New car means a new opportunity for Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Gone to that great graveyard at Dirty Mo Acres.

And according to her driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr., it was time for the old gal to go--and with the the entire concept of giving pet names to his chassis.

We’ve got some good direction on trying to improve and built this (new) car with some newer ideas

Dale Earnhardt Jr. 

“We’re not going to be naming cars anymore,” Earnhardt said. “I knew as soon as we did that it sort of took off and put a lot of pressure on that car and the team.These cars just don’t stick around long enough to get names.You used to race cars for years and years and they would show a personality.These days, you only keep a car for maybe a year before it’s unrecognizable or it’s cut out of the herd.

“We had so much success with that car last year that we ran it this year and we probably shouldn’t have.There are newer ideas and theories and better ways to do things that car didn’t have. But we assumed, ‘Hey, it was doing so well, why wouldn’t it keep going?’ But it seems like over the off-season there’s so much improvement and gains made by every organization that you can’t afford to rest on what you did the year before.”

A different direction

After NASCAR’s most successful active driver on restrictor-plate tracks wrecked by himself here at Daytona International Speedway in February and finished 36th, then crashed 50 laps into the Geico 500 at Talladega Superspeedway in May — only to return to the track long enough for Carl Edwards to wipe him out 13 laps later — it was time for the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports team to go in a different direction.

“We’ll see how this car does,” Earnhardt said of his new anonymous Daytona chassis. “We’ve got some good direction on trying to improve and built this car with some newer ideas, and hopefully it’s going to go out there and be quick.”

Earnhardt, the defending winner of the Coke Zero 400, qualified 16th on Friday. Although he’s led 593 laps in 33 starts at the 2.5-mile track and earned four wins, 13 top fives and 19 top-10 finishes, the driver credits his crews with preparing a car that can outmaneuver the competition on superspeedways. That builds the driver's confidence long before the race begins.

“Well, the first thing is you’ve got to have a fast car and that starts with the fabrication department, the engine shop; the crew chief has got to be sharp knowing every little part of the car that can influence the speed of the car,” Earnhardt said. “You’ve got to just have everything in a row there. The car needs to be as good as it possibly can be. That really makes the driver’s job a lot easier when the car is a dominant car.

“I’ve had plenty of dominant race cars down here. And when you’re out on the race track and you have such a good car, you gain more and more confidence as the weekend goes and your confidence really starts to create more opportunities. When you’re confident about your car, you’re trying more passes and trying to do more things. If you don’t feel confident in your car, you might second-guess a decision or not do something. Every little move you make out there sort of puts you in position to win.”

There are no teammates with ten laps to go

And no matter how committed your teammates are to working together, It's easy for an organization’s good intentions to end in broken promises in the closing stages of a race. Although a driver may have had the opportunity to draft with a teammate in the first 150 laps, that might not be the case in the final 10. Earnhardt has learned from experience that the only thing he can rely on is himself and his car.

“I don’t think it’s just one thing that you do at the end of the race,” Earnhardt said. “It think it’s from the very beginning of the race and what you’re doing lap after lap is going to determine where you are at the end of the race and what position you’re in and how confident you are about your situation.

“It just keeps going throughout the weekend. The car really kicks it off. If you get in there and you’re car is not where it needs to be or doing the things that you want it to do, it’s very hard to have the confidence in it to put it where it needs to go.”

No middle ground

Not surprisingly, Earnhardt is like many drivers who have a love-hate relationship with restrictor-plate racing. If he seems mercurial at times during a Daytona or Talladega contest, the caliber of his car could have something to do with Earnhardt’s demeanor.

“When you don’t run well, you hate it,” Earnhardt said. “We spun out at Daytona and Talladega, and we have a pretty good understanding of why our car has been unstable. We brought a new car that’s hopefully going to be a much better race car for us. We went back to our set-ups that seemed to work so well.

“So, the guys are always working and trying to find speed and we that really made the car unstable so we dialed some of that back out and went back to our older set-ups and hopefully that is going to be all we need to be competitive and be able to get up there and be aggressive.

“If you run up front and finish in the top five, you can have a good time out there and enjoy what you’re doing. But if you wreck and particularly when you wreck at this place, you wreck hard. You hate it. You don’t want to be in those situations where you’re crashing, and it seems like that’s the way plate racing is. It’s either all or nothing. And there’s really no middle ground.”