Dinger unleashed: My man crush

Every other Wednesday, AJ Allmendinger, driver of the No. 84 Red Bull Toyota, writes a column for Yahoo! Sports. Two weekends ago, he finished 14th at Chicagoland Speedway.

In NASCAR, if you take a week off, it feels like you've been gone for, like, five years, because you're not used to it. Over this final off weekend of the season, I didn't do much.

Sunday, I watched a ton of races. I flipped back and forth between the AMLS race, the F1 race, the Grand Am race and the Indy Car race. I might be a bigger fan of watching racing than I am of being a race car driver. I also played a lot of online racing as I watched racing. As you can see, racing never escapes my life.

My wife hasn't seen me for probably three days because I was locked in my basement watching racing and focusing on my online racing.

Outside of racing, I love the NFL. My favorite team/man crush is Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers, so I'm pretty interested in what's going on right now.

I'm pretty biased, but I want Favre to come back. I wasn't ready for him to retire yet. It put a pretty emotional hurt on me when it happened. Unfortunately, the day he retired was the day I was told Mike Skinner was going to replace me for five races in the 84 car.

It all happened within about 30 minutes. I was at the Phoenix test when I got the phone call that they were putting Mike in the car. Then, as I was about to get in the car, one of my crew guys said, "Hey, Favre just retired." I was like, "That's not even funny."

I thought they were joking with me and I made it clear that I wasn't amused. Then I saw it online and, well, that hurt. Honestly, it was up for debate as to which hurt more – me getting replaced or Brett retiring.

I kind of figured I would get back in the car again, but I didn't think I would ever see Brett play again. But I think he's looking good. I've watched the video of him training. I think he should come back, and the Packers are stupid if they don't take him.

I really started getting into the Packers when Brett took over. I just loved the way he played the game. I mean, he's not out there showboating. He's out there just for the love of the game, the love of winning.

I love his attitude. The guy could throw six picks in a row and on that seventh pass he'll cock his arm back and throw it in there again. He never gives up.

I try to incorporate that attitude into my life. I think you have to.

When Mike was in the car, I'll be honest – it was tough going to the track. I won't lie, there were mornings I woke up in my bus not wanting to walk outside, thinking, 'Man, this sucks.' But, I knew that wasn't going to help me get better. As much as it sucked, I knew that I couldn't give up.

You have two decisions. Either give up, which means you never wanted it that bad in the first place, or you can go out there and figure out how to make it work.

Jay Frye, who's the general manager of Red Bull, promised me that I'd be back in the car, and I trusted him, even though in this business when you're told it's only going to be for "five races," it usually means it's permanent.

I had two options. One, not believe him and give up. Or two, go out to the track, hope what he was saying was true and work hard so that I was ready when I did get back in the car, and that's what I did.

Now, we're getting better. After Chicago where we finished 13th, I was pretty jacked up, pretty happy. I wish we could have finished a little better, but it was the first weekend working with my new crew chief Jimmy Elledge.

The way I look at it is this: we have good enough stuff, we have a good team, and now we have Jimmy, I don't think we should be any worse than top 20. On our good days we should be in top 15 and on our best days we should be in top 10. Once we start doing that more naturally, then the top 10s become easier. Then we start working on the top fives and then wins. That's my ultimate goal.

I'm looking forward to Indianapolis. The track itself is a cool place.

People think that because I have an open-wheel background that I grew up wanting to race in the Indy 500, but I guess I grew up in the era when, because of the open-wheel split, it wasn't as big as it used to be. It was always like, 'Yeah, I'd love to run the Indy 500,' but it was never my passion like most open wheel guys.

But to be on the racetrack, to walk through Gasoline Alley with your driver's suit on and to get into your race car, that was pretty cool last year. Unfortunately we had an incident during qualifying and we didn't make the race, but we'll make up for that this year.