Since what looks like a trend sometimes turns out to be merely a coincidence, it’s probably a little dangerous to put too much significance on what Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his team did Sunday at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway.

Still, it’s hard not to feel the fourth-place finish in the DirecTV 500 might be a landmark on the long road back from a dismal 2005 season.

Earnhardt Jr. has said when he considers how things are going, he doesn’t think about last year. He’s trying to measure this team against the one in 2004, when he won six races.

In that Chase, he went to Martinsville in the championship hunt. He’d finished in the top five in his previous five races at the 0.526-mile track, and was running second early when the rear started skipping on him.

“We finally tore the rear-end gear out of it,” he said that day. “Then, it was one thing after another. The car was awful, and it fell apart out from under me.”

Nothing the team tried that day helped, and they left the track 125 points out of the lead and couldn’t get back in the battle for the championship Kurt Busch wound up winning.

Contrast that with what happened Sunday. Earnhardt Jr. suffered significant damage to the right front of his No. 8 Chevrolet in a wreck on Lap 2. Later, Ryan Newman crowded him to the inside of Turn 4 and caused more problems.

Still, he finished fourth.

According to statistical information NASCAR is getting, Earnhardt Jr.’s average position in the race was 14.84, but he finished nearly 11 spots higher. He improved his position on 47 laps, 19 more than 12th-place Reed Sorenson’s next-highest total.

The No. 8 team needs to have more days like Johnson and race winner Tony Stewart had Sunday. But days like Sunday, when teams keep their cool and keep fighting and turn a bad day into a good one, are important, too.