Junior: The car fell apart from under me.

Dale Earnhardt Jr used his sole Nextel Cup Chase 'Mulligan' in Sunday's Subway 500 when a clash with Kyle Petty finally ended what had already been a dismal day for the driver who entered the race second in the points table.

Locking brakes, separate incidents with Carl Edwards, Dale Jarrett and then Petty resulted in an early bath and 33rd place in the final classification for the #8 DEI Budweiser Chevrolet.

"It was mostly out of our control," stated Earnhardt Jr, who found himself with nowhere to go when Petty spun his machine coming off turn four 50 laps from home in front of a large pack of cars. "It wasn't really a stupid mistake any of us made. You can't do much about it."

As Petty spun backwards, he clouted the left hand side of Earnhardt Jr's machine, which was already several laps down on the leaders after problems with the rear brakes. With limited time to make repairs, the decision was made to park for the day.

"I thought Kyle (Petty) was staying low but he spun," he continued. "That's just an insult to injury really. It's just a tough day. We couldn't really do much about it. It was one thing after another."

After starting from third position, Earnhardt Jr's day started going downhill almost as soon as the green flag flew and he spent much of the day trying to stay inside the top 20 on a half-mile track where passing was virtually impossible.

"We had a good car yesterday in practice," commented Earnhardt Jr, who lost 101 points to current Championship leader Kurt Busch with the DNF. "Just during the race it had been really tight and hadn't ran good, hadn't turned good, didn't drive good. We worked real hard to try to get it to turn. We changed a lot of things during the pit stops and nothing helped. We finally had a bunch of vibrations.

"I don't know why I was tight. Maybe that gear was messed up and made us pull in the rear end or something. The car was awful and it fell apart out from under me today."