Earnhardt Can’t Find Words

Dale Earnhardt Jr., bent down at the side of his hauler, took a bag of ice water and held it to the back of his neck.

His driving suit sagging halfway down his boxer shorts, Earnhardt was trying to catch his first break of the day.

After 500 miles inside a car that felt like 500 degrees in Sunday’s Auto Club 500, NASCAR’s series leader had a tough day in the office.

Little E finished 19th at California Speedway and had his 94-point lead dissipate like water on the 139-degree asphalt. He now leads second-place finisher Jimmie Johnson by 25 points, winner Jeff Gordon by 27 and fourth-place finisher Matt Kenseth by 96.

Dale, when you catch your breath, can I have a couple of minutes?

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to catch my breath,” Earnhardt said. And with that, frustrated and in no mood to talk, he left for the air-conditioned sanctity of his motor coach. That was his only direct comment to the media. Twenty minutes later, he and his DEI teammates were gone to the airport.

California Speedway hasn’t been terribly kind to Earnhardt, who is as much a cultural celebrity these days as he is a racing one, but all the music videos and beautiful people lists in the world couldn’t have helped his Budweiser Chevrolet on Sunday.

He started 10th, and the king of restrictor plate races -- those on 2 1/2-mile superspeedways -- was never a factor on Fontana’s two-mile oval. The car kept pushing to the outside of the track, preventing him from getting inside to complete a pass.

By the time he pitted on Lap 24, he had already fallen to 25th, and his handling problems continued; as his team tried to fix the push, the car eventually became loose. He never got higher than 17th, or lower than 30th, after filtering through pit stops.

Iced down and showered, Earnhardt made a comment via his publicist, Jade Gurss: “I’m wiped out. I feel like I’ve been in a fight. I fought the car every lap, and it felt like the car never did the same thing twice. It wasn’t until the last 100 laps or so that I could do anything with it.”

After pitting on Lap 201 of 250, Earnhardt made his biggest move of the race, from 25th to 19th.

In his fifth full season in Nextel Cup, Earnhardt is trying to win his first championship for team owner Teresa Earnhardt, his stepmother and widow of seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt.

By comparison, Gordon -- the clean-cut anti-hero to Earnhardt’s poster boy role for NASCAR Nation -- won his second championship in his fifth season. It was Gordon who had debris thrown at him after winning last week at Talladega, denying second-place Earnhardt.

Gordon has also never finished lower than 16th in eight races at California Speedway.

Earnhardt has finished better than he qualified only once in five races at California Speedway, when he took 12th in 2000. He finished sixth last season, and third in 2001. He suffered a concussion in the 2002 race, the worst of his career, and finished 36th.

That was not a good day at the office either. At least this one didn’t leave him bruised.