Dale Earnhardt Jr. frustrated with Sonoma effort and crash

Dale Earnhardt Jr. was not happy with his afternoon in Sonoma that ended with last week's Michigan winner getting caught in a last lap accident.

Earnhardt was credited with a 23rd-place finish in Sunday's first road course race of the season and expressed his frustration after the checkered flag flew.

"I'm just mad because we didn't run better," Earnhardt said. "We were better than this. I've run better here. We weren't good all weekend. We just I think, we've got to put a better car on the race track. I mean I ain't the best road course racer out there, but I can damn sure do better than that. So we've got to pick up the race car a little bit. That's on my shoulders and (crew chief) Steve's (Letarte) shoulders and our engineers and our whole team and we've just got to do a better job.”

Earnhardt got swept up in the final circuit melee that came on a green-white-checkered restart. After spinning off course he suffered hard contact from Aric Almirola in the incident.

But he was still not pleased with the overall effort of the No. 88 team all weekend.

“We got run into coming out of turn four or coming out of three, but we had a good car," Earnhardt said. "We've had better cars here. We struggled kind of all weekend. We didn't have real good speed in the race. We just kind of hung around and we were going to finish in the top-15 there and with the green-white-checkered there is going to be some victims on that deal and I was one today.”