Dale Earnhardt Jr. answers questioners with LifeLock 400 win

In the few seconds it took to wave the checkered flag over his No. 88 Chevrolet, the main question attached to Dale Earnhardt Jr. abruptly changed.

For more than two years, the question had been when NASCAR’s most popular driver would finally win another Sprint Cup Series points race.

That was answered Sunday when he won the LifeLock 400 at Michigan International Speedway – his 18th career victory – and ended a 76-race winless drought.

Then, as “Junior” conducted his post-race news conference, he turned prescient: “There will be a new question, and it will be just as persistent,” he said.

And the new question is this: Can the scion of the late seven-time Cup champion Dale Earnhardt Sr. win his first championship?

Dale Jr., 33, has one of the best opportunities of his nine-year career. He’s third in the standings, only 84 points behind leader Kyle Busch and 52 points behind second-place Jeff Burton.

Michigan was the 15th race of the year, and the top 12 drivers in points after the “regular season” of 26 races get to compete in the Chase for the Cup title playoff over the final 10 events.

Earnhardt has been racking up points for the same reason that it became evident that his next win was only a matter of time: He’s been consistently running near the front. In the 15 races this season, he has 11 top-10 finishes, including seven in the top five.

In fact, he’s been the most consistent driver among the four at the powerhouse team of Hendrick Motorsports, which Earnhardt joined after his much-publicized departure from his family team after last season.

With team owner Rick Hendrick’s top-tier cars, Earnhardt is poised to reach the point lead for the first time in four years. He last led in 2004, the first year that the Chase was implemented, when he had six victories.

Just qualifying for the Chase would be an improvement. He’s missed it in two of the last three seasons, including 2007, when he finished 16th in points.

“I’ve run hard every lap” this year, he said. “I’ll be real happy if I can just be as consistent as I’ve been the first part of the season.”

Up next, though, is a string of races that have given Earnhardt problems in the past, starting with Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Infineon Raceway, a twisty road course in Sonoma. Earnhardt has led only once at Infineon and has an average finish of 22nd.

“The summer stretch is sort of, you know, always been a difficult stretch for me,” he said. “Tracks like Pocono, hit or miss, the [Infineon and Watkins Glen] road-course races.”

But this year could be different.

“We’ll see, with this equipment and this opportunity that Rick’s given us with these motors and these cars, we may turn that around,” he said. “This will be interesting.”

In the meantime, Earnhardt, his team and his huge fan base reveled in his Michigan victory – which came on a fuel gamble at the end – and in finally dispensing of the when-will-you-win-again question.

“He’s got an awful lot of fans, and they ask me the same thing every time I see them, ‘When is Junior going win the race?’ ” Hendrick said. “Felt like that was kind of the gun to my head.”

Earnhardt said “the winless streak didn’t frustrate me as much as most people would think.”

“I never wondered, ‘Man, will I never win again?’ “said Earnhardt, who won two non-points exhibition and qualifying races at the start of the season at Daytona International Speedway.

But he acknowledged that as he continued to finish near the front this year, “you just grow a little impatient because you want it now.”

The fact that the win came on Father’s Day only added to Earnhardt’s joy, despite his father’s death in a crash on the last lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001.

“It’s special,” he said. “My daddy, he meant a lot to me. I can’t tell my father Happy Father’s Day, but I get the opportunity to wish it upon all of the other fathers out there, and I genuinely mean that when I say it.”

Have a motor sports question for Jim? E-mail him at james.peltz@latimes.com.