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This time last year Dale Earnhardt Jr. was riding high atop NASCAR with the points lead and three victories en route to six wins and a fifth-place finish in the 10-race, playoff-style Chase for the Nextel Cup.
This season he faces the possibility of not only watching the Chase from the outside but also going winless for the first time since 1999. Few would have expected Junior to have led just five laps all year, recorded more worse-than-30th-place finishes (four) than top-five efforts (three) and failed to earn a pole halfway through the 26-race regular season.
Earnhardt has fallen from ninth to 16th in the past four races. He is 124 points out of the 10th place in the season standings, the last spot assured of advancing to the Chase, which also includes any driver within 400 points of the season leader. But Earnhardt is 504 behind leader Jimmie Johnson.
On the other hand, at least the Chase exists. Under the previous season championship system, Earnhardt - one of the sport's most marketed drivers - would be all but done.
Sunday's Pocono 500 typified his season. He started 34th, moved up to 20th and then fell back after his left front tire blew for the second time in the race and caught fire when the wheel locked. He finished 33rd.
"It's hard to find anything positive about a day like today," Earnhardt said after the race. "It's been a struggle all season, and today was another frustrating race. We had those flat tires - and there wasn't much we could do."
Earnhardt's struggles have been magnified in recent weeks by the improvement of teammate Michael Waltrip, who inherited his cars, car chief Tony Eury Jr. and crewmen when Dale Earnhardt Inc. (DEI) switched drivers in a wholesale shakeup this offseason. Team owner Teresa Earnhardt and vice president Richie Gilmore made the decision to avoid stagnation and to separate Earnhardt and Eury, who clashed at times.
After being initially hampered by engine failures and on-track mishaps, Waltrip has finished better than Earnhardt in six of the past seven races, and he started Sunday's race with his first pole position since 1991. His fifth-place finish vaulted him past Earnhardt to 15th in the season standings, 103 points out of 10th.
Fans and media wondered whether Earnhardt's frustration came to a head May 29 at Lowe's Motor Speedway when Earnhardt bumped Waltrip into the wall and out of the Coca-Cola 600 while both were running in the top 10. Earnhardt apologized, but that incident and the numbers have fueled the perception that DEI is in turmoil. Earnhardt's firing last month after just 10 races of new crew chief Pete Rondeau, who was Waltrip's crew chief for the final few races last season, also was viewed as a panic move.
"When teams implode, sometimes you can't fix them," said three-time champion and Fox Sports analyst Darrell Waltrip, Michael's brother. "I'm not sure that's the case, but it sure looks that way."
But Michael Waltrip said looks are deceiving, especially as the object of the change in crews was DEI's long-term health.
"They've had some change," he said of Earnhardt's situation. "I, quite honestly, wanted some change if I was going to drive that car again this year (the one Earnhardt is now driving). So I guess I'm not overly surprised. I do believe, though, that Dale Jr. has the talent and ability to work with his crew. And then Richie Gilmore is bringing both teams together to share information more than we've ever done before. The change is going to be good for DEI."
Through it all Earnhardt tries to be upbeat and confident, seeing everything that has happened as means to an end. He said interim crew chief Steve Hmeil, DEI's director of technical information, has addressed several problem areas - communication between the teams being the most obvious.
"You want (changes of crews cars with Waltrip) to work out the best you can, but you kind of prepare yourself and understand it might not work out," Earnhardt said Saturday. "I wish we could've run better at a couple of racetracks and I'd like to have (won) by now, but I'm not surprised.
I feel you just work and work and work, and we're not doing anything drastically different than our other team, and they're running pretty good every week. You can blame a little of it on the swap, but we were basically in a rut. We have to break that string and get some good fortune going our way and we might not be so bad off."
But late Sunday afternoon, after nothing had gone his way - again - Earnhardt's outlook had changed. "Just going through (the season) ain't no fun," he said.
Earnhardt and Waltrip agree that change was difficult after being around the same people for several years, particularly in Junior's case. Since beginning in NASCAR, Earnhardt had worked with Eury Jr., his cousin, or uncle Tony Sr., now DEI's competition director. The familial relationship became tense and heated at times, but they always understood each other.
Waltrip had forged a similar if calmer bond with crew chief Richard "Slugger" Labbe the past four years up to last October, when Rondeau took over. It was a period in which Waltrip and Labbe found common ground through risk-taking and unconventional thinking. Vague as that sounds, it yielded results with two Daytona 500 wins and four superspeedway triumphs overall, as well as a top-20 standing.
"With Michael, his notes were my notes," Labbe, who joined Evernham Motorsports this season as Jeremy Mayfield's crew chief, said Saturday. "The thing we were good at, we went outside the box. ... Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, but we had success by doing that."
Although the results are just starting to show, Waltrip said he and Eury Jr. hit it off right away. Earnhardt, on the other hand, concedes it was difficult conveying his thoughts and terminology to Rondeau, to say nothing of getting used to a new set of cars.
What nobody foresaw with the swap was how fiercely competitive the teams and drivers would become against each other. Little information was shared, and the teams functioned separately under one roof.
The problems didn't seem apparent at the Daytona 500 as Waltrip started third and Earnhardt fifth. Earnhardt was in the middle of the pack for much of the race before rallying late and leading two laps en route to a third-place finish behind Gordon and Kurt Busch. (Waltrip had engine trouble and finished 37th.)
But the silence continued, which might explain why it seemed more than a coincidence when the teammates collided two weeks ago.
"Tony Jr. said it was hard for him to open a line of communication and information flowing to my team because of the swap and because he wanted to focus on getting Michael in the Chase," said Earnhardt.
"And he didn't want us to hand over the information to the new chief and not garnish any of the credit. It was just shy of spiteful, you know what I mean? ... It was just pride getting in the way, and all the knowledge he gained over the years, he was too proud to basically do the job for Pete. And I was too proud to say, 'Yo, man, why don't you help us out a little bit?' "
One upside to that wreck was that it helped both teams recognize the problem, and Earnhardt said, "Hmeil has worked to keep both teams talking." Eury Jr. even stopped by his motorcoach after qualifying Saturday. The two talked briefly about what worked for Waltrip and how Earnhardt's Chevy responded.
"You can't take four shocks and springs out of Michael's car and throw them in Dale's Jr.'s car and he's going to like it," Eury said. "It doesn't work that way. The people working on Dale's car just have to take our setup and convert it (to his car), just like I would take their information and translate it into Michael's situation and try to get the best out of it."
But time is becoming a factor in this season - and DEI's future. Waltrip's contract is up after the season, while Eury, who's unsigned, has been mentioned as a candidate for several high-profile operations.
However the season ends, Earnhardt believes he and DEI will be stronger. So he's willing to endure second-guessing, as long as it's coming from outsiders.
"You have to be careful not to make things worse than they are," he said. "There's a big difference between understanding what you need to improve and beating yourself up about it. ... I see it as a very steep mountain, but I'm in it to win it."