NASCAR: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Q&A.... (Jan. 9, 2010)

KERRY THARP (Moderator): Dale Earnhardt, Jr. is kind enough right now to come on out and talk to you. Dale, as you look ahead to 2010 season, tell us your thoughts.

DALE EARNHARDT, JR.: Well, it will get here as soon as it gets here, Daytona. We're kind of still in the middle of the off season. I'm still enjoying taking it easy, doing whatever I want to do. We've been doing a little bit of work. A lot of changes have happened with our race team to try to get better. We also have been working trying to prepare the Nationwide program and get it ready, shore up a few more relationships for that deal.
But, I don't know, off season was good. Holidays were really, really good with my family and everything, so... Pretty happy.

KERRY THARP: Questions for Dale.

Q. Obviously you've hired Danica Patrick. Do you think she's going to struggle? Do you think she's going to adapt? Will it take her long? Are you the perfect person to be a car owner for her because you understand the attention she's going to be getting?

DALE EARNHARDT, JR.: Yeah, I'm kind of going into it with an open mind. I mean, it's going to be an uphill battle for her to do well. But I think she can. She's a racecar driver. She should be able to adapt and do whatever she needs to do.
We're going to give her the best tools we can. I don't know if there's a perfect owner or whatever. But, you know, we'll just do the best we can for her. She has been in a car. Pretty happy with how that's gone. Pretty happy with what we've seen. I love her attitude. She gets along great with Tony, Jr. All that stuff is going better than planned. We just need to get to the racetrack. I mean, she's been around Daytona. Went to Orlando tested. Need to run some laps.
I hate testing myself. But, you know, the policy as it is now, it's difficult for someone like Danica to come in and really try to understand the cars, get to know them. We're going through that challenge, trying to help her as much as we can.
But feel pretty good about it. I don't know what she'll do. I wouldn't even know where to begin to sort of guess on how her performance will be or what her stats will look like. We'll just have to see.

Q. Dale, can you talk, there's been proposed rule changes to Daytona, perhaps no passing under the yellow line.

DALE EARNHARDT, JR.: No, you can. They're going to let you, right?

Q. Right.

DALE EARNHARDT, JR.: You said they're going to say no.

Q. I'm saying they're getting rid of that, perhaps getting rid of the no bump drafts, all that stuff. How will that affect the competition?

DALE EARNHARDT, JR.: It will be like going to a race about 10 years ago, I guess. They didn't have any of them rules then. We didn't see anything too crazy. I think it will just, you know racing will look a lot similar as it does now. I don't think you're going to see anything different. Passing below the yellow line, which will be a little different, but that's fine. There's a lot of asphalt down there, so it should be fine.

Q. Do you think if they take away the wing and go to a spoiler, will that help you? How will it impact the racing?

DALE EARNHARDT, JR.: I don't really know. I think it's more important that it seems to be what the fans want. The fans want to get rid of the wing, get the old spoiler back. So, you know, NASCAR seems to I don't really know what that will do to the racing. I don't think it will change it a whole lot myself. I don't know what that wing's really doing back there, what the spoiler would be like on this car. We've never really tested it so...
I don't really know what it would do to the racing. I don't think it would change too much. It could punch a little smaller hole in the air than the wing does and give us a little opportunity to get a little more grip on the front end, but it might do the opposite. You never know.

Q. Dale, Carl Edwards was in here earlier talking about Danica. He said he heard she's been fast in testing. You said she's been fast. Where have you been going? How has she been on the testing scene?

DALE EARNHARDT, JR.: We went to Orlando. It rained. Only got a couple laps the first day. She really took to it pretty good. The lap times were pretty good. I don't know what the second bracket is there, but we were about 3 or 4/10ths faster than what some other Busch teams had tested there the week before and the week after.
We felt good. We put her out on the track with Kelly Bires for a little spell. He had a hard time really kind of hanging on her bumper there for a while. I wasn't there. I'm just going by what Tony, Jr. and them said.
I called Tony, Sr. first because I knew he would tell me the truth. He was blown away. So that told me that things were going really, really good if he was happy.