Earnhardt 'amped' about car, future with Hendrick

DALLAS -- At times it was difficult to keep track of it all, or to remember that it's all about what Dale Earnhardt Jr. is going to be racing on the track beginning next season.

Little E was in the Big D Wednesday to dish out the skinny on how he came to run the No. 88 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports, less than 24 hours after an appearance in Chicago where he unveiled plans for his new candy bar named "Big Mo."

Is there ever a well-kept secret in Nextel Cup racing these days? By the time Junior's new car was unveiled at 2:30 p.m. ET, everyone pretty much knew it was going to be the No. 88 sponsored by some combination of Mountain Dew Amp Energy drink and the National Guard.

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If anyone who made the trek didn't have a clue about what was going to be on the car, the signs were everywhere as soon as they stepped foot into the Dallas Convention Center. As 18 members of the media who took advantage of a fairly-priced offer from team owner Rick Hendrick to fly in a chartered jet from Concord, N.C., to Love Field filed in, they had to sidestep several National Guardsmen on their way to a media work room laden with trays of iced Amp Energy drinks conveniently packaged in tall boy 16-ounce cans.

"This is a perfect fit for me," Earnhardt beamed during the afternoon news conference that was in turn beamed to television outlets across the nation. "They got me up at 5 a.m. this morning, so I was able to test the effectiveness of the [Amp Energy] product. I'm pleased to be here in front of you now, not yawning."

After the televised question-and-answer session, Earnhardt, Hendrick and others involved in making the deal happen adjourned to an adjacent hallway to unveil the color schemes of the No. 88 cars he will run beginning next season. Although Earnhardt had worked together with Hendrick and many members of the Hendrick organization on the designs, he hadn't yet seen the cars in their completed form -- and Hendrick made Junior wait until everyone else could see them, too.

"Everything works together. The colors pop. The numbers pop. He's been like a little kid at Christmas, wanting to see them all morning," said Hendrick, who added that Earnhardt will pretty much split races down the middle next season between the mostly green-and-white Amp Energy car and the mostly blue-and-white National Guard car. "It was exciting to see him that excited about it."

Make no mistake about it. Junior is, you might say, amped about everything that is happening around him as he prepares to transition out of the No. 8 Budweiser car he has driven for Dale Earnhardt Inc. since coming onto the Cup scene as a rookie in 2000. He announced his split from DEI on May 10, and announced he would be coming on board with Hendrick five weeks later.

But Wednesday put a cap on the final threads of speculation that had been hanging over him. Now he knows for certain not only where he will be driving, but exactly what he will be driving next season -- right down to the paint schemes that he helped design.

"The paint scheme itself is very basic. It's pretty simple," Earnhardt said. "With Amp and Guard sort of sharing the responsibility of partnering the car, we had to make the scheme itself as simple as possible to tone down as many decals as we have. If you make the scheme very busy, you're going to lose everything -- and the car is just going to look like a mangled mess going around there. So it was important to make the scheme really basic, so the car could be understood better and read better." (Continued)