Dale Earnhardt Jr. hopes he can maintain early momentum

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is curbing his enthusiasm.

While relishing his near victory in last week’s Daytona 500, the most popular driver in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series knows he’s back at what has been -- for him -- the unfriendly confines of Auto Club Speedway in Fontana.

Still, Earnhardt said Friday that he hopes to maintain momentum from his second-place finish behind winner Jamie McMurray in the Daytona 500 with another strong showing Sunday at the Fontana track.

“I enjoy finishing up front; it had been a long time since we had finished [well],” Earnhardt said before qualifying 27th in the 43-car field for Sunday’s Auto Club 500.

McMurray did maintain his momentum, winning the pole position Friday with a lap of 183.744 mph. And his teammate Juan Pablo Montoya qualified second at 183.477 mph, giving their Chevrolet team, Earnhardt Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates, a sweep of the front row.

Earnhardt, who drives for Hendrick Motorsports, long has struggled at the two-mile Auto Club Speedway oval. In 16 starts, he has never won and has finished in the top five three times.

The son of the late seven-time Cup champion Dale Earnhardt also is coming off a poor 2009 season in which he failed to win and finished 25th in the point standings.

“We had been battered and beaten up so much last year, by ourselves particularly,” he said. “I didn’t want to get too excited after that [Daytona] finish because it was Daytona and it was a track that I typically can run good.

“I didn’t want to get too excited about it because I know I wouldn’t be able to really convince anybody that we were back or we were a strong team or had fixed anything until we come to these kind of tracks and run good at them,” Earnhardt said.

Kenseth surprise

Like Earnhardt, former Cup champion Matt Kenseth endured a lousy season last year after winning the first two races, at Daytona and Fontana.

On Wednesday, despite Kenseth’s eighth-place finish at this year’s Daytona 500, his Roush Fenway Racing team stunned the sport by replacing Kenseth’s crew chief.

Veteran crew chief Todd Parrott was tapped to replace Drew Blickensderfer, who had served as crew chief of Kenseth’s No. 17 Ford since the start of last season. Blickensderfer was moved to the team’s research and development department.

Kenseth, who qualified 20th for Sunday’s race, and team co-owner Jack Roush said they didn’t make the change in the off-season because they weren’t sure it was needed.

That changed at the Daytona race, when it became clear that “the whole dynamic of the team really needed something,” Kenseth said.

The team decided to act now, he said, “instead of waiting until we’re halfway into the season and it’s too late to dig ourselves out.”

“You didn’t feel like everybody came in the truck fired up to go win races,” Kenseth said. “We needed something to throw a spark in the thing.”

And finally

McMurray and other NASCAR drivers enjoy the social-networking site Twitter -- “I’m like a little Twitter geek,” McMurray said -- but Earnhardt said he’s not one of them.

“I never really enjoyed doing it on a personal level,” Earnhardt said, adding that he feared upsetting his followers if he didn’t keep updating his status.

“I had Facebook and MySpace and all that stuff way back in the day, and I just get burned out feeling that responsibility to keep it updated,” Earnhardt said. “It was like, what for? You have to get out of the house every once in a while.”

james.peltz@latimes.com