Searching for Answers: Hendrick drivers trying to figure out how they can get back on winning track

RICHMOND, Va. -- So, on a warm, sunny, lazy Saturday afternoon, with Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s NASCAR winless streak reaching the two-year mark, what's the state of things over in Rick Hendrick's Chevy camp?

Joe Gibbs' Toyota drivers are hot, and Richard Childress' Chevy drivers have been very consistent, while not leading a lot of laps. But at Hendrick's, just hours before last night's Dan Lowry 400, some of the talk was about last Sunday's flap between teammates Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon, two of the sport's biggest stars and both dry this season.

"Yeah, we had a little disagreement on the track," Gordon said. "He and I have talked about it, and it's really a nonissue.

"You're going to make decisions that sometimes work with your teammates and sometimes not. The decision I made and the decision he made just didn't blend together.

"Yeah, I was mad about it at the time, but it's a nonissue now. I love working with him on the track, drafting with him, and having him as a teammate. Trust me -- if you guys made as big of a deal out of how upset we all got at different things at Talladega, it would fill up your whole column.

"Everybody is making a much bigger deal out of this because it's Junior and me."

Perhaps the fact that both were still looking for that first win….

Earnhardt's view: "The exact instance that he had a problem was 25 to go, and that I should have helped him.

"But I felt like the person he went with, or decided to get behind and help, was not the best choice. If I was him, I would have dumped him.

"From where I was, I felt I was making the wiser choice.

"But, uh, it would have done us a lot of good to have sat down before the race -- at any point this year -- to discuss our choices in restrictor-plate racing and what we believe to be fair, what we believe to be right, and what we believe to be wrong; so everybody has a better understanding of what to expect from each other.

"That's just something we'll have to learn together as teammates.

"Restrictor-plate racing is difficult because you want to help your teammates but you want to win a race too.

"Had we won the week before and weren't trying to end the streak of losses, I would have been probably a whole lot more apt to work with him and give up a little bit more. I would have been willing to sacrifice more to help him.

"But when the green flag dropped in that race I didn't want anything but the wind, and I was going to do whatever it took.

"I don't know how it would have played out if I would have helped him. We definitely wouldn't have been in the situation we were in, to get in all that action (the big crash) at the end, and end up having to struggle for 10th.

"But I got a little hot on how things were going for me, and I should have been a little more patient.

"But, I don't know, sometimes patience doesn't get what you want either.

"We're good now. We talked about it at Nashville testing. We sat down, and I said, ‘Look, man, I got nothing but respect for you. I'm the first guy here ready to cooperate. I'm the last guy wanting to make any problems or cause any issues.'

"But I'm determined, and when I go out there I race hard.

"He could see that, and he can see that when he's on the track with me.

"The one thing he wanted to make sure he understood was that I didn't have a spot in my mind to spite him or to show him up in any way.

"To be competitive with Jeff, after all the years he's been at Hendrick, that would be foolish. That would be pretty immature.

"There's a positive competitiveness you can have at most teams, but that wouldn't be very productive....

"We'll try to do a better job of working together next time to win the race. We have a better opportunity to win as teammates working together than we do separately, and we should take that opportunity next time."

Learning curve

So why isn't Hendrick hot this spring?

"It's the car of tomorrow," Jimmie Johnson said. "If you look at a lot of my victories last year, at the start of the season they were on the 1½-mile and two-mile tracks, with the old-style car. And we've been working hard to understand what this new car needs on the big tracks.

"My teammates have gotten off to a little better start than I did. Then I came on at Texas and ran well.

"I think our short-track program has been on par. At Bristol I was more competitive than I have ever been. At Martinsville, Jeff and I were up front and very competitive.

"We're just trying to develop the bigger-track stuff."

"We've got to start putting more consistent runs together, and getting ourselves further up in the points," Gordon said.

"You've got to walk before you can run, and I've always said when you're consistently top five and leading laps, the wins are going to come. We just haven't been doing that....

"One of the things we are being challenged with right now is Goodyear has changed the tires just about everywhere we have gone this year, except for Martinsville. So all the setups we had last year, you can just throw them out the window; they don't seem to work.

"Not to mention that the other teams have stepped up, and we are trying to step up along with them.

"What comes along with that are challenges -- sometimes you hit the setup, sometimes you mess. Right now we are definitely a little off our game because we are coming back to tracks we have had success at -- but not everything is the same.

"It is pretty confusing to us.

"I know how great our organization is, and our teams. And I have confidence in myself. But when you show up at the track and cars are doing things you aren't used to, it throws you for a loop.

"We spent three or four days testing in Nashville the last two weeks and felt we really had some big gains, and showed up here and it didn't feel anything like that.

"We aren't there yet; we still have work to do. It is as much me as it is our cars and setups.

"Sometimes you have to learn how to drive different setups. I went through this many times in my career. I probably go back to, like, 2000 and 2005: both years we really were searching for speed, and everybody was transitioning to different setups. We tried them, and they didn't work for me.

"A little bit of it was my driving style; some of it, just getting used to a different feel. That is one of the things we are dealing with right now.

"There are some major, big changes going on in setups.

"This car was created to simplify things -- and in my mind all I have seen is things becoming more complicated."

■ Mike Mulhern can be reached at mmulhern@wsjournal.com .