Through the first four months of 2014, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has landed a new sponsor, another Daytona 500 win and an award selected by the media.
Now, life will be really grand if the popular NASCAR driver can rekindle his old Talladega Superspeedway dominance Sunday in the Sprint Cup Series.
Media and broadcasters selected Earnhardt as the first-quarter winner for the Driver of the Year award. He beat Kevin Harvick and IndyCar’s Will Power for the honor.
“We have worked so hard to be able to be this competitive and we show up every week and we are quick and the car is there,” Earnhardt said. “It’s been so long — or I’ve never really had that, to be honest. I can’t even imagine ’04 was even that good. This is awesome that things are going as good. I couldn’t be happier with what is going on in my professional life.”
Earnhardt was second at the Talladega race last October after a four-race run when his average finish was 18th.
It was a serious rut for a driver who won four times at Talladega in a three-year span ending in 2004, with two runner-up finishes in between.
Earnhardt said the focal point on his race team until maybe 16 months ago was on just overall improvement. Then they could turn more of their attention to restrictor plate racing for the big tracks at Daytona and Talladega.
It paid off with his second Daytona 500 win in February. Earnhardt is currently fifth in the points standings.
If he does have more confidence coming into Talladega, Earnhardt said it’s about the car, not himself.
“When you are driving the car and you get a sense of the car’s ability, the car gives you the confidence,” Earnhardt said. “If you are thinking, ‘Hey, man, I need to make this move right now, but I don’t believe in the car,’ then the result is typically not what you are wanting and more of what you expect.”
The latest good news for Earnhardt was a three-year sponsorship with Nationwide Insurance, announced Friday.
Under the agreement with the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports team, Nationwide will be a primary sponsor for 12 Sprint Cup races in 2015 and 13 each during the two years after that. The company also will be an associate sponsor all three seasons.
Nationwide is ending its title sponsorship of the second-tier series at the end of this season after seven years. The company sponsored Ricky Stenhouse Jr. for four Sprint Cup races this season and remains signed on as NASCAR’s official auto, home, life and business insurance partner through 2017.
Web winner: Josh Wise made it to Talladega the new-fashioned way.
A movement started on the online site Reddit by a 16-year-old fan using the digital currency Dogecoin generated a sponsorship for Wise’s No. 98 Ford Fusion in Sunday’s race.
Wise learned about the effort through another social media site, Twitter.
“At that time I didn’t really know what Dogecoin was,” Wise said. “I had heard of Reddit but I hadn’t been on there much. It was easy to kind of dismiss it at first because it was like, ‘Well yeah, they might have like 10 or 15 people want to help us raise sponsorship but I doubt they’re going to be able to raise the full amount to sponsor us.’
“Five or six days later, they had met the goal of $55,000 to sponsor us and we had a sponsor for Talladega. It was pretty cool.”
Teen Denis Pavel of Niles, Ill., had noticed Wise’s mostly unadorned black car having a strong run at Bristol before finishing 23rd. He thought of past fundraisers he’d seen on Reddit, and helped pave Wise’s road to Talladega. Phil Parsons Racing also let Reddit users vote on a paint scheme for Wise’s car.
“It’s been so cool because having a crowd-funded car like that, we had a lot of excited people that contributed,” Wise said. “And also people that are part of Dogecoin and the Reddit community … For a small team like us and for myself as a driver who’s really trying to break out in the sport, it’s been just a really awesome opportunity.”
