Bud team to 'click' again at Michigan.

Dale Earnhardt Jr and the #8 Budweiser Chevrolet team have been one of the hottest combinations on the NASCAR Winston Cup tour during the last two months and they hope to carry their momentum onto the Michigan International Speedway where Earnhardt Jr has yet to score a top ten result.

Earnhardt has had quite a few memorable moments at the D-shaped rural Michigan International Speedway already in his relatively short career and he is hoping to add one or two more to that list during this weekend's Kmart 400 at the flowing two-mile track.

Earnhardt Jr is the track record holder for NASCAR Winston Cup cars with a lap at an average speed of 191.149 mph. It was the first (and still the only) lap at more than 190 mph in a stock car at MIS, and it secured his second Bud Pole in his first full season of Winston Cup competition last June. In the same event he joined his father and brother Kerry in the starting line-up for that race, which made them the first father and two-son trio to start a Winston Cup race in 40 years.

During his Busch Series career, he scored his first career Busch top-10 finish with an under-financed team in 1997, and he won in 1999 in an exciting duel with Jeff Gordon, who was making a rare appearance in a Busch car.

In 1999, he waged a memorable battle with his father in the International Race of Champions [IROC] event, narrowly finishing second in a fender-bending, near-photo finish. The race is still talked about to this day, and it still stands as the best finish of Dale Jr's stint in the IROC series.

This weekend there will be nothing to distract him from his task as he attempts to score his first victory of the 2001 NWC season and although Dale Jr's best finish at MIS currently stands at 13th, both he and the team have good reason to believe that they can improve upon that on Sunday.

"The team is really clicking right now," Earnhardt Jr said as the team prepared their cars for the trip to Brooklyn, Mi. "We've had a string of great runs - even though we missed the set-up at Charlotte. In the past seven races we've matched the number of top 10s we had all last year. I think it shows how we're improving as a team to get two third-place finishes in the last four races even though we ran out of fuel at California (dropping one lap behind) and then spun out at Dover. I can't wait to get to Michigan and see that green flag."

"Last year at Michigan, it seemed like anything and everything happened" added Earnhardt Jr of his eventful 2000 season in the Irish Hills of Michigan. "I had the flu, we won the pole and led the fall race, I barely avoided a couple of big wrecks, we dropped to last place, our spotter's radio battery went dead and I spun through the infield grass... let's see, I can't even remember it all. I think we even blew an engine, which never seems to happen. We've been really strong on horsepower all season, and this track is very similar to Fontana, so look out! Here we come."

A clear indicator of the level Earnhardt Jr and the #8 team have been running this year is shown by the fact that since Dale Jr and the Bud team dropped to 26th in points after a disappointing Bristol race, they have gained 17 positions to 9th place and have scored more points than anyone other than Tony Stewart.

Whereas MIS has been the site of some of the greatest races in recent history, they have been CART FedEx Championship races for the turbocharged Indy cars. Where the open-wheel boys have been able to devise an aerodynamic package to make races exciting with multiple passes on the two-mile track, NASCAR Winston Cup events as of late have tended to be more of a snooze fest. As an example, Dale Jarrett won this race in 1999 by leading the last 148 laps with no yellow flags to bunch the field meaning that a good qualifying run is usually essential if you wish to have a successful Sunday afternoon.