Martin: Change good for Earnhardt

The Sprint Cup veteran, who has worked and succeeded with many different crew chiefs throughout his NASCAR career, including Earnhardt's new interim crew chief Lance McGrew, said the changes implemented by Rick Hendrick will be refreshing for the team.

"Dale Jr's situation has been building and building since late summer last year," said Martin. "You get to a certain point where in order for things to get better you have to make a change and it sort of puts everybody on edge.

"Everybody does more. I think Junior will do more because of this change and he'll be more tolerant of situations because it's a growing pain rather than something that has been festering and getting sore. I think that will be good for the whole team."

The-50-year-old said the communication between Earnhardt and Eury Jr was not flowing well due to their mutual frustration caused by the lack of results, making the change inevitable. He is hopeful that the switch to Lance McGrew will allow Earnhardt to race at the front again.

"You know where Junior and Tony Jr were, their communication was suffering because of frustration and now it's all new and Junior will have a new attitude because he won't feel that same kind of frustration," he said.

"I think it will be good right from the start. Obviously they will get better as they race along and they learn what really works for Junior. That's what happened with [crew chief] Alan [Gustafson] and my team. We've gotten better with each race but we came out of the gate pretty good too.

"Junior is one hell of a race car driver and as soon as he straps into something that feels right then he's going to go to the front."