Junior quickly turns focus to Richmond
You are Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Is your glass half empty this week, or half full?
You've been struggling this season, but you're coming off a near miss -- a second-place finish -- at your strongest track, Talladega. You're heading to another track that has been good to you, Richmond.
Let me re-emphasize: You are Dale Earnhardt Jr.
You.
I keep trying to get all of you to put yourselves in his place, whether you're pro-Junior, anti-Junior or Junior-neutral. Maybe some of this ongoing Internet exchange among the three camps -- from bickering to insult hurling -- would ease up.
You did everything right at Talladega, everything you could do to win the race. You missed all the big wrecks, you were tucked in at second and pushing the leader like mad going into the final lap, and you got cleanly under the final, worst wreck at the finish.
But you finished second. You lost, by your late father's measure that "second is just the first loser." Not only that, you lost where you've won five races and your father won 10.
By all conventional wisdom, you did what you had to do to win, and then a new phenomenon occurred Sunday: Suddenly it was obvious that two cars hooked up could come on like a freight train past the longer drafting lines.
You and Ryan Newman did that on the inside, protecting the bottom as you dueled, but here came Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski up high, and they ran you down and passed you in the waning seconds.
Then Keselowski won and Edwards wrecked and Newman collected Edwards' flying car, and you came cleanly past it all. You got the best finish you could get.
Second is your best finish all year. The others were 27th, 39th, 10th, 11th, 14th, 8th, 20th and 31st. So you are still 15th in points, three notches but just 45 points out of the top 12, which you must reach to make the Chase.
Now you go to Richmond, where you won two springs ago, and would have won last spring had Kyle Busch not gotten under you and turned you late in the race.
Half empty or half full? Do you think "Things are looking up" or "Oh, man, I missed an opportunity"?
What do you think? You, Dale Earnhardt Jr.
If you really are in his shoes, you don't think either way. That's probably why he chuckled a little when I asked him that the other day on a NASCAR media teleconference.
And he sounded subdued. If you really are Dale Earnhardt Jr., you sound subdued a lot of the time, what with all the weight on you.
"If Brad hadn't won the race [Keselowski is his close friend and protégé], maybe if somebody else had won it," Earnhardt said, "you definitely feel like you missed an opportunity until the sun sets on that day."
If you really are Dale Earnhardt Jr., you don't dwell on it long. You can't. You'd drive yourself crazy, knowing you just missed shrugging the weight of the NASCAR world off your shoulders, quieted your legion of critics if only for a moment and brought at least some smiles to your insatiable worshipers.
"On Monday, you get up and you go, 'All right, where are we in points? What's the situation look like? We kind of made some gains and we've got to try to keep momentum going and we got a good track coming, let's go in there with what's worked in the past. You start thinking about it like that."
You don't look at the glass, you look at the pitcher; actually the whole barrel, the championship standings, because a championship more than anything is what is expected of you. You see that just a week ago it was half empty, but now the level is rising a bit.
"This year we started out so slow and terrible, we're in a hole now," he said. "We're going to be fighting our way to try to get in the Chase all year, I'm pretty sure.
"So we're going to have to step our performance up in the summer, way beyond what we were capable of doing last year."
But you try to keep it half full: "I feel like we can definitely do better than we did last year in the summer races … with Pocono, the road courses, all those things."
“” -- Dale Earnhardt Jr.
I like Richmond a lot. We always thought we run good there because it's a lot like Myrtle Beach.
"I like Richmond a lot," Earnhardt said of the place where he has won three times. "We always thought we run good there because it's a lot like Myrtle Beach [the South Carolina short track where his father prepared him for the move to NASCAR]. There's a lot of similarities."
Richmond "has got a lot of different grooves that you can run," he said. "You can move around."
So do allow yourself to picture yourself in Victory Lane at Richmond again? Allow yourself to imagine the deep sigh of relief of your first win this year, to get the load off?
"I wouldn't go that far," Earnhardt said. "We're definitely going to go in there to try to win the race. But we are in so dire need of getting some top-5 finishes."
Not that he's turning conservative just for top-5s: "I'm not saying we're going to take a second-place car and finish fourth with it. I'm just saying that, just like this past weekend, every lap I'll be concentrating on not putting myself in any precarious situation that might not allow me to finish in the top-5, if I've got a car that can."
Just beyond Richmond, he said, "we've got a couple of good racetracks coming up. We do pretty good at Darlington. I always love running at Charlotte."
If you really are Dale Earnhardt Jr., despite all the expectations of Junior Nation and all the ridicule from Anti-Junior Nation, and all the skepticism from the Junior-neutrals … well … you are after all just a human being hoping, within reason, to do the best you can.
Which, of course, will never be good enough to satiate your fans or silence your critics or satisfy your skeptics.
But you've known that for a long time. That's why you so often sound subdued.
Ed Hinton is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at edward.t.hinton@espn3.com.
