Dale Jr. adjusting to crew chief's 'super-super serious' personality
Thirteen races into their first season together, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and crew chief Greg Ives have, by most all accounts, enjoyed a successful start.
In addition to scoring a Chase for the Sprint Cup-clinching win at Talladega Superspeedway in early May, Earnhardt's No. 88 Chevrolet has been fast just about everywhere, and the driver seems as confident in his team as he's ever been.
Yet Earnhardt and Ives have yet to establish the close, personal bond that Earnhardt enjoyed with Steve Letarte, his crew chief from the past four seasons.
Letarte, who guided the third-generation driver to five wins and four Chase berths from 2011-2014, left Hendrick Motorsports at the end of last season to join NBC Sports.
"He's not the jokester Steve was," Earnhardt said on Friday at Pocono Raceway. "The atmosphere in the lounge is a lot more business and less jokes and less talk about family and what happened last week and what are you going to do Monday and stuff like that. Me and Steve had become best friends, and so everything's on the table as far as conversation. Now, I don't know Greg well enough, but we're working on our relationship and definitely we have a lot of trust in each other, and the relationship will continue to get better the more we work together.
"Also, I don't want to sit there and just shoot the crap with him and, I guess, distract him from what he's trying to do. I want to give him every opportunity to brainstorm on the race car. He's an engineer. He's got that engineer mind. And I want him to work it, and so I just sort of sit back and make myself available for anything he needs to know from me."
Not that Ives refrains from the occasional joke.
"He's got a sense of humor; don't get me wrong," Earnhardt said. "But, it's all business. We understand, and I think he takes this super-super serious. This is his dream come true to be able to crew chief in the Cup Series, and I want to give him every opportunity to be successful and us as a team. We're in a good position winning races, running well; we don't want to take a step back. So it's really all business right now for the time being. We win us some more races, we can be a little more jovial. But 'til then, we need to win some more races."
Despite having just the one victory at Talladega, Earnhardt has eight top-10 finishes -- including seven top fives -- in his 13 starts with Ives calling the shots. He is fifth in the standings.
Earnhardt lauds Ives for taking practical steps to shield himself from much of the inevitable scrutiny that comes with being the crew chief for a 12-time NASCAR most popular driver.
"I think he's been insulated somehow so far, whether it's staying off social media, because Letarte was very active on Twitter and Greg isn't," Earnhardt said. "Greg sort of keeps himself in his little world and protects what's important to him."
"I get tore up on social media, and just by everyone in general, when I make a mistake," the driver of the No. 88 Chevy said. "Man, when I missed my pit stall at the Daytona 500 that year, it took two years for people to quit talk about that. It did. I still hear about it, like, 'Are you going to miss your pit stall?' That was four years ago.
"So, I joke with (Ives) about it. And he seems to just like stare right through me like he has no idea what I'm talking about. I don't think that he has been affected by it at all yet. Certainly, I want him focused on the car and what's important to him. He's definitely got his mind on the right things."
