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Earnhardt Jr. learning who’s who in Cup garage

By SceneDaily.com

Feb 7, 2009

When Dale Earnhardt Jr. looks around the Sprint Cup garage, he doesn’t recognize some of the cars he sees.

And what worries him more, he doesn’t know who is driving some of those cars.

“I seen numbers going through the garage yesterday, and I’m like, 75, who is that?” he said.

For the record, it was Derrike Cope, one of several drivers without full-time rides who are attempting to make the Daytona 500. He joins a list of drivers like Mike Garvey, Kirk Shelmerdine, Geoff Bodine, Boris Said, Norm Benning, Carl Long and 74-year-old James Hylton, who are all just trying to qualify for the Daytona 500.

Others like Jeremy Mayfield, Joe Nemechek, Scott Riggs, Regan Smith and Terry Labonte landed last-minute rides with underfunded teams looking to piece together enough sponsorship to run the full season.

Earnhardt Jr. will have his eye out for some of those cars and drivers during practices leading up to the Daytona 500. In fact, he and his spotter, T.J. Majors, have a system in place for spotting cars and drivers they aren’t familiar with and might need to be leery of.

It’s kind of like a cell phone commercial, Earnhardt Jr. said.

“Those commercials where everybody is walking around with these service bars above their heads and some people had good service and some didn’t. That’s kinda how we do it,” he said. “He tells me I’ve got one bar inside, no bars inside, four bars inside. That way if it’s one bar, or one and half bars, or no bars, you be a little careful and take it easy.”

Earnhardt Jr. actually likes seeing teams like Tommy Baldwin Racing (with driver Scott Riggs) and drivers like Mayfield and Nemechek putting together deals to try to run the full season. They are underdogs that he would like to see succeed.

“I pull for the underdog hard,” he said. “I don’t think I would ever pull against one, especially in this time.”

Though the odds are stacked heavily against them, Earnhardt Jr. actually thinks some single-car teams could succeed this year because the sluggish economy has driven prices and costs down.

“It’s going to be really tough for guys to compete, but if there is a time in this sport where it can get back to like it was, when you had little single-car teams, with minimal funding, competing week in and week out, this is it, because one thing the economy has done is make them a lot of cheaper to obtain,” he said. “Prices are down on parts and pieces. You can find deals here and there because those businesses are trying to stay afloat just like the race teams are.”