TBO.com - Live in the moment

Earnhardt Can't Outrun Bad Karma

Published: Oct 31, 2007

There was only one way the constellations could have aligned for Jimmie Johnson to pull out a win Sunday at Atlanta. Sure enough, Alpha Centauri got right with the fourth moon of Jupiter and the sun shone brightly on the No. 48 car.

Again.

Whenever one guy is getting the kind of supernatural love that Johnson and his teammate/championship combatant Jeff Gordon are this year, you can be sure somebody at the other end of the spectrum is getting kicked in the teeth.

His name is Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Earnhardt has only three more chances to avoid going winless for the first time in his career, but it's hard to win when you've had seven engine failures in 33 races, a wheel come off while you're challenging for second place, and an uncanny penchant for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Not that Earnhardt definitely would have won any of those races, but he would have had a fighting chance in some of them.

"We're fast, we lead laps, we set ourselves up for victory and then bam! - something odd happens," Earnhardt said.

He said that before Sunday's Pep Boys Auto 500, in which Earnhardt was trying to pass Carl Edwards for second place on the last lap when his left rear wheel came off and his car veered sharply into the wall.

Told You So

After fighting back from a pit road penalty, an unscheduled pit stop for a tire going flat and a spin in Turn 1 while running second, Earnhardt lined up behind Johnson and Edwards for Sunday's green-white-checkered finish.

He could feel the wheel getting loose before the restart, but fourth-place Reed Sorenson relayed through his spotter that he couldn't see anything wrong with Earnhardt's car.

"Are you kidding?" Earnhardt fired back to his spotter, T.J. Majors. "It's driving like a forklift here! Do you see the car weaving? That's not me! It may be OK at speed. … We'll find out here in a second."

Bam!

It's the way Earnhardt's final season with Dale Earnhardt Inc. has gone. Bad breaks, bad parts, bad karma.

So much has gone wrong for the driver who's moving to Hendrick Motorsports next year that it's fairly amazing he's the top-ranked driver outside the Chase - 13th, with more top-five finishes (seven) than four drivers in the Chase.

The season began with a crash in the Daytona 500, and before Sunday's crash at Atlanta, there were engine failures at California, Indianapolis, Watkins Glen, Richmond, Talladega and Martinsville and a crash at Texas.

In the spring race at Texas - site of this weekend's eighth race in the Chase for the Nextel Cup - Earnhardt led 96 laps before Tony Stewart spun out while trying to pass Kurt Busch for the lead, and Kyle Busch ran into Earnhardt.

Never Laid Down

Then there was the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, where Earnhardt ran in the top five much of the day before an engine failure left him with a 34th-place finish. At Richmond, he was in the middle of a three-way battle for third place with less than 60 laps remaining when the engine expired.

"I'm not sure how much more bizarre this season can get," Earnhardt said. "We've done so many good things this year as a team, and I've been given the most consistently fast cars of my career, and the only thing lacking is a victory."

A driver who could be acting like a lame duck and a team that could have packed it in when their driver gave notice have competed admirably in the Chase. Earnhardt has had good runs throughout the Chase. He finished third at Dover, sixth at Kansas, led at Talladega until his engine blew, led at Martinsville, challenged at Atlanta.

It bodes well for how he will compete next year, when he becomes a teammate of Johnson and Gordon.

And gets some of that supernatural love for himself.