DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- How good is Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his No. 8 Budweiser Chevy team?

He blows a tire on lap 22 and does some pretty decent damage to the car in the process. But he manages to pit more than once during the ensuing caution caused by his car's debris and keeps himself on the lead lap.

	Dale Earnhardt Jr. was behind the eight-ball all day at Daytona.

Earnhardt Jr. said the blown tire didn't get him down.

"That didn't disappoint me -- how could something like that disappoint you? When you have something like that, any other team might have given up on it. That's the way I feel about it," Earnhardt Jr. said of his team's effort to get him back on the track.

Sure, he pretty much dropped to the back of the field, but no matter. Over the next 60 laps or so, he managed to work his way through the pack with what was essentially only 75 percent of a car body and move back into the top 10.

Drivers who had been running fine all day long couldn't do that.

But this comeback wasn't to be, as Earnhardt Jr. blew his right rear tire on lap 94 and lost his brakes in the process. The team would get the car back on the track and Earnhardt Jr. ended up 29th, but his chances for an unlikely win were gone.

"The right rear tire blew out. Driving through the infield at 160 miles per hour is pretty exciting," said Earnhardt Jr., who thought he'd end up in worse shape after the tire blew. He said the blown tire actually caused the brakes to fail, but the team still thought it could get the car back out quickly.

"We capped the line so we could go back out and the brakes worked, but NASCAR wouldn't let us go without all four brakes. It wouldn't have hurt it."

Still, Earnhardt Jr. wasn't disappointed in his team's effort.

"We had a lot of flat tires and stuff like that, but we stayed at it," he said. "We just kept piecing it back together when we had trouble. We can leave here with a decent attitude knowing that we didn't quit. We didn't get the finish we wanted, but we've got many more years of coming back, and if this is as bad as it gets, this will be all right."

Earnhardt Jr.'s car was strong during Speedweek. He narrowly missed a win twice, finishing second to Tony Stewart in the Bud Shootout and second to teammate Michael Waltrip in the second Gatorade 125 on Thursday.

But despite not meeting expectations, Earnhardt Jr. said he had fun at Daytona and was showing it post-race.

"We didn't get the finish we wanted to but we had a lot of cool (stuff) happen to us, blowing a lot of tires out and getting in wrecks and coming through the infield," said Earnhardt Jr. "I think that was a (daredevil) Joey Chitwood-style thing to do. Hope I raised some eyebrows there. I might have a little future in the stunt business.

"It was a lot of fun. All you can do is smile, joke about it, laugh it off and not let it bother you too bad. You can't let it get you down. If anything, it betters our odds of winning the championship because rarely does the winner of the 500 go on to win the championship."

Earnhardt Jr.'s thoughts on his furious rally back through the field after his first blown tire?

"That was the fun part."

The car that crawled across the start-finish line 29 laps down barely resembled the one that started the race. But according to Earnhardt Jr., that was nothing.

"No, we've done a lot worse than that. You should have seen my Busch days."