by Lee Spencer

Updated: April 28, 2008, 4:57 PM EST 284 comments

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Just ask Dale Earnhardt Jr., who is the unrivaled fan favorite on the 2.66-mile Superspeedway. His valiant comeback from 31st to 10th over the final 11 laps was reminiscent of his father's rally eight years earlier. Earnhardt could go wherever, whenever he pleased. And when the sport's most popular driver is happy — everyone is happy. Well, everyone except his competition.

Earnhardt was glowing in the garage following the race. After finishing 10th, it would be hard-pressed to find a racer satisfied with that result. Yes, he was happy "not to come in on the hook" but for Earnhardt, this season is a culmination of all the pieces finally coming together for him at Hendrick Motorsports.

"I feel like I firmly say that I will show up every week this year and run like this. I really do," Earnhardt said. "I look at the quality of my team — they keep impressing me. My equipment and my motors show me every week that they help to make my job easier. And Tony Jr. does a good job of setting up the cars and making them fast. He made that car really good today. I thought it was the best car on the track even against the Toyotas that were very strong, I thought we had the best car on the track.

"I feel for the first time in my life that I can go everywhere and run like that each week. We should be in the top 10. If we don't have a significant incident or a mechanical situation, there's no reason why we shouldn't finish in the top 10 every week. I don't think I ever felt like that, much less been able to say it."

But when it comes to the new car at Talladega, Earnhardt gave it a glowing review.

Rather than rely on my analysis entirely for this week's scorecard, I'm allowing Junior to offer the top points on the positives and negatives of the Aaron's 499 from behind the wheel.

First, let's start with the good stuff:

1) The Car — "It was a whole lot of fun," Earnhardt said. "Those cars are so safe, you can just throw caution to the wind and come what may on your roof or on all four (tires) — it was just a lot of fun. It really is. It was just unfortunate to see all the crashes we had and I'm just glad that everyone got out of here uninjured. The cars are so much safer now that the guys are quite a bit more daring in their actions near the end of the race and I have to include myself in that.

"Guys are trying to win and everyone has a shot with the way the cars are drafting. Anyone can win. You can tell, everyone thinks they're going to win the race. You can see how they're all running into each other. It's just awesome to see cars banging and sliding. One thing I'll hand to this car that you couldn't say about the last model is that guys run into each other hard at the end and get crossed up and straighten right back out. There were three incidents within the last four laps if not the last two laps that would have been crashes — five, six-car pile-ups — and guys were just banging off of them and straightening 'em out. That car has that ability. Just like when I got turned sideways, I thought I was done — too many degrees sideway to be able correct it — but the way the car catches the air when it goes sideways, the air straightens it right back up.

2) And he walked away (with assistance) — Although Dario Franchitti needed help getting to the ambulance, given the severity of his wreck in the Nationwide race he was very fortunate to get out of the car with just a broken left ankle. Franchitti was extremely complimentary of his car's construction and the crew that built him a safe ride.

3) NASCAR delaying the Nationwide COT — Although the No. 2 series was expected to be saddled with scrapping inventories of worthless cars with COTs in NNS, it appears that full-time plans are on hold until at least the end of next year. In this economy, with many of the Nationwide teams surviving at best this is not the time to ask these teams to adopt this undertaking. (More on this later.)

And back to the drawing board ...

1) The argument for shortening races — "We all ran single-file for awhile but that's because the races are too long and everybody is just cutting into it," Earnhardt said. "It's like, 'OK, let's not race for awhile, let's run 100 laps and get that out of the way.' But if they shortened this race to 300 miles, we'd be running like that all day long. It would be fun."

2) Spotters and warning systems — Spotters are human and they deserve a lot of credit for keeping their drivers safe. But it's brutal to watch a situation unfold like Franchitti's on Saturday. In many situations, a spotter doesn't have time to hit the radio. That wasn't the case here. Franchitti was a sitting duck but he shouldn't have been. There has to be a better solution, like requiring spotters to have experience at lower levels before graduating to NASCAR's higher ranks.

3) Starters and parkers — The Nationwide Series is in a crisis with some teams able to qualify but do little more but retreat to the garage not long after the green flag falls. With so much potential racing talent, there has to be a solid series where drivers can get adequate seat time among a full field.