Page 2 of 3
He began the season with a bang -- winning all three races during Speedweeks leading up to the Daytona 500. But in the big race, a "two-dollar part" broke and he finished a miserable 36th. It looked like all of last season in microcosm. Big splashy finishes followed by disastrous losses, no in-between. Then he smashed and banged his way around Rockingham for a bruised 33rd place finish. It looked more like bumper cars than Winston Cup.
His luck took a turn for the better in Vegas with a second place finish and, except for his nemesis track, Bristol, he's finished in the top 10 ever since. His pit crew, not the most consistent either in years past, were on fire in Vegas, gaining positions for him with each stop.
Though he started in the back in Atlanta the following week, it took less than 40 laps for him to weave his way to the top 10. He eventually finished third by "keeping his nose clean." Afterwards he said, "What we've had trouble with was consistency for a long run and staying fast for a long run and we were today."
At Texas, he ended up second and along the way did some crowd-pleasing Gordon bumping. He also had to start in the back in California, but made his way into the top 10 in 34 laps. A lug nut screw-up during a pit stop late in the race put him a lap down, but he still managed a sixth place finish. Clearly DEI is giving him fast cars -- and he's learned to keep his temper under control, at least while he's racing.
Then came Talladega. Darlington may have had the closest, fiercest finish of the season so far, but Talladega was all out hellacious racing with Junior providing most of the fireworks. He became the first person to win four consecutive times at that super speedway. Though the first three victories were relatively easy, the fourth one was a bitch.
Again he started in the back. He slipped through the "Big One" on lap 89 and by 107 took the lead. But he didn't cruise up front comfortably as in the past. This time his teammate Michael Waltrip wasn't there to run interference and draft with him. (He crashed on lap 83 and ended up with a 24th place finish.) Throughout the day, Junior clawed and gouged and bumped his way to the front nine times. He wore his hand out waving anybody and everybody to get behind him and push.
And with three laps to go, he dove into a three-wide pass that sent him below the yellow line and left fans gasping, fearing he'd be Black Flagged (i.e., parked). NASCAR ruled the pass legal and he got the checkered flag. Chat rooms overflowed with thrilled fans declaring their most sacred form of approval: he drove like his dad that day.
There are several factors that have no doubt led to Junior becoming, by all appearances, a more focused and consistent driver: he's more experienced, he's got more distance between himself and the specter of his father's tragic death, and he's recovered from the concussion suffered during last year's wreck in California.
Maybe even more important, though, is that he seems to have a better working relationship with his team. It's like he spent the off-season reading Drivers are from Mars, Pit Crews are from Venus. Plus, Junior has said that the personnel changes made in the off-season have rejuvenated the team. In the past, the relationship looked like a bad teenage romance - nobody knew what the other wanted or how to give it to them. Anybody listening in to his radio frequency on race days now can tell that he's both tougher with his crew and more articulate about what the car needs in order to run up front. His crew chief, Tony Eury Sr., noted this after the race at Martinsville: "He's learning the cars better and giving more information. Everything is better this season."
He even claims to have tempered his partying ways in order to focus more on the week-in and week-out work of competing for a championship. Before you get sad thinking of the infamous Club E, the nightclub in his basement, gathering dust bunnies instead of beach bunnies, rest assured he's still NASCAR's resident rock star.
He's now been in three music videos, sharing screen time with Sheryl Crow, Three Doors Down, and the Matthew Good Band (who?). Like any rock star worth his leather, he still primarily dates swimsuit models -- busty brunettes whose "acting" credits are far outnumbered by the half-nude photos of them on the Internet.
But the relatively serious and composed Junior of 2003 seems unlikely to pull stunts like last year's PR debacle in which he blew off about 800 fans waiting in line for a book signing to jet off to a Kid Rock concert. However, there's no evidence that his musical taste has improved as much as his on-track performance.
