Zeroing in on Earnhardt's Frustration

By David Smith (on Twitter at @DavidSmithMA)
October 10, 2012

“If this is what we did every week I wouldn’t be doing it. I will just put it to you like that. If this is how we raced every week, I would find another job. It’s really not racing. I don’t know. It’s a little disappointing how that all went down. That cost a lot of money right there. If this is how we are going to race, and that is how we are going to continue to race and nothing is going to change, I think NASCAR should build the cars. It would save us a lot of money.” — Dale Earnhardt, Jr., following an accident and 20th-place finish Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway.

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Do not blame Earnhardt for lashing out after crashing and the subsequent talk of fans rooting for wrecks. Understand that he watched his father perish at Daytona International Speedway in a last lap crash not totally dissimilar to the one that occurred on Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway. His comments above came from an emotional place and likely have been marinating since February, 2001.

But let us also consider another reason behind the comments: pure, unbridled frustration. Earnhardt, a five-race winner at Talladega, has not won there since 2004. Likewise, he has not won at Daytona in a points-paying race since the ’04 Daytona 500. He has never scored a restrictor plate victory in a COT era points event.

Earnhardt at a restrictor plate track reminds me of a young football punt returner who scored some highlight-worthy touchdowns early in his career that led to him being branded an “x-factor.” As the punt returner ages, he feels obligated to live up to the hype and tries to make something happen every time he touches the ball. Desperate to keep his reputation afloat, he dances frantically, jumping east and west in a quest to go north. Ultimately, the player becomes counterproductive, which is how I now view Earnhardt at the palaces that once called him a prince.

The combination of the COT, the shift to tandem-style racing and then the molding of the tandem and traditional draft into the current hybrid we now enjoy (or don’t enjoy, be that way) has stymied Earnhardt. In 2012 it has been cerebral assassin Matt Kenseth who has run roughshod on the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series field on plate tracks. His path to the front is fairly simple: get there and stay there, no dancing necessary.

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For comparison’s sake, here are the four restrictor place races broken down for Kenseth and Earnhardt:

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In many a race, a driver does not often have a wide array of choices available to him regarding where to run as the laps wind down. At restrictor plate races, a driver has more choices than at any other track. Kenseth and the No. 17 team chose to stay in the front this year, the optimal position in case something like the melee on Sunday went down and the win was decided, more or less, by a screen cap from a video.

Kenseth spent 90.6 percent of the combined four races running inside the top 15 and 32.8 percent of the races in the lead. And Earnhardt? He tip-toed around the lead, pacing the field 3.8 percent of the time in 2012 plate races and running in the top 15 just 67.13 percent of the time. Kenseth’s north-running approach allows him to call scoreboard over the once-proud plate prancer, two wins to none and a more staggering 2.5 average finish to 11.5.

So in theory, the end of Sunday’s race might not have been a jumping off point for Earnhardt’s exasperation but rather a microcosm of his year on plate tracks; Kenseth, out front as usual, avoids the mess and picks up the win while Earnhardt, mired in traffic, gets caught in the wreckage with every other sucker ... Read More

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MotorsportsAnalytics.com is a subscription-based web site that brings advanced statistical concepts created for evaluating drivers and teams to the every day race fan. The web site has been featured in USA Today and Sports Business Daily and on SiriusXM Satellite Radio’s NASCAR Channel.

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David Smith is the Editor-in-Chief of Motorsports Analytics and the host of The David Smith Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidSmithMA.