The facts about Junior-DEI split? Truth is, they're still evolving

At about 3:15 p.m. Wednesday, I sat down in a chair at MediaComm in south Charlotte to talk to ESPN in Bristol, Conn., for a segment on spotters on its "Outside the Lines" show.

As we were getting set up, a producer there asked a question that changed my day instantly.

"Have you heard anything about a news conference at JR Motorsports tomorrow?" he said.
I had not, but from that moment on it was pretty much the only thing on the radar in the NASCAR world.

At the beginning, the first thing was to simply find out if a press conference was actually going to happen. The first round of calls that Jim Utter and I made got us nowhere. Nobody was answering the phone. Which is, often, a clue in itself.

At some point, we found out that a company that helps assemble and set up sound systems for NASCAR-related press events had a full crew on site at JR Motorsports setting up for an "event" on Thursday.

OK, that means you're not chasing a ghost. Something actually is going on. Now, the question becomes what's going on.

That's where things got off the track, a little bit, I think.

For the next couple of hours, just about anybody we could get on the phone who knew anything or who we thought knew anything were saying that Earnhardt Jr. and Martin Truex Jr. would leave Dale Earnahrdt to drive Cup cars at JR Motorsports next year.

Kelley Elledge said a month ago that JR Motorsports, which fields Busch and late model cars, isn't ready to be a Cup team. And it frankly would make no sense for Earnhardt Jr. to leave DEI for a start-up team that he'd own when the whole stated purpose of the contract talks has been to get him into a situation where he can win races and contend for championships.

Still, at that point in the late afternoon, that's what just about everyone was saying would be announced. As soon as we got official word that there would be a news conference at 11 a.m., I was also talking to people at Sirius NASCAR Radio about trying to arrange for me to be up there in Mooresville for the announcement and for Sirius to somehow cover it live.

Dave Moody was also on the air at that time on his Sirius show, and I also knew we needed to get something up on thatsracin.com. On the web, we put up the fact that a news conference was scheduled and that was about it. Moody, meanwhile, was hearing some of the same stuff from his "people" and started talking about the speculation and conjecturing about what might happen if that turned out to be the case.

Before long, other people were reporting the same thing. Some, were even citing Moody as their source, which shows that nobody else was getting their phone calls returned, either.

Meanwhile, Jim Utter and I were still talking trying to get people who actually know what's going on to tell us something. As the Truex/JR Motorsports/Hendrick story got out there, some folks started calling back to tell us that was not accurate.

By the time the deadline for the newspaper arrived, the story I had was that Earnhardt Jr. would announce he's leaving DEI and won't say where he's will go. Others had different information, and they wrote what they thought they knew. I wrote what Jim and I had.

That's how this business works. Sometimes it gets a little confusing, and the last thing you want to do is confuse readers, listeners and viewers. But sometimes, the information actually changes and with the 24-7 news cycle we have, it takes a while for the right stuff to catch up.