Earnhardt aims to stay consistent

Earnhardt is not very optimistic about his chances of scoring a second victory in the summer stretch that is about to begin but he believes that once the Chase starts, he will be racing at tracks better suited to him.

"I think I have real potential and the races specifically in the Chase are good tracks for me," Earnhardt said. "The summer stretch is sort of, you know, always been a difficult stretch for me. Tracks like Pocono, hit or miss, the road course races, getting them in and out of the way.

"Yeah, just trying to get out of the road courses with a top-ten, you're lucky as hell. But I don't know, you know, the summer stretch; we've never really been smoking hot in the last eight years.

"We'll see, with this equipment and this opportunity that Rick (Hendrick) has given us with these motors and these cars, we may turn that around and really sure is surprise ourselves throughout the summer."

The Hendrick driver expects to maintain his consistency in the coming races and stay out of trouble to consolidate his place in the Chase. He says he would be happy to settle for top five finishes when he doesn't have a car that gives him the chance to get victory.

"I guess I'm in a maintain mode," Earnhardt added. "I'll be real happy if I can just be as consistent as I've been the first part of the season. We go out and we race hard. I've run hard every lap. I'm qualifying every lap.

"But I'm smart, I don't back my car into the fence and I don't run into the side of people and spin myself out and I try not to be around people who do that.

"So you know, wins, I'm working hard to get wins, but I just think we've had the best car sometimes and things have happened, and the rest of the times, we've had a Top 5 car and that's what we've got."

Earnhardt's consistency thus far, which shows eleven top ten results out of the first fifteen races, has allowed him to be among the top five in the championship for the past eleven races.