NASCAR inspectors flag No. 8 as rain pushes race to Sunday

1 p.m. Mother's Day start now set at South Carolina's Darlington Raceway

DAVID POOLE and JIM UTTER / The Charlotte Observer

Saturday, May. 12, 2007

• Slideshow | A rainy Saturday at Darlington Raceway
• Darlington slideshow | Dale Earnhardt Jr., Clint Bowyer and many more

DARLINGTON, S.C. – Come rain or come shine, nothing can wipe Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Dale Earnhardt Inc. out of the NASCAR headlines.

Rain drenched Darlington Raceway Saturday night, pushing the Dodge Avenger 500 back to a 1 p.m. start Sunday. It’s the second straight week that rain has washed out a Saturday night race, following last week’s postponement at Richmond.

It will be the first time NASCAR runs on Mother's Day since 1986, when the all-star event was held at Atlanta.

In prerace inspections Saturday, however, NASCAR officials said a problem had been found on the No. 8 Chevrolet. Inspectors discovered that the rear wing on Earnhardt Jr.’s No. 8 Chevrolet was improperly mounted and forced the team to reattach the wing with new mounting brackets.

Nextel Cup Series director John Darby said NASCAR confiscated the mounting brackets used by the No. 8 team on its wing – one of the key components to the new “car of tomorrow” which is being used at 16 races this season including Darlington.

“We have specific blue prints for all the parts on the car,” Darby said. He said series officials “are a little sensitive to those parameters.”

The incident is likely to result in the first penalty in NASCAR history involving a “car of tomorrow” and include a fines and points penalty.

Earnhardt Jr.’s team reattached the wing of the car with new mounting brackets and ultimately cleared inspection. Earnhardt Jr. will still start 21st today.

Any penalties against DEI would compete for attention with rumors about Earnhardt Jr.’s future after Thursday’s announcement that the driver won’t return to that team in 2008.

Ginn Racing owner Bobby Ginn, in an interview with The Associated Press, tossed his name into the sweepstakes saying he would “stretch as hard as we could stretch to do it.”

“We’re in play,” Ginn said. “You want the best, the absolute best, and I love the idea that Dale wants to win championships. He could accomplish that here with us.”

J.D. Gibbs, president of Joe Gibbs Racing, meanwhile said that his team would certainly talk to Earnhardt Jr. about possible opportunities despite the fact that his association with Budweiser would be a major complication.

Gibbs’ father, Joe, frequently speaks to Christian groups and has at least once flatly declined having a beer company as primary sponsor for one of his teams.

“Budweiser has been a great partner for the sport and does a lot,” J.D. Gibbs said. “But that would be a hard deal for us to do.”

Gibbs, however, stopped short of saying the issue over a beer sponsorship would be a “deal breaker” He said he thought Earnhardt Jr. and his sister, Kelley Elledge, “did a great job” in announcing Thursday that Earnhardt Jr. will not return to Dale Earnhardt Inc. after the 2007 season.

“I know that was hard for him,” Gibbs said. “Who wouldn’t want a chance to talk to Dale Jr.? It sounds like whatever decision they come up with would be a good one. When the time is right, we’d love to sit down with them and talk to him and see what their plans are. But right now we are just focusing on what we’re doing.”

The Gibbs team fields Chevrolets for Tony Stewart, Denny Hamlin and J.J. Yeley. NASCAR limits a single car owner to four Nextel Cup teams, but Gibbs said adding a fourth team for Earnhardt Jr. or any other driver would not be a simple thing to do.

“We’ve added cars and each time we spent a year and a half working on it,” he said. “They were still hard. That’s a hard, hard deal setting up and putting a fourth car in within six months’ time. I wouldn’t say we couldn’t do it, I’m just saying we’d have to get a sign-off from everyone in our shop.”

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