Q: How were the Country Music Awards?

A: Oh, it was fun. Dreaded every moment up until it started happening. Of course when you get in the middle of it, it's pretty interesting. I sit there and from the moment I said I'd do it, which was about a month and a half before, to the moment when I got there, I was thinking, 'What did I do this for?' I was thinking that the whole time. I sat down, and the first performance went off. I was sitting there thinking, 'Man, I'm going to see a concert with some of the greatest of today's stars. This is pretty cool.' The more it got going, the more I got into it. I knew that would happen. It's just angst and nervousness leading up to it.

Q: Just outside your comfort zone?

A: Way outside. Way outside.

Q: Even after all the stuff you do?

A:  I know! You never get used to it. I don't. I'm always just a nervous wreck. It's terrifying getting up in front of them people and trying to because it's not a NASCAR race. It's nothing I do for a living. I'm so comfortable in this world but don't know to do that, but I guess we did OK.

Q: Did you have a script?

A: Yeah. I went to the rehearsals, and 65% of the people presenting skipped the rehearsals, which I don't blame them. But I went anyway to try it out. That was pretty fun. I think the best part about it is meeting the stars. I'm as starstruck as everybody else, so walking the red carpet, you see a lot of different people. You see Reba McEntire, whom my sister is a huge fan of, and I wanted to get my picture with Reba for my sister, but I didn't have the nerve to ask her. I was in the green room with Kris Kristofferson for probably two hours, and Mike Davis got to talk with him. Mike Davis and him had a conversation about North Carolina. I was just happy for Mike to have a conversation with a guy like that, and me being able to meet him and tell him how much a fan I was. Stuff like that was really cool. He was a highwayman, you know? That makes it pretty tough.

Q: You said during an interview at the CMAs that you don't want the season to end?

A:  Well, I have, uh. It's been a really (lousy) season, but we're starting to run a little bit better. And I really enjoy working with Lance, and the offseason is the beginning of a lot of hard work. A lot of you get a little break in December, but before you know it, the offseason is here and gone. There's a lot of hard work in January. A lot of photo shoots and testing. So I'm just trying to put off the inevitable. Speedweeks is hell, kind of leading up to that and getting to the Daytona 500. All those things, they'll be here like that (snaps fingers), you know? And so, I'm just trying to slow everything down. I was real happy with how we ran last week (at Texas). I was upset about how we decided to finish the race, but I'm enjoying Lance a lot. I enjoy the guys. And more so, how me and Lance are getting along makes me feel like racing and not sitting around in December.

Q: Your stats seem bizarre, because since Lance has been on the team, you've run better, but the results are worse. What do you have to fix? Is it just turning the page on the calendar?

A:  I don't know if it's that easy. Yeah, I don't know if it's that easy. As a driver, I wouldn't call myself conservative, because I ran really hard last week. But I don't go looking for problems on the track. We just, I don't know, man. It's like ... it's our problem, too, to fix. To figure out. But I will say this, that team is under a microscope, and it's hard to perform when all eyes are on you. But the best people in every brand of sports step up and get it done. I don't really know where to put the responsibility for why our finishes look like they do, 'cause they're horrible. But we can look back and see more than half of them weren't our doing. We got taken out, a couple of failures here and there, but last week we run ourselves slap out of gas. We knew we had to pit. We weren't trying to make it. We knew we had to pit. We still run ourselves out of gas. That's unacceptable entirely, for any team. That was frustrating. We can chalk that up as our own doing. A lot of other times, we've just been taken out or something silly has happened.

Q: A lot of people who look at your record might say it's just bad luck. But are you a guy who believes you make your own luck?

A:  If you want to find yourself mixed up in a bunch of wrecks, you run around at the back of the pack. So in that example, I feel like you made your own luck. If you hang out with pigs, you're going to get (dirt) on you. You make your own luck in that sense, but you can't say when a part falls off the car that you really could have avoided that because it would have taken a psychic. It depends. You definitely are in control of your fate when driving. And your crew chief is in control of your fate with the pit strategy and all those things. Everybody has a hand in the failure or success.

Q: Do you anticipate personnel changes for next year?

A:  I feel I'm happy with my team. I feel everybody on that team is really good at their job and good enough to be in that position. We get along. I'm sure Lance will look at that, and he and (team manager) Brian Whitesell will look at that and sort of mull over what improvements we can make in every area during the offseason. That's no different than what every team does every offseason. Chad (Knaus, Jimmie Johnson's crew chief) does the same thing, even though they win championships, they may change one guy or move somebody around.

Q: Tony Gibson, your former crew chief, made some comments to ESPN.com recently in which he implied there were people at Hendrick who didn't believe in you. Do you agree with that?

A:  I don't think that was really true. Gibson's a good guy, and we have a great relationship. He's a great friend of mine. I'm working with this team, and I've got to believe in this 88 team. It's impossible for me to agree with them comments when I've got to work with this team and believe in this team and expect them to believe in me. And I do. I expect us to show up every week with their belief in me. I know that Lance does. Me and Lance have had some conversations when we've laid it out on the line, and I know when he's genuine. I think I'm a good judge of character of when people are telling the truth or blowing smoke. I feel he's genuine about his belief in me. He'll rally the right people around us to make it happen. He doesn't want to go down the road with somebody whose heart's not in it. And if somebody on the team turns out to have a change of heart or difference of opinion about our ability to run good, it's probably better for everybody if we weren't working together. But I don't really feel that way about the team now. Gibson's a good guy. It was a hard to deal with that because it hurt Rick's feelings a lot because Rick takes the switch from (former crew chief) Tony (Eury) Jr. to Lance, he takes the responsibility for that. So it hurt his feelings a little bit. I think Tony Jr. is in a better place personally. I think me and him have a better relationship. I love working with him, and I'm going to work with him again one day. It might be in the Nationwide Series next year. It might be in Cup 10 years from now. Who knows? I like working with him. He's my family, and I will work with him. But right now with our program and our team, it's not the direction we're going, and I feel good about Lance. I like Lance. Every car I've drove of his that he's built I've liked, it's worked, and we've been fast. So that's working. That program is going in this direction, and the rest of it is in a better place, too. Tony Jr. was pretty beat down and had a hard time with it. I feel like the position he's in now (in Hendrick's R&D department) is one he can enjoy and grow, but I want him close because I love him so much, and he's so much fun to work with and just a hell of a guy. And he's great at his job.

Q: And you don't want him taking that knowledge to another organization?

A:  It ain't that. If he wants to go work somewhere else, I want him to be happy. That has nothing to do with it. I love him because he's my cousin, and I want him around me because we like to be around each other. I told Tony Jr. you do what you need to do to be happy. I want you to be happy. If you want to go crew chief someone else in the Cup series, go do that. But I have this other plan, and if that looks fun, let's do that. It's up to him. I don't care about what he does with his knowledge or if it falls into someone else's hand. He's a great guy, and he's going to do good things no matter where he's at, but I like working with him. I'd rather me and him have involvement in something in our lives, because when we're 50, 60, 70 years old, those are the things that we're going to have the most fondest memories and be the proudest of. We don't want to get apart and try to reconnect down the road.

Q: The professional relationship with Tony grew to where you didn't talk to one another. Is communication with Lance now more important? For example, does he fall on his sword after a situation like running out of gas at Texas?

A:  He will to an extent. I don't want Lance to fall on his sword entirely, because the team has to respect him and his decisions, and we have to back him. We can't go to the next race and go, 'Now you know what happened last week. Are you sure about this? None of us believe what you're saying.' I've been driving for a while, and I've got my opinions on his strategy, and we're going to have disagreements, but we had some phone conversations up until 3 o'clock in the morning after that Texas race just to get it behind us and start thinking about Phoenix. I like that about Lance. I like being able to go ahead and get that (stuff) out of the way. If it's 3 o'clock in the morning on Sunday night. We were both heartbroken. I couldn't go after him or point my finger at him because he was feeling bad enough as it was about it. So I just hope that we can learn from it. That was a race we should have finished in the top five if we had done what everyone else around us was doing. We just learn from it and move on, and hopefully the next time in that position, we do as the Romans do.

Q: It's kind of a tightrope for you because at Kansas, the same thing happened. A car that should have finished in the top five, and because of the crew, it doesn't. On one hand, you want to believe in those guys, but I assume you want to kick them in the pants, too?

A:  Crews are going to make mistakes, even the best crews are going to with lug nuts and stuff like that. But what happens when I think about those things, when you put it that way. Right or wrong, what my instinct is to do is to say, from the top down: Rick and (Hendrick vice president) Doug Duchardt, all those guys are acutely aware of every step we take wrong and right. They put Lance in charge of the team for a reason, so from the top down, they'll evaluate and fix whatever these problems are that we have where we're stumbling within the crew. We've made a lot of changes on our pit crew to be better through the Kansas deal. We were interchanging guys back and forth for several weeks, and I feel like the crew is doing great. You can't have loose lug nuts, and everyone knows it's bound to happen here or there, but you can't have them frequently. When you think about Lance's experience, he hasn't really called a 500-mile race but a couple of times in the last several years, doing the R&D deal with Brad (Keselowski). He really hasn't been in the week-to-week deal calling a 500-mile race since working with the 25 team. So I cut him a break there on what he chose to do last weekend, and I hope that when we get put in those situations again — it's easy to have hindsight and say you should have done this — but hopefully we'll make the better, safer decision then.

Q: So your sense now, you guys should have these fixed for next season?

A:  Absolutely, yeah. ... It'll be hell. We can't do this (season) again. If we start struggling right out of the box (in 2010), we won't hit the panic button, but I'll sit down with Rick, which he'll be willing to do, and we'll sit down with Lance, and we'll figure out what the problem is and what to fix. We're to the point now where we show up and we're fast and competitive. In races, we're running good. From now to February, we should have figured out what the hell the other problems are that are keeping us from finishing the deal.

Q: Your demeanor, you seem a lot more confident and relaxed than when Lance was announced as your permanent crew chief at Talladega?

A:  Yeah, yeah. I just didn't feel like doing a press conference. I was just tired of the media publicity of everything that's went on this year. And I was exhausted of having to sort of get in front of you guys with every move we made and try to explain to you all what my feelings were. I was confident then about the choice, but just having to get up in front of everybody and make it. Hell, maybe Lance feels the same way, but I feel like we could have done without the whole press conference and just went ahead and done it. Made the decision to do it, made that known and if anyone wanted one on ones or some questions, they could have came to us. I qualified like (crap) at Charlotte, and had that deal where I was upset and talked to you guys (the next day after a press conference). It kind of bit me in the tail a little bit and got me in the (National) Enquirer, which was fun. I thought that was a compliment.

Q: Have you checked who those unnamed sources were in that story?

A:  No, I guess it means you're relevant. I need to hold my tongue a lot of times. It's been a real frustrating year, and you've got to give me a little credit, because I've been pretty good about controlling my mouth. I don't want to insult Rick. He's given me everything. He hasn't short-handed me. A lot of fans may have the impression he's not as focused on us because we're not in the Chase now, and he's got to think about the other three guys. But he's done everything I've ever asked and more. I don't want to say anything derogatory about him or the guys, and it's hard to make any comment about the team without really thinking hard whether they're going to be insulted at all. I've got to be more careful around my emotions and stuff. I do feel more confident today. (Texas) was just a good week, and it helped me. I'm sort of living and dying by the result of every day. If we struggle in practice, my emotions and feelings and my gut are on a roller coaster trying to finish the season out. With every day and practice, the car's tight, the car's loose, it's just a roller coaster on how I feel about things. But the best thing I can do is really settle down and believe in Lance and believe that Rick is doing everything he can do. And believe in my guys, my car chief. Believe in any new guy that I'm working with. I've got to get faith in it. I just haven't really been concentrating on doing that, but I should be because I owe it to those guys if they're going to believe in me.

Enlarge By Mark J. Rebilas, US Presswire Dale Earnhardt Jr. has just five top-10 finishes in 35 races this season.