Family matters, but Junior's making a chief mistake

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Mixing family and business rarely works, just ask Tony Soprano.

But Dale Earnhardt Jr. doesn't subscribe to that theory.

To Junior, blood is truly thicker than motor oil and his racing career has been shaped by his family, for better or worse.

His father started a race team to give Junior a chance to drive. His sister has been his business manager and was instrumental in his decision to break away from DEI and stepmother Teresa to join Hendrick Motorsports.

And his cousin, Tony Eury Jr., has been his crew chief for most of Earnhardt Jr.'s Nextel Cup career.

Hendrick announced earlier this week that indeed Eury Jr. will follow Earnhardt Jr. to the team in 2008 and call the shots from the pit box as he's done for all but one year of Junior's tenure.

"Tony Jr. and Dale have a successful history working together," Rick Hendrick said. "They have trust in each other, which is the biggest part of the relationship between driver and crew chief. We have the utmost confidence in their ability to win races and compete for titles at Hendrick Motorsports."

The only time Earnhardt Jr. and Eury Jr. were apart was in 2005, when DEI made the ill-fated decision to swap crew chiefs between Earnhardt Jr. and Michael Waltrip's teams. For whatever reasons there was a falling out between the two cousins and both the team as well as the Juniors felt a change would be beneficial.

The experiment was a total flop and the two were reunited at the tail end of the year and for the following season.

"We didn't change the teams because of a performance issue. We changed it because of an attitude issue between me and Tony Jr.," he said. "We changed it, maybe not for the right reasons, but the change did what it was supposed to it. It fixed his attitude and it fixed my attitude.

"It's not always greener on the other side for either one of us. We both look at each other and talk to each other today totally different. I think that gives us that opportunity to work together in the future that we wouldn't have had if we would have run ourselves totally apart."

But the reunion hasn't been a huge success by any means.

Since coming back together, Earnhardt Jr. has made exactly one trip to Victory Lane in 71 starts.

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