MOORESVILLE, N.C. (March 3, 2016) – Sunday’s Folds of Honor 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway was the first test of the new low-downforce package for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, and there were a lot of people anxiously awaiting a sense of whether it would work as intended.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. was one of them, and after finishing second to teammate Jimmie Johnson, he made his opinion known.
It’s a keeper…so far.
“It was a good old-school race,” he said. “If you liked racing in the 1980s and 1990s, you saw it today. That’s exactly what it was like back then. Obviously, I didn’t drive the cars, but watching as a kid, it’s exactly what the race at Atlanta reminded me of.”
Those words have to resonate in Daytona Beach, just as they resonate with JR Nation. When the most popular driver is saying good things about the racing, the tires, the whole weekend, everybody benefits.
“Man, what a day, what a weekend,” Earnhardt Jr. said, kicking off his weekly Dale Jr. Download podcast on Dirty Mo Radio. “It was interesting. We ran that [low-downforce] package a little bit last year and all the drivers seemed to like it. The drivers were the ones that pushed to have this package, and NASCAR liked what they saw in the races we had last year, so that’s how we ended up getting this package all year long.”
A week after finishing 36th at Daytona, it was a moral imperative that the weekend in Atlanta went well, he said.
“The weekend was really important for me, because last weekend at Daytona was such a disappointment,” Earnhardt Jr. opined. “Finishing 36th the first race of the year puts you in a big hole in the points, so we needed to come back to Atlanta and get a top-five finish, recoup those lost points and get ourselves back up into the top 20, top 15, sort of climb our way back up. That had to start at Atlanta. We needed to rebound, and we did.”
And he had fun doing it, too, which is important when you’re at the second stop of the year and have 35 more to go (including non-point events). Between the new rules and the new tire Goodyear brought to the track, it was an uplifting experience.
“When the race started, I went toward the front real fast,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I was trying not to use up the car or the tires. I knew that was going to be important. It was a softer tire than we normally run there, because with the low-downforce package, Goodyear was able to come with a softer tire, which they did a great job on.”
Straight out of the box, the teams were challenged with a long green-flag run, and on the abrasive track surface it was a true test of the new rubber.
“I ended up using up that first set of tires pretty badly,” Earnhardt Jr. admitted. “I ended up getting real loose and falling back a little bit. But we started short-pitting, which was again unique in the fact that the tires were wearing out before a full load of fuel ran out. You saw everyone short-pitting all day long, and that’s good. That’s good for racing, it allows some guys to run a little bit longer than others. You have comers and goers, guys on old tires, new tires, and so forth, and you see a lot of passing for position due to that, so we had a lot more racing going on the race track because Goodyear brought a tire that not only fell off and slowed down, it also wore out without blowing out.
“If you ran it too hard or too long or too sideways, you could certainly blow the tire out. There should be that repercussion. What we had before was, the tire had to be so hard to withstand the loads that we created with all that downforce that the tire never wore out. You could basically run qualifying laps for the entire fuel run. That’s not fun.”
Tire management is a lost art among today’s NASCAR drivers. They can do it, because they had to coming up through the ranks, but they haven’t had to in a long time. That’s something that Earnhardt Jr. really likes.
“You had to take care of your tires,” he said. “You’d see guys run real hard at the start of a run and then fall off and get real loose, wear their tires out. You could take care of your tires, run easy the first 10 laps and then save a little bit more at the end of the run to be able to pass some guys back. It was such a blast. I haven’t been in a race where tires were something you had to manage in such a long time. It was unbelievable.
“That’s what being a race-car driver is all about, having to manage the tires, having to take care of the car, having to drive smart, and if you did that, it really played into your favor.”
Of course, the result was a second-place run behind a Hendrick Motorsports teammate, and that’s better than 36th any day of the week.
“Obviously, we had a great car, and had we not had a good-handling car and had it been a struggle, I know I’d be singing a different tune,” Earnhardt Jr. admitted. “I was really excited with what I saw today as far as the package we have for 2016. Goodyear’s choice of going in a softer direction for tire compound, what they may have learned today versus what they can apply to other race tracks. The challenge is really on Goodyear’s shoulders to give us a tire that does fall off, does wear out, that you have to take care of, and that’s going to be difficult to do at some race tracks.
“They nailed it today.”