Dale Earnhardt Jr. on his car making the Daytona 500: 'I can't wait' for Sunday

Bob Pockrass

FOX NASCAR Insider

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Dale Earnhardt Jr. has resisted the lure of his family team going NASCAR Cup Series racing because he wants to make sure it makes sense economically.

From an emotional sense, he’s sold after an evening that totally drained him.

Justin Allgaier had to rally late in his qualifying race Thursday night at Daytona International Speedway to earn the one spot available to non-chartered teams in each of the duels for Sunday’s Daytona 500.

“We have kind of tried to downplay how badly we want to race in the Cup Series. At least I have,” Earnhardt said. “It’s like one of them things where you are like, ‘Man, if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.’

“I’m not going to make it drag down all the other great things happening in my world, but man, we got here, and we got a taste of it. … I didn’t know exactly how badly I wanted to do this or wanted to be a part of something like this until we started going through it.”

Earnhardt co-owns JR Motorsports with his sister, Kelley Earnhardt Miller, and Rick Hendrick. The Earnhardts, among the children of two-time Daytona 500 winner and son of seven-time Cup champion Dale Earnhardt, have won titles in NASCAR’s top development series, the Xfinity Series. They have built an organization around the brand of Earnhardt Jr., who was the sport’s most popular driver for nearly two decades after his father’s death in the 2001 Daytona 500.

“We get to push a car on the grid Sunday for the first time ever and the biggest, most important race that I’ve ever known, and I can’t wait,” Earnhardt said.

It was a long 24 hours prior to the race for Allgaier and the team as Allgaier missed the chance to automatically qualify for the race in single-car runs by just one spot on Wednesday night. That forced them, for all intents and purposes, into a situation where they had to outrun four other drivers in the race Thursday.

JJ Yeley posed a great challenge, and Allgaier was able to pass him on the final lap.

“I don’t know what day of the week it is, what time it is,” Allgaier said. “I feel like we’re in a time warp.

“[Wednesday] night was probably emotionally one of the more draining qualifying efforts ever because I knew how important qualifying was and how much easier the race [would have been]. … I just don’t want to let Dale down, don’t want to let Kelley down, don’t want to let our fans down.”

He didn’t let them down. And now they will join 40 other teams in pushing their cars to pit road on Sunday.

“There’s just no better place than this racetrack,” Earnhardt Miller said. “This is the crown jewel of everything that we do. This is the start of everything that we do.

“This is the big race that everybody wants to make, and here we are sitting here. We’re about to start our first one.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.