Dale Jr. confident he can come from the back and "get a great finish"

That’s understandable, given that he described his No. 88 Chevy as fun to drive. That hasn’t often been the case for Earnhardt this season, whose cars typically haven't been especially fast off the truck.

Avoiding a practice crash

But Kansas was different. Earnhardt was fastest in the Best 10 Consecutive Lap Average category in the first Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series practice — even though he was sideways early in the session and nearly tagged the wall.

How close was Earnhardt to wadding up his car on the 1.5-mile track?

“It was real close,” Earnhardt said. “That would have been a back-up (car) for sure. You know, I looked up there and against the fence it looks like the (NASCAR Camping World) Trucks have been up there and there is some rubber down, so I thought it was pretty clean, but we went up there and it was a little dusty for whatever reason. That is where we are going to race. That seems like, you know, this track has greyed up quite a bit, good age on the surface and it will continue to get even more fun and wider.

“It’s pretty wide as it is, so I wanted to try to get up there as soon as I could and see how our car drove, so we didn’t find out anything in the race that we didn’t already know. Right now, we are kind of running in the middle of the track and that will change a little bit. That won’t really be what we are doing in the race. In the race, I think, we will be up at the top or at the bottom.”

Qualifying inspection issues

The challenge escalated for Earnhardt in the Go Bowling 400 after the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports team failed to pass pre-qualifying inspection. His car never made it to the grid for time trials, having failed to make it through the Laser Inspection Station (LIS). Earnhardt, whose best result at Kansas is a second in 2011, will have to come from the 33rd starting position on Saturday night to have a shot at the win.

“We had a pretty good car in practice, had good speed and it’s a pretty long race,” Earnhardt said. “I think it will take us some time, but we can certainly make our way up through there and get a great finish. The car has great speed. The guys are certainly disappointed about not being able to get through tech because we felt like we should have been able to pass and we actually ran the car through right after practice and everything was good.

“I don’t know why it failed, but I’m sure that is the way everybody feels that didn’t get through it’s like they don’t understand what is going on, but it definitely would have been nice to start a little closer to the front and make it a little bit easier on us, but we will have to do our best when the race starts to try to be aggressive and get as many as we can on the early restarts.”

Praising Kansas

Earnhardt is thrilled with the evolution of the 1.5-mile track since Kansas Speedway repaved the surface in the fall of 2012. Although he took “the hardest hit” of his career during a test of the new surface that season, which sidelined the driver for two races including the fall Kansas event, Earnhardt prefers the current track conditions.

“The new asphalt is not always a lot of fun, really narrow groove, hard to get rubber laid down and if you get outside of that groove it’s real treacherous, you saw Texas was pretty bad,” Earnhardt said. “But, it was the best-case scenario because of the work they did all week at Texas, but think about how Michigan used to be when it was repaved, very single groove. Can’t pass when there is only one way around the track, so this place the color of the asphalt has changed quite a bit. It’s gotten slicker and a little more abrasive and we move up and run against the wall, run in the middle, run the bottom and drivers love to have options.

“If the car is not working perfectly in the groove they are in they can move around and then the old race track, old surface like that gives you that chance. You can’t go moving around on new asphalt you will spin out and wreck. I think everybody loves it. I certainly didn’t hate the old track, as far as the configuration, but I like banking and like running against the wall and we can do that here.”