the working station they had and how much room they had and it was very frustrating -- but they managed," Earnhardt said. "And we went through a lot of struggles and changes in personnel, and it wasn't easy to win a race in that series. But we did, and I realized a dream for that company."