With 10 races remaining before the Chase for the Sprint Cup, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has pretty simple goals: Maintain the level of performance he has displayed all season and win another race.
Heading into the Cup race Saturday night at Kentucky Speedway, the Hendrick Motorsports driver sits third in the Cup standings, 14 points behind leader Matt Kenseth. He’s comfortably in the Chase — he is 103 points ahead of 11th, with the top 10 getting guaranteed spots — and won his first race in four years two weeks ago at Michigan International Speedway.
Last year, Earnhardt started 29th and finished 30th at Kentucky.
“I didn’t run as well as I thought I would here last year,” Earnhardt said. “I don’t really know exactly why we didn’t compete well. I think we’re better this year.
“I’ll be surprised if we don’t run competitive and have a top-10 car at least this weekend. If we don’t have that kind of competitive car, I’d be a little bit disappointed and concerned surely about where we’re headed and what we’re doing.”
Earnhardt has six top-five and a series-high 12 top-10 finishes in 16 races and has seven top-10s on tracks 1.5 to 2 miles in length. He led 70 laps earlier this year at 1.5-mile Las Vegas.
Earnhardt said every week, the team critically evaluates its cars and setups and whether it is headed in the right direction. But he doesn’t necessarily view the Kentucky race as a blueprint for what could happen in the Chase, which features five 1.5-mile tracks.
Kentucky and Atlanta are the only 1.5-mile tracks left before the Chase, which includes stops at Chicagoland, Charlotte, Kansas, Texas and Homestead.
“The 1.5s are important,” Earnhardt said. “I don’t really dissect the season like that. I always start out really well and then I struggle in the summer and then I do pretty well at the end of the season. The tracks at the end of the season are really the same or similar tracks we started the year with.
“I just assume I like those tracks or do well at those tracks, so I feel pretty comfortable about the Chase and the tracks in the Chase.”
Earnhardt has 10 top-10s in his last 12 races, including the dominating win two weeks ago at 2-mile Michigan, where he led a season-high 95 laps. A wreck on the last lap relegated him to 23rd last week on the road course at Sonoma for his first finish worse than 17th this year.
“I feel like we just need to kind of maintain our course,” Earnhardt said. “I struggle in the summer and we’ve gotten off to a pretty good start besides the road-course race at Sonoma.
“We’ve had a pretty good summer so far. If we can keep that going, I’m going to be really excited.”
The best part of the summer, of course, has been the win.
“I’d like to win another race,” Earnhardt said. “I enjoyed that one at Michigan, so I’d like to do that again. It doesn’t really matter where.”
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