MOORESVILLE, N.C. (May 17, 2017) – Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished 20th last week at Kansas Speedway, and it could have been so much better for so many reasons.
On his weekly Dirty Mo Radio podcast, The Dale Jr. Download, the driver of the No. 88 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports revealed that a simulator session gave him and his team a really good feeling headed to the 1.5-mile track, but a series of events conspired to knock those feelings into next week. One featured several fruitless trips into NASCAR’s revamped “Room of Doom,” the one that houses the Laser Inspection Station, and the other had to do with vibrations, and not the kind that the Beach Boys immortalized in their massive summer hit from 1966.
Let’s start with the good stuff, from the Chevrolet simulator.
“This week before the race we went to the Chevy simulator,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “It’s literally an entire car in the middle of a big giant room with a big huge screen, and you climb in the car and drive like a video game. In a room behind you, with a bunch of windows and stuff, is all these engineers, and they kind of just change stuff on the car.
“It’s kind of like an opportunity to simulate changes you might make during a race weekend. Obviously, the practice sessions we had during the weekend were about three hours’ total. You don’t have that much time, and you can sit on that sim and mess around all day long, trying stuff. We found a lot of stuff that we liked, took it to the track and tried it in our practices and man, did that made things go way smoother. The car came out of the trailer quick, drove great in all the practices, our mock qualifying runs were good and we were feeling pretty confident that we were going to have a good day.”
A trip to the LIS took care of that.
“We had a lot of trouble getting through the LIS machine...we joked about that on Twitter,” he said. “You’ve got to laugh. So we missed qualifying for the second time this year. The last time we missed it was at Texas, a similar race track, and I don’t know if that’s coincidental. There’s a lot of confusion on social media about it, so I’m not going to assume I know everything and I’m correct. All I do know for sure is that we went through at one particular point on Friday, and it was incorrect. So we went and worked on it, fixed our little issue, went back through on our own dime, intentionally quit practice early to go over and check it to make sure we’re going to be good for qualifying. We go through, it’s clear, thumbs-up, and we were feeling good.
“After we cleared, we went back to the garage and made more adjustments to make it more comfortable to get through inspection. When it came time to go through tech inspection, we failed.”
Over the sound of a sad trombone, Earnhardt Jr. wondered why that happened.
“We’ve heard a lot of reasons as to why that might be the case,” he said. “A lot of people think that the teams are just lying through their teeth. I am just speculating that it’s possible it may be the wheels. The wheels might have a little bit of run-out, some sort of little imperfection. This LIS machine is measuring and failing cars at ten-thousandths of an inch, a very, very small measurement and the wheels certainly have that much run-out and imperfection.”
One of the engineers from another team Tweeted out the idea of having a calibration car go through once an hour to check the LIS, and that was something Dale Jr. was in favor of seeing. “I did see that Tweet, and it’s very interesting,” he quipped. “I think they should do it.”
The penalty for failing inspection was fairly major. No qualifying attempt at Kansas and the loss of 15 minutes of practice time from previous infractions. It also meant that crew chief Greg Ives was not able to select a pit stall for the race, a fact that would play into a bigger deal during the 400-miler.
Despite the penalties, Earnhardt Jr. was in favor...for the most part...of having some deterrent for failing the inspection.
“I like the system that if you fail one part of the inspection you have to start over,” he said. “I like that. There’s a lot of things about it I like. I’m not proposing we make big changes, but I think we need to look at this LIS machine. They (NASCAR) need deterrence for failing the LIS machine, but that pit selection is pretty critical. If you look at the selections, you’ll see, no offense to anybody who may assume they’re a slow car, it’s usually fast guy, slow guy, fast guy, slow guy. Usually, it alternates where you try to pick around the slower guys. The slower guys pick last, so the fast guys separate themselves by a stall or two as you go down through the top 10. That means the slower guys pick those available spots. That works out pretty well. You get to come down pit road, get in and out of your stall with relative ease. When you don’t get to pick your pit, you pick last and you get put in front of your teammate. That is a no-no. That had Greg Ives so sick he wanted to throw up on Friday night.
“He felt responsible for failing tech inspection so many times that he had to let NASCAR pick his pit for him and that put him right in front of Alan (Gustafson) and the 24 (Chase Elliott). Alan put his arm around Greg and said, ‘Man, don’t worry about it. I understand.’"
It did contribute some to Elliott’s collision with Michael McDowell, who was pitted just ahead of Dale Jr.
“Visualize the pit sequence on pit road,” he said. “Chase comes in, I have to come in around him, so the right rear of my car is hanging out of my pit stall. He has to really get aggressive to turn out of his stall to get around me. And he’s driving hard, hard right out into pit road. The potential for him to have contact with a car is big, and it happened to be the 95. It made it difficult for him to get out and contributed to that issue.”
As if that inauspicious start to the night wasn’t enough, those bad vibrations reared their ugly heads as well. Loose wheels have plagued the No. 88 team so far this season, costing the team a shot at victory a week earlier at Talladega, statistically one of Dale Jr.’s best tracks. So when he called to pit road with a vibration, it kick-started some sniping among the media and on social media.
“I feel terrible,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “The social media aspect and public perception of that...If I am out on the track and say I have a vibration, think it’s a loose wheel. I have to tell Greg that information. That becomes public knowledge, and immediately the media starts Tweeting that Dale has a vibration, maybe a loose wheel. Fans start to react, everybody up and down pit road. Immediately the responsibility falls on the changers, the crew itself.
“Whether the wheel is loose or not, the perception is somebody made a mistake, which is unfortunate. It turned out that we didn’t have any loose wheels. There’s a possibility that we broke a belt in one of the tires...that has happened there before. We’ve blown tires out because the belts snapped inside the tires. But Greg and the guys took the car back as it left the track, put it on the chassis dyno and it shook. They went through the car to find out why this thing was shaking. They changed tires, which helped. They changed the tires themselves, not the wheels or the studs. There’s an issue somewhere within the package of the car, something we’re doing this year that created that.”
But the thing he’s kicking himself over is not remembering that Kansas Speedway’s surface makes the tires shake every time they race on it.
“Every time we go to Kansas, we all talk about tires shaking,” he said. “Clint Bowyer talked about it during the race, concerns with his car having some vibrations. Everybody talks about tire chatter and vibration and it’s never really loose wheels. It’s just for whatever reason, that track either snaps the belts in the tires and you get a set where it shakes really bad, you take that set off, the next set won’t shake. That kind of alternates throughout the race. I didn’t think about that during the race itself. If I’d have really thought early before the race, ‘this is a track where the tires are going to shake, you might get a set that does,’ I might have been a little less...it’s track-specific.”
There are many causes of vibrations in a NASCAR stock car, but in the end, it still means the car is shaking. Earnhardt Jr. clarified.
“A vibration is a vibration,” he said. “If a drive shaft shakes, it gives you a specific type of vibration that you can say, ‘hey guys, I think we need to rotate the drive shaft.’ What they do literally is unhook the drive shaft from the rear end housing, flip it like 45, 90, 180 degrees or even change the entire drive shaft, and that fixes that vibration. The last vibration we had was all firewall forward, so I think we actually snapped a belt in the right front tire. That shakes the whole car. Literally, going down the front straightaway, you can almost see the windshield almost coming out of the car. It’s very violent. Everything in the car is shaking like crazy, the shifter, everything.”
Earnhardt Jr. and co-host Tyler Overstreet also discussed the violent accident that involved a pair of former JR Motorsports drivers in Aric Almirola and Danica Patrick, which left Almirola stinging from a compression fracture in his back. Other topics included the addition of a fourth stage to the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, Dale Jr.’s favorite NASCAR All-Star Race memories and of course, cycling with his pals in the driver-owner lot.
For this and much more, listen to The Dale Jr. Download on Dirty Mo Radio or download it from iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud and other major podcast outlets.