Are Dale Earnhardt Jr.‘s Best Years Behind Him?
Hendrick Motorsports
Tony Eury Sr., Pete Rondeau, Steve Hmiel, Tony Eury Jr., and Lance McGrew.
Those have been Dale Earnhardt Jr.‘s crew chiefs during his 10-year tenure in Sprint Cup racing.
And during that time, Earnhardt has achieved three top-five and one other top-10 finish. Two of those top-fives and the top-10 came with Eury Sr., while the remaining top-five came with Eury Jr.
This season, Earnhardt currently sits 22nd. With seven races remaining on the Cup schedule, unless he makes some significant forward progress in the standings, Junior is destined to have his worst season finish ever in his Cup career.
His previous worst finish was 19th in 2005, when he started the year with Rondeau, who lasted roughly three months, followed by Hmiel on an interim basis and, eventually, Eury Jr. came into the fold late in the season after quarterbacking then-teammate Michael Waltrip’s team as crew chief.
There’s an old adage in pro sports that when a team is going bad, you fire the manager or head coach. But sooner or later, after you’ve fired more than a handful of managers/head coaches and the problem remains, the owner eventually comes to the conclusion that maybe the problem boils down to the player or players themselves as being at the root cause of lack of success.
In a Chevrolet Racing interview transcript over the weekend at Kansas, Junior said he’d like McGrew to remain his crew chief for 2010, but that any final decision on whether they’ll remain linked together rests with team owner Rick Hendrick, who is expected to make a definitive decision in the next few weeks.
McGrew took over for Eury Jr. earlier this year and has watched Earnhardt and the No. 88 have some good finishes, as well as several bad ones, too. The main reason for the switch from Eury to McGrew was the belief Earnhardt and Eury had run their course and that a change was needed for the No. 88 to get better.
The change has made absolutely no difference in Earnhardt’s overall performance.
Well, wait a minute, scratch that. Actually it has made a difference: a negative difference that is. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Just one look at Junior’s scorecard this season proves it: 0 wins, just 2 top-fives and a meager 5 top-10s, all career single-season lows.
And while some of Junior’s fans might want to make McGrew the scapegoat, I disagree. He’s done the best he can with what he has to work with. The chemistry and talent is there, but the performance isn’t – and that comes more so from behind the wheel than atop the pit box.
Frankly, I’m not convinced that even Chad Knaus could fix the problems with the No. 88 team. Nor, I don’t see how a continuing revolving door of crew chiefs is going to help Earnhardt and the No. 88 team, that sooner or later the winning combination is going to magically appear.
If Hendrick is the smart businessman he’s known to be, he’ll keep McGrew onboard for 2010 and maybe, just maybe, the duo will finally start to mesh in a more successful manner.
Then there’s the other side of the coin: even with the best organization behind him, maybe Junior has seen his best days in Sprint Cup and we’ll never see him return to those kinds of years where he finished third or fifth or even eighth in the season standings.
Maybe 12th (last year) or 22nd (this year) is the best we can hope for.
Sure, we’d love to see him return to the days where he won six races in one year (2004) or 15 wins in his first five seasons in Cup – as opposed to just three wins in his last five seasons (and his last 175 starts).
But getting rid of McGrew isn’t necessarily going to magically fix things. He deserves a chance at a full season with Junior before any move to replace him occurs.
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