‘Little E’ has day full of troubles

Nick Christensen

Monday, March 8, 2004 | 10 a.m.

Coming into the Sunday's UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400, Dale Earnhardt Jr. was the NASCAR Nextel Cup points leader, and arguably his sport's most popular driver, the son of one of its most influential drivers. It might have been easy to think he has had a lot of breaks in life and racing.

He got none of them Sunday.

Earnhardt, the Daytona 500 winner, finished 35th at Sunday's Las Vegas race, suffering from a poorly handling car that required multiple trips to the garage and, he said, would not at all cooperate.

"Yeah, it's really disappointing," he said. "We were about a second off the pace, no matter what we did. I know it's going to be a black Monday at the shop, but I also know we're going to do an awful lot of laps in testing this week at Kentucky (Speedway) to figure out what was wrong."

The Kentucky track is a 1.5 mile tri-oval similar to Las Vegas Motor Speedway, except with 14 degrees of banking in the corner, as opposed to Las Vegas' 12 degrees.

Earnhardt tumbled to seventh in the Nextel Cup points standings, one point behind Kevin Harvick. Matt Kenseth, now the winner of two of the three Nextel Cup races this season, moved up to first, followed by Tony Stewart and Elliot Sadler.

The sport's flagship driver said he thinks the season will get back on track at next week's race at Atlanta.

"We've always been good at Atlanta, so we should be OK. I mean, we started last year with two finishes like this and came back strong the rest of the year," Earnhardt said. "We should have tested here, but it's too late now. I know we're going to do what we can to figure out what we need to do to correct whatever was wrong."