Not great, but Junior's first year at HMS a good start

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- It wasn't a win, but second place in the TUMS QuikPak 500 at Martinsville Speedway sure felt like one for Dale Earnhardt Jr. on Sunday.

There will be no Sprint Cup Series championship for the kid named Earnhardt this year. His strong finish Sunday moved him up just one spot in the standings -- to ninth -- and hardly atoned for disastrous runs the previous two weeks at Talladega and Lowe's Motor Speedway near Charlotte, N.C.

But to Junior and his No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports team, it was salve to apply to the open wounds left by those earlier terrible finishes that took him out of this Chase for the Sprint Cup championship almost before he ever could get up to speed.

"We ran good at Talladega and we ran good at Charlotte, and couldn't finish anything," crew chief Tony Eury Jr. said. "This was the kind of finish we really needed."

Earnhardt agreed.

"It's does feel great finishing like this," he said. "We have had such bad luck the last six weeks and tore up so many racecars. I had been proud of myself all year long for not wrecking cars and for keeping all my cars in one piece. Then I think we went through about six in the last month or something like that.

"It has been terrible. But this is good for my team."

Looking back
This was a season that began with such great promise eight months ago in Daytona, where Earnhardt won his first two races in the new No. 88 Chevrolet being fielded for him by owner Rick Hendrick. When he captured the Budweiser Shootout and his 125-mile qualifying race for the Daytona 500, however, it very well may have had the opposite effect of relieving any pressure he may have felt to succeed this season.

Indeed, it may have increased expectations on a season that already had great ones heaped upon the No. 88 team by the likes of former points champion and current television analyst Darrell Waltrip. It was Waltrip who predicted Earnhardt would win not only the season-opening Daytona 500 but "at least" five more races before the season was completed.

It was Waltrip who said that. But it was Earnhardt -- as well as Hendrick -- who did not flinch when told of Waltrip's great expectations.

As it turns out, they were too great. Earnhardt did not win a points event until gambling on fuel mileage at Michigan in mid-June, and he hasn't won another since -- despite leading lots of laps. He led at least one lap in eight of 10 races during one stretch, including 90 at Richmond, 76 at New Hampshire, 43 in a second go-round at Michigan and 33 -- nearly a third -- of a 102-lap road-course event at Watkins Glen. (Continued)