ShareThisBy MIKE MULHERN
Friday, November 17, 2006
Dale Earnhardt Jr. is still second-guessing his run at Texas Motor Speedway where he was ailing with the flu, but ran up front early only to slap the wall and lose time for repairs. Earnhardt finished sixth in the Dickies 500 and wound up losing only 20 points to leader Jimmie Johnson.
But it was another emotional afternoon.
"When you hit the wall, you go from such a high, because we were running second, to pretty much 'Man, there goes the championship,'" Earnhardt said. "Physically, the first half of the race was really tough. Then I got to feeling a little better halfway through the race, and I was able to come on at the end and run hard. I was able to be there with the car. I don't think I'll ever see that again in my career, where I had so much damage to the car but was still able to compete."
And now? Earnhardt and crew chief Tony Eury Jr. have been hard at it these past five weeks _ They could have won at Talladega; they finished fourth at Charlotte, 22nd at Martinsville, third at Atlanta, sixth at Texas, and ninth Sunday at Phoenix.
But Johnson has been just so hot and comes here 115 points in front of Earnhardt.
"It's theirs to lose," Earnhardt said of Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus. "But you've got to be standing there waiting to grab it."
And the odds don't favor Earnhardt's being there. In his six runs at Homestead, his best finish has been a mediocre 13th.
"I was looking, with about four to go, and a 100-point deficit, and thinking if we could have knocked 20 or 30 points off a race, we'd be OK," Earnhardt said.
"But they've got to make a pretty big mistake for us to gain on them."
So maybe Sunday's race will just be a battle to win the race, instead of for the championship.
If so, Kevin Harvick is a good pick.
The fast 1 1/2-mile Homestead-Miami track "is one of those places where you don't ever know when it is going to stop aging. Every time we go, it seems like it loses a little more grip ... which is a good thing," Harvick said.
"It has become one of my favorite tracks since they have redone it, just for the fact you can move around, and it is hard to get hold of. There are a lot of different places to make your car work."
Harvick has never won here _ his best run was a second in 2004. Last fall he finished eighth. But the car he's running ran third at Texas two weeks ago.
Jeff Gordon has never won here, either. But he did run strong at Phoenix, and Gordon said that a test here three weeks ago was profitable: "It's going to be a really awesome race because the groove has moved all the way to the wall.
"My only concern is when they're starting the race (3 p.m.); we're going to have another Atlanta situation (with blind sun spots), which we had at Homestead last year."
Gordon is 167 points down to Johnson, and the maximum number of points that a driver can gain in any one race is 156.
Kyle Busch, like Gordon, is now out of title contention. And for Busch the Chase has been a bitter disappointment, considering how well he ran during the regular season.
"The thing I've learned this year is just to settle down," Busch said. The goal now, he said, is, "To get into a rhythm and run the race and just be there at the end."
