Nascar Racing Online

The inevitable has come to pass. As the AP and Yahoo! Sports’ Jenna Fryer reports today, Tony Eury Jr. has been fired as Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s crew chief.

Brian Whitesell will serve as Junior’s crew chief this weekend at Dover International Speedway. Lance McGrew will become the interim crew chief beginning the following week at Pocono.

"Our performance hasn’t been where it should be," Rick Hendrick said in a statement. "It’s impossible to pin that on any one factor, but change is the right decision at this point. We have a plan in place, and we’re going to move forward with it.

"We’re going to put our full resources toward improving the situation and winning races," Hendrick continued. "It’s going to be a collective effort that includes all of our drivers, all of our crew chiefs, all of our engineers. Everyone in our company will be involved on some level."

The signs were everywhere, of course. Since moving to Hendrick Motorsports to start the 2008 season, Earnhardt has won exactly one points race, and while he made the Chase last year, he’s steadily languished around 20th place this year and is in severe danger of missing out on the Chase in 2009.

There’s been plenty of blame to go around — driver, car, crew, chief — but since Junior himself isn’t going anywhere, something had to give, and it was Eury. The crew chief had borne an enormous share of the criticism of the #88 team, with critics charging that Eury was overmatched or too close to his cousin Junior to be able to keep a necessary professional distance.

After repeatedly saying that Eury’s job was safe and that the team needed time to work itself out, Rick Hendrick as much as filled out the pink slip on Tuesday. "Could it change?" Hendrick said. "We’re talking about things, we’re meeting, we’re going to make decisions as the days go by, but we haven’t made any decision as of right now."

But apparently he has since then. The obvious question will be how this will affect Junior’s team and, equally important, his mindset. Junior has always seemed to approach racing as a family business, and has perhaps leaned too hard on the "family" when some more of the "business" was necessary. Go back and read his quotes at Bristol, for instance, when he as much as admitted that the Junior-Junior combination was leaking oil, but that he didn’t think any change was necessary.

"I like racing with my cousin whether we are the perfect combination or not," Earnhardt said. "I just like racing with him. That’s what I want to do for the rest of my life."

That’s not going to happen, obviously. And now, with one more piece of the puzzle removed, we’re closer to figuring out where the real problem lies with the #88 team.

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3. What effect will crew chief news have on Kurt Busch’s Chase?
4. Dale Earnhardt Jr. is sliding once again, and that’s bad news
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