|
 Never mind that Earnhardt's No. 88 team picked up front tire changer
Scott Brzozowski from Jeff Gordon's No. 24 squad after the 24 hired
free agent Nick O'Dell, late of Joe Gibbs Racing.
That change aside, Earnhardt wants to keep his over-the-wall gang as
is -- for strong reasons -- even though some have suggested
Earnhardt might benefit from the temporary reassignment of some of
Jimmie Johnson's crew, with Johnson eliminated from the Chase for
the NASCAR Sprint Cup in last Sunday's AAA 400 at Dover
International Speedway.
"I really would like to keep my guys -- I'll be honest with you,"
Earnhardt said on Tuesday during a Chase Contender Round
question-and-answer session with reporters at the NASCAR Hall of
Fame heading into the round's opener Saturday night at Charlotte
Motor Speedway (7 p.m. ET on NBC). "I don't think you build a guy's
trust ... he needs to know you believe in him. The same way for the
driver.
"The driver needs to know the team believes he can do it. I think
the carrier, the changer, all those guys want to know that the
driver and everybody involved believe in them when they go over the
wall. If I take the 48 guys because I think they're better, then
what am I going to do next year?
"I'll have to start from scratch again. All those guys that are on
my car now are going to be (ticked) off because I didn't believe in
them, because I took the 48 guys when the going got tough. So I
don't believe in doing that. I believe that my guys can do it. I
think that we'll find a combination that works for the rest of the
year and beyond."
Now that Brzozowski is on his team, Earnhardt would prefer to keep
him, too. The front tire changer has been a mainstay on Gordon's
team since 2013.
"I hope that Scott wants to stick around beyond this season,"
Earnhardt said. "I actually talked to him a bit today. It's not like
we need too many changes. We just need one key guy that can come in
and elevate the standard and push everyone. Over the past couple
years, when we've had great crews, a lot of the guys that we've been
working with this year have been on those teams.
"But if you get one guy in there who's kind of a key player, or a
bit of a superstar, like a wide receiver or a quarterback is to a
football team, he can really elevate the play of everybody around
him and boost the entire crew -- just the confidence those guys
having going over the wall when he's a part of it changes the whole
consistency of the team.
"We really want Scott to wrap his brain around staying with us."
TRUEX WASN'T STRESSED BY LAST-MINUTE PENALTY AT DOVER
Maybe it's a good thing Martin Truex Jr. didn't see his car removed
from the grid minutes before the start of Sunday's AAA 400 at Dover.
NASCAR inspectors had noticed a problem with the right rear wheel
well of Truex's No. 78 Chevrolet, ushered the car back through the
inspection line and made the team fix the issue so that the car
conformed to the templates.
"I didn't even see it, actually," Truex told the NASCAR Wire
Service. "I was at driver intros, and Marty Snider from NBC was
like, 'Hey, your car's not out here.' I looked at (Ryan) Newman, and
he was like, 'Yeah, I just walked by it on the way out here.
[to top of second column] |
"But then I saw on TV that it was back in the garage, and I was
like, 'That's not good.'
But Truex didn't let the distraction upset him.
"It actually wasn't as bad as you think," Truex said. "I felt really
good about the race car going into the race. I obviously felt really
good about Dover-I always do-something about that track just gives
me a lot of confidence.
"They were like, 'You've got to go to the rear.' I said, 'No
worries. We'll be fine.' If anything, it made me more focused. I was
kind of mad about it for a minute, but it was just, 'You know what
you've got to do. Just go do it.' And we did it."
Truex rallied for an 11th-place finish to advance to the Contender
Round of the Chase.
HARVICK HAS CLEAR-CUT APPROACH TO TALLADEGA CHASE RACE
The Chase race most drivers dread most -- especially if they haven't
won at Charlotte or Kansas -- is the Oct. 25 event at Talladega
Superspeedway.
The Contender Round's elimination race is the most unpredictable in
the 10-event playoff, but reigning series champion Kevin Harvick has
developed a plan he thinks works best at the 2.66-mile
restrictor-plate superspeedway, NASCAR racing's largest oval track.
"There's just a lot out of your control," Harvick said. "For me,
I've just made the decision over the last several years that you go
there and try to position yourself at the front of the pack and just
let it happen. Otherwise, it's just a complete mental drain on
yourself and the team.
"That's the strategy. That's what we're going to do. We're going to
play the odds. ... If you're at the front of the pack, are you going
to have less chance of wrecking? I don't know. Somebody who's way
smarter than me is going to have to go back and look at all those
races and decide where the crashes happened.
"But I think, for us, it's just picking a mind-set, just pushing
forward with it -- and that's it."
-----------------------------------------------
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
