Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s Budweiser Shootout Victory A Special Win For Hendrick

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By Deb Williams

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (Feb. 9, 2008) – Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s performance in Saturday night's Budweiser Shootout and the circumstances surrounding it are events of which movies are made, but if Hollywood had produced it, no one would have believed it.

Earnhardt Jr. entered the annual event for last year's pole winners not having visited victory lane in a NASCAR Sprint Cup race since May 2006 at Richmond, Va. For the first time in his career, he wasn't driving for Dale Earnhardt Inc., a company founded by his late father. Now, his team owner was Rick Hendrick, a Charlotte, N.C., businessman who had known him since he was a child and who had hired his grandfather – Robert Gee – as a fabricator when he formed his team in late 1983. The team's crew chief – Tony Eury Jr. -- is Earnhardt Jr.'s first cousin and also a grandson of Gee's.

And the team's setup man – Joey Arnold – had lost his 5-year-old son to a terminal disease a few days before the trip to Daytona. He was working at the race shop the day after his child's death and when Eury Jr. asked why, he responded: “This is my best chance to win the Daytona 500 and I want to be a part of it.”

Saturday night, Earnhardt Jr. led a record 47 laps in the 70-lap race, including the final two, holding off Tony Stewart and teammate Jimmie Johnson for his second victory in the non-points event. A victory that Eury Jr. dedicated to Arnold.

“Man, I don’t know where to start. It’s crazy,” a jubilant Earnhardt Jr. said after becoming the seventh driver to acquire multiple Budweiser Shootout victories. “We had a lot of help at the end from Jimmie (Johnson). That really was half the credit to the win. The other half was the car being capable of being up there in the first place. I had a great handling package. I had great runs up off the corner and had a great motor. We just got lucky at the end, being in the right lane and getting the right help from the right guy.”

From the race's beginning, it was evident that Earnhardt Jr.'s Chevrolet was strong. In the first 20-lap segment, the Hendrick Motorsports driver led 15 laps. During the 10-minute break, he told his crew his car was a little loose, and he might have some issues in traffic, but those issues never occurred. When the race resumed, he began the final 50 laps in the lead and set the pace for 32 of those circuits on the 2.5-mile track. The 47 laps he led broke the record of 44 set by Greg Biffle in 2005.

Throughout the race that was slowed by four caution flags for 14 laps, Earnhardt Jr.'s stiffest challenge came from Stewart, who led twice for nine laps in his first outing in a Toyota. He also exchanged the lead with Earnhardt twice in the final 10 laps.

“I'm pretty happy,” said Stewart, who elected the low groove while Earnhardt Jr. took the high side. “It's hard to beat Dale Jr. He's one of the best restrictor-plate drivers there's ever been. He learned a lot from his dad, and I'm not sure he's not better than his dad, in all honesty, now.”

Stewart said he couldn't be disappointed with his team's performance.

“We were climbing an uphill battle there on the bottom, but it was fun,” Stewart continued. “It's fun when you get around guys you trust like that.”

For the Hendrick team, it was more than fun, it was special.

“I have never had so many emotions going through me at the end of a race,” said Hendrick, who had all four of his cars finish in the top six. “One, because I thought about Ricky [Hendrick, his son who was killed in a plane crash in October 2004], because he wanted this and they talked about doing this, and this happened.

“Then, I thought about Robert Gee, because he and I came down here and raced together in a Busch car named Emma. The car he [Earnhardt Jr.] is going to drive in the (Daytona) 500 is Emma and I have his two grandchildren sitting here, so there is a whole lot of neat stuff going on; I mean, we are like giddy.

“Seeing these two guys do what they did tonight, the first time out of the box after all the heat that has been on them, boy, they took a lot of heat off of me tonight. So, it is really special."

Earnhardt Jr. said it was nice to see his teammates – Johnson and Jeff Gordon – helping him in the race's closing stages.

“Jeff (Gordon) got a couple of runs and went around us, but that’s what I would have done,” Earnhardt Jr. continued. “You can only expect so much dedication when it comes to being a teammate and you’ve got to work together and we did. I got a lot of help tonight. There weren’t that many times when I was able to help them because we were out front so much, but that’s the way it should be as far as how it went tonight; being able to help each other and stay toward the front. But when you’ve got the opportunity to take the lead or put yourself in position to win, you do it.”

And that's exactly what Earnhardt Jr. did.

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