Dale Jr.'s team staying in place at Hendrick

MARTINSVILLE — Don’t expect a shake-up among Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s crew just yet. Despite a rough start to the season, team owner Rick Hendrick doesn’t plan on making any personnel changes.

“What I want to say is that I am 100 percent behind this group,” Hendrick said in a teleconference on Wednesday. “I have no intentions of making any changes. I have all intentions of making it better.”

Earnhardt has struggled out of the gate and, despite three consecutive top-15 finishes, he’s barely crept into the top 20 in points. With the mounting pressure to succeed, there were rumblings that Earnhardt’s crew chief, Tony Eury Jr., might be on the way out in their sophomore season at Hendrick
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“I just think we have got the right combination,” Hendrick said. “And I think we are going to be able to prove that to you folks here pretty soon.”

The team had a meeting earlier this week to discuss ways to turn things around.

“Well, when you need to do better, you get down and you sit down and get all the collective experience you can around you and try to feed off of it,” Earnhardt said. “We’re just trying to hear out everybody’s opinions on some things we can try or do differently, and if it will help. We’re just working to get better and we don’t sit on our tails hoping it’ll turn around on its own because it probably wouldn’t happen that way.”

Earnhardt came out of the meeting, which he called “constructive,” feeling good.

“Rick has a lot of experience and talent in his organization and I tried to get a few of those guys together that have watched us at the race track and watched us on the weekends and know a little bit of the history of our team,” Earnhardt said. “Just trying to give those guys an opportunity to voice their opinions on the situation and take what they say and try to understand it and try to make our team better with what they tell me.”

Instead of wiping the slate clean, the team believes slight modifications to their operation might be the key to a change in luck.

“We talked about a lot of little stuff we could do differently or try,” Earnhardt said. “We looked at some of the methods and some of the ways that they have had success in the past and we just talked about some ways we could communicate better. One of the things that we were working really hard on is trying to communicate at the race track and on the radio better. So me and Tony Jr. are real conscious of that and are trying to do a better job each week. And I think that we are. And hopefully soon we’ll start seeing some results.”

Little things such as qualifying better would likely help, as well.

“I think they’re working through those sorts of things,” teammate Jeff Gordon said. “I talked to him last week after the race and he said, ‘Man, I should have qualified better. My car was actually pretty good.’ So it’s little things like that that can make all the difference in the world.”

Earnhardt finished 14th last week at Bristol, but might have done better had he not started 34th. Today at Martinsville he’ll start 19th in the Goody’s Fast Pain Relief 500 since rain wiped out Friday’s qualifying, forcing the lineup to be dictated by the points standings.

In addition to changes in the garage, Earnhardt said he’s also modified his diet and workout regimen.

“Dale has stepped up to the plate, and I am super proud of him, and Tony is willing to do whatever he needs to do, and that’s all you can ask of them,” Hendrick said. “If they are open- minded and they want to try, we can get it fixed.”