Will Dale Jr. plus Talladega be a winning equation?

Plenty of intangibles tilt in Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s favor this weekend — his history of success at Talladega Superspeedway and his father’s legacy of dominating there among them.

One X-factor Earnhardt doesn’t buy into — momentum.

Earnhardt has reason for optimism heading into Sunday’s Aaron’s 499 (FOX, 1 p.m. ET), but it’s not based around his runner-up finish last weekend at Richmond International Raceway. Instead, NASCAR’s most popular driver suggests that season-to-date performance and confidence play more important roles.

“No, I don’t think momentum is a real thing,” Earnhardt said. “The team is confident, we’re feeling good. We feel like we’re competing well. Really close to winning a race. We ain’t really raced for a win yet and lost one, so I wouldn’t count (Richmond). But we’re getting better at running in the top five and top 10s. We’ll just try to keep doing that.”

Being “really close” to ending a 138-race winless streak would go a long way toward appeasing a wide fan base that seems to turn its most rabid at Talladega, where Earnhardt Jr. has five of his 18 wins in the Sprint Cup Series. His most recent victory at the 2.66-mile track, however, wasn’t recent at all, coming in the fall of 2004.

This season, the good has outweighed the bad. Earnhardt has a string of five straight top-10 efforts heading to Talladega and hasn’t finished worse than 15th in nine races so far in 2012 — leaving him second in the standings, five points behind series leader Greg Biffle. He was also runner-up in the season-opening Daytona 500, where the similar rules package for restrictor-plate tracks earned high marks from Earnhardt for bringing pack racing back.

“I do like having more control of my own destiny and making my own decisions for myself, looking out for number one and my team all day long, trying to do whatever I can to put myself in position to win the race,” Earnhardt said. “That’s really what I feel like I’ve been doing all my life. To do anything different doesn’t feel comfortable and feels odd to me.”

An Earnhardt win would also bring an end to Hendrick Motorsports’ modest 15-race slump, which has prolonged the team’s anticipation of a milestone 200th win in NASCAR’s top series. Hendrick has 11 Talladega wins, second only to the 12 scored by Richard Childress Racing.