The Las Vegas test was important for every Nextel Cup team, not least for the #8 DEI squad and driver Dale Earnhardt Jr, who will be working frantically over the two days to re-acclimatise himself with returning crew chief Tony Eury Jr and get his championship ambitions back on-track.
Moderator
We're joined by Dale Earnhardt Jr. Talk about how your day is going so far.
DALE EARNHARDT, JR.
We’re just getting kind of reacquainted with the racetrack. It's going pretty good I think. We've got one car that I'm pretty comfortable with. I think we can make something out of it. The other car we struggled with a little bit, but it's not necessarily the type of chassis or type of car that we would typically run. So we were just going to give it a try, try to learn some things with it. But this other car we tested with a couple days ago in Texas has been pretty strong and I'm pretty happy with how it feels. We need to get some more speed out of it, and we'll work on that over the next day and a half.
Q.
The cars this year have a new nose and a new tail. What does that mean to the driver? Is it a different car for him today than it was at the last race last year?
DALE EARNHARDT, JR.
Not necessarily. We tested this car a little bit last year before the end of the season and I felt like the new nose is a little bit better. It offers a little bit more in the way of downforce and a little bit more in the way of grip to the front tyres versus the car we ran last year.
But we're just talking tenths of a percent, not a whole lot, which I think is good. If they can improve, that's good, but you don't want to get so much of a change, you really have to go chasing after what kind of set up you need for the first 25 percent of the season.
