How will Dale Earnhardt Jr. really fare with new crew chief?
I am sure all of Junior Nation is united with the same question -- how will Dale Earnhardt Jr. perform in 2015 with Steve Letarte having departed as the No. 88 crew chief. Greg Ives has been tapped to lead the team this season. I don't have any reason to believe that Greg won't be the right guy to replace Steve.
I mean, the reality is they know each other quite well and, as all race fans know, it's all about chemistry between a driver and crew chief. Greg worked for Dale. Jr. He won a Nationwide Series championship for him last year at JR Motorsports with rookie driver Chase Elliott. At the same time, we know that the former Nationwide Series, which in 2015 is now sponsored by Xfinity, is simply not the same as the NASCAR Sprint Cup series.
The greatest example I can give you of that is Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and his crew chief, Mike Kelley. They won back-to-back Nationwide championships.
Unfortunately, when they moved to the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, they simply couldn't make it work together. With all that said, I just think there are a lot of positives to having Greg as Dale Jr.'s crew chief.
Greg worked for crew chief Chad Knaus as an engineer. They won races and championships together on that No. 48 car. Now as a crew chief, Greg will be back in the same shop with Chad where the No. 48 and No. 88 cars are housed together. So I just have a feeling Dale Jr. and Greg will be successful.
Again though, it's just another one of those things that we won't really know how it will play out until we get the race cars back on the track and get the 2015 season under way. Daytona isn't really going to give us that many answers because, like I always tell you, Daytona is Daytona. I think once we get past Daytona and get that stretch of Atlanta plus the West Coast swing of Las Vegas, Phoenix and Fontana behind us, we'll have a lot of answers to questions that remain unanswered right now.
