BRISTOL, Tenn. – When the green flag waved in Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway, Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s No. 88 Nationwide Chevrolet SS didn’t go.
Literally.
NASCAR’s most popular driver radioed his Hendrick Motorsports team that his car had no power. Crawling to pit road Earnhardt reset the ECU (Electronic Control Unit) system inside his car. Moments later, the engine roared and he resumed the race two laps down.
Using patience Earnhardt caught the tail end of the field, but did a masterful job of negotiating traffic while still staying ahead of the leaders. Utilizing the beneficiary of being waved around when the lead lap cars pitted, the No. 88 team regained their lead lap status following the fourth caution of the day on Lap 154.
Earnhardt didn’t have the fastest car on Sunday, but battling Bristol and being in the right lane following the cautions allowed the Kannapolis, North Carolina native to find himself in the hunt for his first win of the season for the second straight race.
On the last restart with five laps remaining, Earnhardt restarted fourth, but stayed tucked on leader Carl Edwards’ bumper to move into second, kept Chevrolet rival Kurt Busch at bay to net his third runner-up finish of 2016.
After the race, Earnhardt described that the engine quit because of a safety function. Designed to cut off the engine in an event of a struck throttle, enough applied pressure to the brake will active the kill switch, which immediately cuts power to the engine, which Earnhardt said happened to him.
“Yeah, we got the Roush system on our cars for the stuck throttle issue, and just warming the brakes up, I engaged that system to kill the throttle,” explained Earnhardt. “I was warming the brakes up like I always do, and apparently I applied too much pressure and it killed the motor.
“So I just needed to cycle the ECU, reset that, came to pit road and did that. I probably could’ve done it on the track and saved ourselves a lot of trouble, but you don’t know what’s going on at that particular point, and you listen to the first thing anybody tells you when it comes to direction, and the first thing that my spotter said was that if I need to pit, I need to come on now. We got on pit road, cycled it, lost a couple laps. Greg (Ives, crew chief) did a good job getting the wave around and knowing when to take them and stuff, and we got back on the lead lap.”
Moving forward, Earnhardt addressed how his team will prevent the issue from happening again.
“We’ll work on that and maybe raise that threshold a little bit because I wasn’t really using the brake that much.”
Despite the obstacles, Earnhardt and his Greg Ives team never gave up and used the hiccup as an opportunity to bounce back, even while still dealing with an ill-handling race car. The 41-year-old felt he had a car good enough for 10th.
“We had about a 10th place car,” he added. “We weren’t really that good all day. We tried a setup that we’ve never really ran here before, just trying to learn a little something going forward, and we’ll go home and science it out a little bit.
“We got real lucky the last three restarts to be on the outside line. We restarted 10th, 6th and 4th, and when you restart 4th you’re typically going to come out in second place after that. I was hoping we didn’t have any more cautions after that. So it was good. We’ll take it.”
Moving ahead, Earnhardt heads to Richmond, where he said his team is ready to win, but if they can’t, he hopes they can continue to produce strong finishes that will help them further solidify a comfort zone for their spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
“Well, I hope the second comes a little easier than this one did. I’d love to get a win,” he said. “We weren’t really as close today as we were last week. We had a really good car last week, a top three car. This car wasn’t that good, but we kind of understand why. We’re going outside the box as far as what we typically run here for setup.
And that’s good. You didn’t the setup didn’t quite work but you still had a good day and you can go home and learn and try to science it out and make that setup work. I like finishing good, and that’s going to help us get into the Chase pretty comfortably if we don’t have any major issues, but we certainly want to win. Going to victory lane is important to our sponsors, and it’s obviously fun. But it’s good for our team to set ourselves up to not have to worry about the Chase anymore. Even though you know you’re a top five team or top 10 team that should make the Chase without any issue, you can’t help but count them points to 16th or 17th each week.”
Earning his fourth top-five and fifth top-10 finish of the season, Earnhardt heads to Richmond next weekend sixth in series points.
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
