One of the most important people who needs to be credited for Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s success with Hendrick Motorsports in the NASCAR Cup Series is Steve Letarte, who served as his crew chief from 2011 to 2014. In this time, they won five races, including the 2014 Daytona 500, and ranked high in the field. That said, the journey of how they did so is not so straightforward.
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Earnhardt Jr. was not going through the best of times in 2010, finishing 21st in the standings with only eight top-10s. The upper management was looking to make some big changes, and one idea they came up with was to swap his team with Mark Martin’s group.
Martin had just one year left on his contract, with Kasey Kahne set to take over soon after, so a shake-up seemed inevitable. Still, the proposal didn’t sit well with Junior.
Earnhardt didn’t think it would be very healthy for him to swap teams with Martin and spend an entire year watching each other drive the other’s car. When he made that clear to the team, they changed direction and ended up swapping Martin’s team with Jeff Gordon’s instead. Gordon was actually interested in the idea because he would get to work with Alan Gustafson.
After that, they moved Junior to work with Letarte. This was something he welcomed since the No. 48 and No. 24 shops in the Hendrick compound operated very differently from the No. 88 and No. 5 shops he had been part of before. The chance to work near the likes of Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus was too enticing to pass up.
How Letarte and Dale Jr. turned their fate around
Letarte and Junior had both been in a tough spot when they were put together. They realized that they needed to improve their performances or face the real threat of termination. The crew chief had particularly pointed this out to Junior and told him that he was going to have to do a range of things that would ultimately help them.
He narrated in a recent episode of the “Dale Jr. Download” podcast, “I think it changed Letarte as a person and as a crew chief to have that big change happen. He was one of the first crew chiefs ever after a race to tell me he needed to give me a better car.”
Such words had made him think that not everything was on his shoulders and focus on just delivering on the track. Slowly and steadily, they moved from being a top-20 car to finishing inside the top-5 consistently.
“And so, all the way through the summer, it was really cool because Letarte was like, ‘We got this. We’re going to have a methodical approach and we’re going to just shoot for this and then when we nail that, we’re going to nail shoot for this and nail that,'” Earnhardt Jr. continued.
“We kept setting these goals and reaching them, and it worked. I was like, ‘All right, it was awesome.’ If we hadn’t made that change, I don’t think I would have ever won another race. It was going to be an ugly grind to the very end.” The gratefulness in his voice was quite evident when he said these words.
Letarte had been more than just a crew chief for Junior. He had been a cheerleader and his biggest motivator. He believed in the talent that his driver had and extracted the maximum out of it.
