It's not the team that Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants everyone to know. It's not the hotly debated off-season crew swap with his teammate Michael Waltrip -- or the chemistry with the new crew chief Pete Rondeau -- that has led to Earnhardt's free fall in the Nextel Cup points standings this season.
It is just not that simple.
Earnhardt acknowledged Friday that the problems at Dale Earnhardt Inc run much deeper, and he said he was not sure if the fix would come in time for the team to qualify for this year's 10-race playoff for the Cup title.
"We're not competitive like we want to be," Earnhardt said before qualifying 19th for the Food City 500 on Sunday at Bristol Motor Speedway. Elliott Sadler won the pole with a lap of 127.733 miles an hour.
"We're not performing as good as we want to be," Earnhardt said. "That's all right there in front of you in the numbers."
For Earnhardt, the most popular driver in NASCAR, the numbers are grim. Heading into the fifth race of the season, he is in 26th place in the Cup standings. He has never finished that low in five years of Cup competition. Earnhardt has been in the top 10 in three of the past four years, and he was in the hunt for the title in the final race last season before ending up fifth over all.
Plenty of excuses exist for this year's drop. After finishing third in the season-opening Daytona 500 on Feb. 20, Earnhardt had tire troubles at California Speedway and ended up 32nd in the Auto Club 500 on Feb. 27. A crash on Lap 11 at Las Vegas on March 13 left Earnhardt 42nd for the day. And two weeks ago at Atlanta, two pit-road speeding penalties led to a 24th-place showing.
But it is more than a run of bad luck for Earnhardt, and he knows it. After starting fifth at Daytona, he started 40th, 34th and 35th in the next three races.
That has to do with speed, not bad fortune.
Much of the blame has fallen on the shoulders of Rondeau, Waltrip's former crew chief who took over the Earnhardt team this year in place of Tony Eury Sr., Earnhardt's uncle. The switch was made to ease the tension that had built between Earnhardt and his cousin, the car chief Tony Eury Jr., as well as to bolster Waltrip's team.
"He's had to put up with some terrible stuff so far, some people been pretty mean to him," Earnhardt said in defense of Rondeau.
"I wouldn't change a soul on the team that I'm with now. But there's a couple of areas in the company itself that we need to improve. We could be stronger, you know."
Earnhardt blamed staff losses in other departments in recent years for an overall drop in performance. "I don't see as much ingenuity as I guess I would like to see from the company," he said.
Still, he has 22 races left to make up ground and finish in the top 10 to qualify for the season-ending Cup chase. There are those who expect Earnhardt to rally.
"It's very early," the defending Cup champion, Kurt Busch, said. "You have to give it a good 10 races to see who your characters are going to be when it comes down to crunch time."
"We'd like to be in there in the top 10, and we're going to try hard to get there," he said. "If we don't, it might not be the end of the world."
But he does not want it to be the beginning of a decline in the team's status among the elite of NASCAR. In a way, that would be letting down his father, Dale Earnhardt, who began the team and brought it to prominence before he died in a crash at the Daytona 500 in 2001.
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