Dale Earnhardt Jr. wins at Talladega for the first time since 2004
TALLADEGA, Ala. – While Daytona holds the place of highest significance in the story of the Earnhardt family, Talladega claims more than its share of spectacular Dale moments.
Earnhardt Sr. won more races here than anywhere else. Those 10 included his spectacular 2000 victory, his final win, in which he drove from 18th place to victory lane in just a few laps. Earnhardt Jr. also claims more wins at Talladega than any other track. Bolstered early in his career by his father’s expertise, Junior won four straight in the early 2000s and five of seven, capped by a 2004 victory in which he cost himself championship points by cursing in victory lane.
Until Sunday, that was Junior’s last win here, a stretch of 10 years and 20 races, a stretch in which Junior went from guarantee to threat to afterthought and back to threat again. Sunday’s Geico 500 marked the final step in Junior’s resurgence, the final kiss-off to the dark days of 2009 and 2010. Dale Earnhardt Jr. is fully and completely back at the top of the NASCAR world. At long last, the cheers of his tens of thousands of fans at Talladega aren’t for his past, but for his present and his future.
“It’s just real emotional,” Earnhardt said in victory lane, seeming to hold back tears. “I haven’t won here in a long time. It was my daddy’s birthday a couple of days ago, and I’m just real emotional, man.” Earnhardt Sr. would have turned 65 on April 29.
It wasn’t a flawless race; Talladega never is. A large wreck on lap 47 took several cars out of contention, but few serious challengers. Talladega is generally a place where aggression ends badly, and perhaps with that in mind, the final few dozen laps were a high-speed locomotive with Earnhardt as the engine and Jimmie Johnson serving as a rolling blockade in second place. Almost no one made a move on Earnhardt until the final lap, and by then, it was far too late.
“It wasn’t that no one was trying,” Jeff Gordon said of the single-file line, “it’s just that you need a group of more than five to go … It’s not about trusting one guy to go with you, you’ve got to trust 10.”
The only driver at the front who had the impetus to make a real run at Earnhardt was Denny Hamlin, who was in fourth place but behind series newcomer Ryan Blaney, racing in just his sixth Sprint Cup-level race. Hamlin, who drives a Toyota, was surrounded by Chevrolets, and understood that he had an uphill track to race to even catch Earnhardt, much less pass him.
“You gotta have pushes, runs when you can,” Hamlin said afterward. “It’s really stacked against you when you’re the only Toyota out there.” Hamlin made a move that didn’t pay off, and ended up in ninth place as a result. Blaney fell to fourth place, one spot behind Paul Menard, with Martin Truex Jr. rounding out the top five.
The victory almost surely puts Earnhardt into the Chase for the Sprint Cup. He sits in fifth place, 75 points behind series leader and defending champion Kevin Harvick. As he drove down the frontstretch following his win, the grandstands erupted in some of the loudest cheers Talladega has heard in a decade. For the moment, all is right in Junior Nation.
____
Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter.
And keep up with Jay over on Facebook, too.
