Pops Eury understands pain involved with split

Think about it -- a race track should be a fountain of joy, not a puddle of pain.

For a couple family members at Dover, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his uncle, Tony Eury, there was too much of the latter.

For all the working stiffs, hanging around race tracks might be a literal steaming cauldron of pressure, deceit and devious backstabbing balanced by beautifully-executed teamwork and benevolent helping hands. But in the end you have to understand this is a darned sight better than having a real job.

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And if you're a fan "on vacation," different versions of the same scenarios apply if you have to deal with big mouths, people who might smell bad or take up too much space or who smoke or drink to excess and don't act right balanced by a fascinating cornucopia of sights, sounds and events.

And then, last weekend at Dover, we had the Earnhardt and Eury families.

Just to clarify, we're not talking about the littlest member of the families here, as painful as fourth generation driver Jeffrey Earnhardt's Nationwide Series qualifying shortfall was.

The resilience of youth is a wonderful thing. In the immediate aftermath of qualifying, in which Kerry Earnhardt's son was the only driver sent home, the youngster was nowhere to be found.

It caused a smile and brought to mind the seeming continuation of a family tradition made infamous by his grandfather, Dale Earnhardt, for whom evacuating the premises in a hurry following any result -- good, bad or indifferent -- was a given.

But according to his former DEI teammate Trevor Bayne who -- speaking of pure joy, was floating on a cloud all weekend in anticipation of his eight-race Nationwide program with Michael Waltrip that was announced Monday -- little Earnhardt was still somewhere in the Dover infield Saturday afternoon and was planning to be there Sunday, as well.

But we digress. In a lot of ways, what was mostly in evidence was just pure pain, and somehow that's not right.

And I don't wanna hear about income and getting paid well and how it comes with the territory. That doesn't cut it. No one deserves to live under a microscope, no matter how much they're getting paid.

For Earnhardt Jr., who was told by team owner Rick Hendrick on Wednesday evening that his direct working relationship with his cousin and crew chief, Tony Eury Jr., was over, the weekend was difficult at best.

At his Friday media briefing, Earnhardt Jr. looked like he had been bled nearly colorless with a demeanor as if he was attending a funeral for a dear friend.

It just wasn't fair that on Saturday, for both of them, the disconnection of the two cousins overshadowed what should have been pure joy -- a victory for the JR Motorsports Nationwide car that Junior owns with Hendrick and that Eury crew chiefs.

Instead, Eury had to talk philosophy, and give a health update on his son.

"Tony Jr. will be fine -- he's just beat down, he's worn out," the father told PRN's Steve Richards on Saturday morning. "Everything that happened on that [No. 88] team is magnified four or five times from what any other team is and he's a guy that races to win and they haven't been able to do that. It's just dragged him down, beat him down.

"They got to trying so much different stuff and everybody's pullin' this way and pullin' that way and I think he just got totally confused and off his game ... knowing that the pressure is on him, and everybody's lookin' at him. You can't turn the TV on, you can't turn the Internet on but everybody's blasting him. They tried everything in the world to make Dale Jr. happy and they haven't found it." (Continued)