Brian Hilderbrand covers motor sports for the Las Vegas Sun. His motor sports notebook appears Friday. He can be reached at [email protected] or (702) 259-4089.
Following Sunday night's on-track run-in with Dale Earnhardt Inc. teammate Michael Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt Jr. chalked up the incident to hard racing and downplayed talk of a simmering feud with Waltrip.
Earnhardt hit Waltrip on lap 246 of Sunday's Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR Nextel Cup race at Lowe's Motor Speedway and Waltrip was knocked out of the race as a result. Earnhardt continued with a damaged car and finished 33rd.
Tony Eury Sr., Earnhardt's uncle, former crew chief and DEI's director of competition, suggested after the race that the incident might have been intentional on Earnhardt's part.
"(Earnhardt) acts like he's friends with (Waltrip), but every time he gets around him on the racetrack he ends up wrecking him," Eury told nascar.com.
Not so, Earnhardt said.
"There is no problem between me and Michael, and I think Michael understands that," Earnhardt said. "He's definitely not the person I wanted to run into tonight. It's unfortunate. Hopefully everybody can come to terms with it one way or another.
"I know some guys on Michael's team are probably upset and don't really know (what happened). I mean, if you're not in the racecar, you don't know what the hell's going on out there, so I can't expect anyone to understand what exactly was going on at that moment and time and how we all came together and wrecked. The people that understand, they'll move on and we'll try to get better next week."
Earnhardt said that, if anything, he races more conservatively around Waltrip.
"(Waltrip and I) don't get into the habit of running into each other," he said. "And we don't really race each other that hard; we actually try to work together most of the time.
"We're out there racing, and he happened to be the guy. It could've been anybody else. He's the last person I wanted to run into but we were all going for the same piece of real estate."
Sunday's race was marred by a record 22 caution periods and Earnhardt said some of those may have been the result of Lowe's Motor Speedway officials smoothing the track's racing surface earlier this year.
"The track's a little slick," Earnhardt said. "(There is) just a lot of grip in spots and there's spots where there's no grip. Once you got the car working pretty good, it wasn't that big a deal; it wasn't that tough to drive.
"But the car was real hard to drive if you had a push or a loose condition. (It would) probably do some good to put some asphalt down, I think, because the track's tearing up a little bit anyways."
Earnhardt slipped four spots in the points as a result of his 33rd-place finish and is 15th in the Nextel Cup standings after 12 races. Waltrip, who finished 36th Sunday, is 18th in points.
TOUGH WEEKEND: Las Vegas native and reigning Nextel Cup champion Kurt Busch spun and crashed twice in the first 150 laps Sunday and finished 43rd -- his worst finish of the season.
Busch slipped four spots, to 10th, in the Nextel Cup standings. Busch has been among the top 10 in points for 47 consecutive races -- the longest active streak on the circuit.
This weekend, the series visits Dover International Speedway -- the site of Busch's first career Cup start. In September 2000, Busch qualified 10th and finished 18th at Dover. He has posted two career top-10 finishes at Dover, including a career-best fifth place last September.
AT THE BULLRING: Spencer Clark and Nick Parmelee won the twin 50-lap Super Late Model main events Saturday night at The Bullring at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Other main-event winners were Justin Good (Chargers), Dustin Ash (Legends Cars), Randall Boren (IMCA Modifieds) and Gary Wyatt (Bullring Bombers).
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