By Mike Mulhern
Media General News Service
Published: May 9, 2008

DARLINGTON, S.C. - Speed, speed, speed. New asphalt here, and these guys are making the most of it. Fast.

Too fast? That’s what some worry.

“The speeds are pretty insane ... the grip is good,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said.

“I think it’s possible for somebody to maintain a really fast pace (for all 500 miles). But it’s going to be very physical driving that hard and that fast. It’s going to be very physical.”

Maybe the tires won’t take it.

Maybe the asphalt can’t take it.

Maybe the drivers can’t take it.

Toyota’s AJ Allmendinger was one of the fastest here in yesterday’s practice, at 178.679 mph, and Earnhardt wasn’t far off, at 178.640. In fact, just about everyone on the track was faster than Ward Burton’s all-time qualifying record here of 173.797 mph, set in 1996, just after the last repave at this 1950s-vintage track.

But what happens in pole runs this tonight (5 o’clock) for Saturday’s Dodge Challenger 500 is up for debate.

With speeds like this - 200-mph-plus into the corners, on such a relatively small track (1.366 miles) - there are plenty of questions.

To put this speed into some perspective, Clint Bowyer was on the pole here last spring at 164.897 mph. So speeds here this time around are a full two seconds a lap quicker.

That is astounding.

It might also be scary.

Or at least it should be scary.

Too fast?

Well, remember what Dale Earnhardt Sr. once told his fellow drivers: “Why don’t you just tie kerosene-soaked rags around your ankles so the ants won’t climb up and eat your candy (expletive-deleted).

“Don’t come here and grumble about going too fast. Get the hell out of the race car if you have feathers on your legs.”

Speaking of The Big E, his son Dale Jr., is getting more than a bit frustrated with the way things are going this season. Not that he’s running bad. He’s running very strong. But he’s still winless. And at Talladega he angered teammate Jeff Gordon with some late-race moves while fighting for the win. And then at Richmond last Saturday, well, he’s still kicking himself for not doing a better job in the closing laps and taking himself out of the hunt during a stretch battle with Kyle Busch.

Busch, on the other hand, is one of the hottest drivers on the tour, and - as much for his amazing driving talents as for his still rough-around-the-edges personality - Busch is now being looked at in some circles as maybe the next Dale Earnhardt Sr.

“On the track, there may be some comparisons there,” Earnhardt said. “Kyle’s fast. He’s running well. He’s quick. He’s aggressive.

“This is Dale Earnhardt in ‘89 and earlier. Daddy quit doing that stuff after a while. But that’s the way dad raced, and Kyle has that same style. He’s very aggressive.”

But attitudes? “Personality-wise, they are polar opposites,” Earnhardt said. “Give me a break. You knew my dad better than that. Give my dad a little more credit than that.”

The elder Earnhardt, of course, was booed for years by angry fans who took exception to his hard-driving wheel-work and his general disdain for criticism. “Don’t worry about the boos,” he once told another driver. “It’s when you walk up on that pre-race stage and they don’t do anything at all when you’re introduced ... that’s when you need to start worrying.”

Earnhardt says he’s not second-guessing the Richmond drama. “There are a bunch of different things you probably could have tried to do. But I don’t think anything would have won the race for me.

“We were all going down in the corner too hard. But I couldn’t go in the corner any harder.

“The points were the toughest part of it, because I want to make the chase. I feel we’ve got a good shot at challenging for the championship the way we’re running.

“I know we’ve got a long ways to go, but we can’t give up anything because we don’t know where we’re going to be.”

The cool way both Earnhardt and Busch handled their controversy was remarkable, considering some of the short-track incidents other drivers have had over the years (like the many Rusty Wallace-Dale Earnhardt Sr. run-ins).

“My schedule is so busy I just ain’t got time for it,” Earnhardt said about not getting all riled up. “I’m in a bad enough mood just with the grind of the season that I don’t let those things get to me.

“I don’t want to make an issue worse for me. I don’t want to give anybody ammunition. We’ve got a lot of critics ... and a lot of supporters too, and I know they would have rather me have been a little more vocal and a little more angry about it.

“But I’ve got better things, more important things to worry about.”

Earnhardt said he and Busch still haven’t had a beer over the situation: “No, we haven’t. We probably will. It ain’t no big deal. There ain’t no big rush.

“It was a big deal. Somebody was saying the other day that was a bad deal. But it was a bad deal for me, and I was pretty frustrated by it.

“But it’s exciting for the sport. And whether I want to deny it or not, there are people out there that enjoyed it. Kyle has got some fans, I’m sure. And there are a lot of people that might not be his fans but just don’t like me.

“But it wasn’t good for us, and that was disappointing. I wanted to get a better finish than 15th.

“It was hard racing, and it was avoidable. But I went in the corner ... I blew turns one and two real bad, and he saw that, and he almost had me cleared off turn two. I got back beside him down the back straightaway and had a pretty good run, and I went in the corner - I didn’t go in as high as I had been running, I went about a half car-length lower ... and I think he was anticipating me going in where I had been running.

“I anticipated him going on the bottom, because he’d been running real tight on the apron.

“We both sort of ran into each other. It don’t make it any better watching the replay. I can see where a lot of people think it was intentional. I don’t think it was, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.”

After the race one of Earnhardt’s crew men, Rick Pigeon, briefly confronted Busch. Earnhardt’s crew this year is pretty much the same crew Busch had last year. But Tony Eury Jr., Earnhardt’s crew chief, quickly calmed the situation.

“Pidge felt personable about it ... but we had a lot of family watching at home, and we didn’t want to embarrass them,” Earnhardt said. “We’ve got a lot of fans that appreciate how you handle yourself, how you conduct yourself properly.

“It was a bad deal, but there wasn’t nothing I could do after the race to change it.

“Tony Junior told everybody to be cool. That was cool of him. Smart. It saved us from making comments we would most likely want to retract.... or starting a fight with the media jabbing back and forth. That ain’t no fun.

“So we saved ourselves a lot of grief.”

Mike Mulhern can be reached at .