Count Dale Earnhardt Jr. is looking forward to the incoming Chase as he appreciating the new NASCAR Sprint Cup format.

According to Dale "This Chase, I'm telling you, this thing is intense. I think these rounds are harder than I anticipated."

He describes the route saying "You're going to have loose wheels, you just are. That's going to happen. Those guys are working their guts out."

"They have those air wrenches tuned to do the job as fast as they can and try to cut some time off of the overall stop. In talking to my right front changer, I think that also opens the window for those kind of things to happen so there's a balance there between having a gun that can do the job quickly but also being able to get those things tight every time and being consistent on that. I wasn't too worried about it. I've had loose wheels before. You just gotta understand that the wheel's going to come off eventually. So you need to get your butt on pit road as fast as you can because you can't run well or run in the top 10 if you back it in the wall. You just come down pit road, you're going to lose a little time. Steve (Letarte) was smart to put four tires on it because we were going to lose a lap anyways."

Currently, Earnhardt has one win, six top-five finishes, 11 top-10 finishes and a pole, which he earned last fall. He also joins Dover in sixth place in the standings with a 28-point cushion to move on to the Contender Round.

"We are going in with a little bit of a cushion, 28 points. If we give up 28 points and don't make the next round, with that kind of finish, I don't know that we deserve to go any further. But that's not what we're going to worry about. We got a good cushion and that makes the whole weekend a lot easier. And we'll try to get on through this round. Try to go out there and win the race. We get to move on to some tracks that I think we have a better shot at to be more competitive at and we'll try to continue to improve on consistency. We've had some good speed so we just got to get the results to match with the way the car's been running."

"Hopefully we can avoid all the nonsense. We love to win races and we're going out there to try and win races. Trust me, I want to finish as high as I can. We're working every lap trying to pass cars but as long as we're in that last round with a shot, that's all that matters."