Finally!
By: Drew Hierwarter
Finally, the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series is back in balance! Finally, the media can stop telling us every single week how long it has been since he last won. Finally, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. has won a points paying race! To make it even better, he did it at Michigan, a track that he had never won on before. And he did it by working good pit strategy and taking a huge gamble on fuel mileage.
As so often happens at Michigan, this race came down to a test of fuel conservation. To win you have to run fast enough to stay in front of your competitors, yet slow enough to make sure you have enough fuel to get to the checkered flag. As the laps ran down on Sunday, Dale Earnhardt did not have enough. He had made his last pit stop on lap 148, 52 laps from the finish. Typically at Michigan you can only go 40-45 laps on a full tank of fuel. But as others made pit stops for a quick splash of fuel the decision was made to stay out to gain track position.
“I’m not a gambling man,” crew chief Tony Eury, Jr. said. “I don’t even like going to Las Vegas to put $20 down. … But if we ran out of gas, we were going to finish 25th. If we came in and pitted, we were going to finish 25th. So I told him we were going to go for it. We were either going to win or run out of gas and finish 25th.”
Then, with only two laps to go, Sam Hornish spun and that brought out the caution flag. Now the race was going to go extra laps and end in a green-white-checkered two lap dash to the finish. Earnhardt immediately cut his engine off and coasted. And for the remainder of the caution period he would start the engine just for a few seconds and turn it off and coast some more. Everybody in the 88 pit was holding their breath. Making it to 200 laps was going to be marginal at best. But going to lap 202? Nobody knew if they could make that or not.
The field took the green flag for the final time and Earnhardt pulled away to slight lead. As they came back around for the white flag, Patrick Carpentier spun on the front straightaway, bringing out another yellow flag and, according to NASCAR’s procedures, ending the race. Earnhardt had won, and as he turned his car down pit road and headed for Victory Lane, his engine sputtered and died for the last time, out of fuel.
After climbing out of the car, a jubilant Dale Earnhardt, Jr. told the TV audience; “We were going to stumble to the finish and probably not win the race. We weren’t going to finish. The yellow saved us. They can write what they want, but we won one.”