Dale Earnhardt Jr. didn’t have the best of days in the Irish Hills after a wreck in the early stages of today’s race.
Rounding Turn 2, the driver of the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet threaded the needle of AJ Allmendinger and Chris Buescher. Buescher got loose and clipped the left-rear corner of Earnhardt. This got Earnhardt loose and sent him up into the left-front of Allmendinger. Both ended up in the wall. Earnhardt continued to hit the wall down the backstretch before his car spun out down across the track onto the runoff area.
“Yeah, it wasn’t too bad, actually,” Earnhardt said in response to being told his wreck looked hard. “I knew I was going to hit the wall. The No. 34 just drove into the left front quarter panel. Oh, man. I don’t know; them restarts and all that. You’ve got a responsibility to try and take care of everybody out there even when you’re three-wide. I’m disappointed in that. But, we had a pretty good car and we were just kind of taking our time, there. And the car was great. So, it’s a shame.
Earnhardt added that he wished Buescher “would have taken better care of us.”
“He just lost the car and hit the quarter panel,” he said. “It happens, though. I’m angry, but I won’t be too upset about it later. It’s frustrating right now because we had a good car and I was happy with the way the car drove. We had good speed, we just needed to continue to work on getting our track position and we were doing that. We won’t get a chance to get the finish I think we could have got today.”
When asked about the wreck from his point of view, Allmendinger said he wasn’t “really sure. I think Junior got hit and I was on the outside of him and that was it. It was kind of weird back there. I’m not really sure what kind of car we had. I thought in clean air we weren’t too bad, but I guess a lot of people could say that. Just not a lot of fun racing there.”
The damage done to both cars was significant and neither continued on in the race. Allmendinger finished 38th and Earnhardt finished 39th.
