Not great, but Junior's first year at HMS a good start

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- It wasn't a win, but second place in the TUMS QuikPak 500 at Martinsville Speedway sure felt like one for Dale Earnhardt Jr. on Sunday.

There will be no Sprint Cup Series championship for the kid named Earnhardt this year. His strong finish Sunday moved him up just one spot in the standings -- to ninth -- and hardly atoned for disastrous runs the previous two weeks at Talladega and Lowe's Motor Speedway near Charlotte, N.C.

Your Turn
Send Joe your thoughts
Joe's Community page
But to Junior and his No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports team, it was salve to apply to the open wounds left by those earlier terrible finishes that took him out of this Chase for the Sprint Cup championship almost before he ever could get up to speed.

"We ran good at Talladega and we ran good at Charlotte, and couldn't finish anything," crew chief Tony Eury Jr. said. "This was the kind of finish we really needed."

Earnhardt agreed.

"It's does feel great finishing like this," he said. "We have had such bad luck the last six weeks and tore up so many racecars. I had been proud of myself all year long for not wrecking cars and for keeping all my cars in one piece. Then I think we went through about six in the last month or something like that.

"It has been terrible. But this is good for my team."

Looking back
This was a season that began with such great promise eight months ago in Daytona, where Earnhardt won his first two races in the new No. 88 Chevrolet being fielded for him by owner Rick Hendrick. When he captured the Budweiser Shootout and his 125-mile qualifying race for the Daytona 500, however, it very well may have had the opposite effect of relieving any pressure he may have felt to succeed this season.

Indeed, it may have increased expectations on a season that already had great ones heaped upon the No. 88 team by the likes of former points champion and current television analyst Darrell Waltrip. It was Waltrip who predicted Earnhardt would win not only the season-opening Daytona 500 but "at least" five more races before the season was completed.

It was Waltrip who said that. But it was Earnhardt -- as well as Hendrick -- who did not flinch when told of Waltrip's great expectations.

As it turns out, they were too great. Earnhardt did not win a points event until gambling on fuel mileage at Michigan in mid-June, and he hasn't won another since -- despite leading lots of laps. He led at least one lap in eight of 10 races during one stretch, including 90 at Richmond, 76 at New Hampshire, 43 in a second go-round at Michigan and 33 -- nearly a third -- of a 102-lap road-course event at Watkins Glen.

Page 1
Page 2
So there have been plenty of bright spots. Earnhardt has been out of the top 10 in the standings only one week out of 32 this season, so he has been remarkably consistent. He has run up front and challenged for victories.

But too many times, especially lately, his finishes had not matched the effort or the early-race successes. Sunday's did.

"This will give us momentum heading into Atlanta and Texas, and that's what we need," Eury said. "We want to finish this season strong. We run strong at these tracks coming up, and it's important to finish this off the right way and build some momentum that we can take into next year."

Learning experience
It hasn't been a horrible first year for Earnhardt at Hendrick. It just hasn't been the grand success that Waltrip and others had envisioned for him.

After Earnhardt's fifth-place finish at New Hampshire -- the first event in the 10-race Chase -- Hendrick took great pains to point out that he has been very pleased with Earnhardt's first season with his organization. But he also made it clear that he, like Earnhardt and Eury and everyone else associated with the team, believes that it could have been better and should be better in the future.

Earnhardt is hoping Sunday is a start down that path. He said he considers himself lucky to be working out of the same building as the No. 48 team of two-time defending champion Jimmie Johnson, who moved one step closer to becoming the second driver in NASCAR history to win three consecutive titles when he was the only one to finish ahead of Earnhardt at Martinsville.

"I'm fortunate enough to be in the same shop as Jimmie and see how they work and what they do," Earnhardt said. "Hopefully a lot of that stuff is going to rub off on us."

Maybe it's already starting to. There were fleeting moments when Earnhardt thought he might even catch Johnson on Sunday. But they passed before he could make the pass.

In the end, the consensus was that his car just wasn't quite strong enough.

"I would have liked to have had that opportunity and I think I could have given Jimmie a good run for his money, but I knew for a fact that wasn't going to be the outcome," Earnhardt said.

The outcome, as it was, did not turn out that badly for Earnhardt. And on the whole, neither has his first season at hm