Dale Earnhardt Jr. thought something on his car was broken shortly
before the halfway point of Sunday’s race at Dover
International Speedway.
But when his team took a look on pit road, there was nothing
broken, and about seven laps clicked away while he was on pit road
on the green flag.
Earnhardt told his crew the car wouldn’t turn in Turns
1 and 2 and that it felt like something in the steering was broken.
He told his crew he was coming in to pit right away.
But after going under the hood, the team couldn’t find
anything wrong with the car, and several laps later, Earnhardt was
running consistently fast laps.
“There was nothing to be fixed,” a dejected crew
chief Lance McGrew said afterward. “Nothing.”
Earnhardt ended up 10 laps down in 30th, dropping four
positions to 16th in the standings.
“There’s a bunch of marbles on the race track
down there, and I was on the inside,” Earnhardt told
SBNation.com. “We got the green, and I hit those (marbles)
and the car went straight. We’d been dragging the splitter
all day in the corner coming off of (Turn) 4, and the car just went
straight like it had a flat tire.
“We’d been so loose before that, I figured
something must be (messed) up and broke on it. That thing drove
like it was … broke in half.”
