BROOKLYN, Mich. -- For a guy who only two days earlier had been lambasting NASCAR for allegedly putting a poor product on the tracks much of this season, Dale Earnhardt Jr. sure looked like he was having a whole lot of fun Sunday at Michigan International Speedway.
And for a while, it looked like he might even win a race, too.
In the end, Earnhardt had to settle for third in the Carfax 400 -- but he was coming hard over the final laps and knew he had the fuel to make it. Eventual winner Brian Vickers and second-place finisher Jeff Gordon, Earnhardt's teammate at Hendrick Motorsports, weren't nearly as sure that they could make it to the checkered flag without running out of gas.
But while Earnhardt had fresher tires and more gas than the pair running in front of him, he didn't have the time to catch them.
"The way our luck has been, I wasn't sitting there thinking I was in the catbird's seat. I was thinking maybe I'll get on the podium [with a top-three finish]," Earnhardt said.
"I know every one of those guys is real good at saving fuel. We've all gotten smarter, I think, in the last year and a half on some of the tricks you can pull to do that, some of the things we can accomplish under caution to help ourselves."
Earnhardt should know. His last Sprint Cup victory came 43 races ago at the same MIS venue, when he gambled on fuel mileage at the end and barely made it to Victory Lane.
This time, others had to sweat out the fuel-mileage game. Some lost, too. Losers in that gambling affair included two of Earnhardt's other Hendrick teammates -- three-time defending points champion Jimmie Johnson, who ran out of gas with three laps to go; and Mark Martin, who won the Michigan race in June when Johnson and Greg Biffle both ran out of gas in front of him in the final lap and a half.
Johnson attempted to make it 51 laps between fuel stops this time, when in the June race he failed to make it more than 47. It turned out to be a bad gamble and he ended up with a 33rd-place finish to show for it.
As good as Johnson and his crew chief, Chad Knaus, have proven to be overall during the past several seasons, playing the fuel-mileage gamble game obviously is not their forte.
"I'm certainly frustrated," Johnson said. "We've won one race on fuel mileage, ever. It's just not what we are good at. I think it is a little too risky for us to even try it.
"We got lucky once in Phoenix. Outside of that, we always come up short."
Knaus added: "We had the fastest car by a bunch and I hate it for Jimmie and I hate it for all my guys."
Martin was running just outside the top 10 when he ran out of fuel Sunday, relegating him to a 31st-place finish.
Meanwhile, Earnhardt had no such concerns because he pitted earlier while the rest of the top cars stayed out on the track, hoping for a late caution that never came. Earnhardt said afterward that he had to talk crew chief Lance McGrew in letting him come to pit road to take on gas and four tires at the time, figuring it would pay dividends later.
"I knew we had to come in for fuel. Initially, he did not want to," Earnhardt said. "But I was like, 'You know what? Eventually we're going to have to pit and that's going to put us in the back, so why don't we go back there now -- instead of waiting until later when we'll only have a handful of laps to make it back up?' We made the right move."
The third-place finish was Earnhardt's best since grabbing second at Talladega in April. In the 13 races between that one and Sunday's, Earnhardt had finished no higher than 12th and came home in 26th or worse nine times.
He said he is hopeful Sunday's strong run is a harbinger of better times ahead for him and his No. 88 Chevrolet team. They began the season projected as a championship contender, but struggled so badly that team owner Rick Hendrick eventually replaced Tony Eury Jr. with McGrew as crew chief -- a move that hadn't paid many tangible dividends until Sunday.
"We just haven't had nothin' to smile about," Earnhardt said. "So I'm just real happy for Lance and real happy for my guys, my team. Hopefully, this will take a little of the load off of Rick and our sponsors. Hopefully, this will lift them up a little bit and help us build some momentum in the right direction.
"It was a good run [Sunday]. We've seen some other hints where we've been getting better at some other tracks over the last two months. But we finally put a race together where we can appreciate the finish, instead of just having a good car here and there."
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