I watched the recurring nightmare of Dale Jr. make his usual early-race charge only to drop like a stone later in the day...

pretty obvious here, Jr needs a new crew chief or engineer, they are good at starting but can not finish well!

The problem is much more complex than it may appear.

The level of competition is so high that even teammates have a tough time competing with the same equipment. A large part of the challenge is finding a set-up that is both competitive at the start of the race and one that can be adjusted throughout the race to maintain the car performance as the track changes. This is extremely difficult to achieve as we've all seen from all the top teams and drivers. You only need to be off a small amount to go from hero-to-zero in a race. The average person has no idea how small a change it takes to make these cars "un-driveable" or a 20th place car from a pole sitter. Just changing a set of tires can take you from the front to the back of the pack and vice versa. It's way more complicated and challenging than it looks. If it were easy there would be ten winners every week.