Dale Earnhardt Jr.: Changes to Talladega racing could backfire
MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Dale Earnhardt Jr. said Tuesday if he was in charge of NASCAR, he would make changes to the cars at Talladega Superspeedway.
The only problem is he doesn’t know what could be done to keep cars on the ground and still maintain a good show, he told Paste BN Sports. And that means it’s best to not change anything at all.
“We don’t really know what to change,” he said. “It’s easy to say something general like, ‘Slow ‘em down 30 mph.’ It’s easy to say what the cars need to be doing on the track. But getting them to do that (is harder).”
Sunday’s race at Talladega saw three cars get airborne and 35 of the 40 entries sustain at least some damage from crashes. That’s caused a great deal of discussion this week in the NASCAR community about what — if anything — could be done.
But Earnhardt said as a driver, he preferred NASCAR would keep everything the same.
“If I’m not driving it and I’m at the top and I’m the puppeteer, hell yeah I’ll change it!” he said. “But I gotta drive it. So I don’t want to change because it might go the wrong way or do nothing at all. So leave it alone, you know?
“As a driver, it’s frustrating to go through change. It’s frustrating to have things keep moving and not have a reason to keep doing it. We can make changes to the cars and not know exactly what’s going to happen, and I don’t like doing that.”
Earnhardt cited last year’s race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway as an example. NASCAR wanted to try a high drag package, which officials said would create the opportunity for slingshot passing in the Brickyard 400.
Drivers were skeptical, and they turned out to be right.
“I’m not trusting a computer to tell me, ‘Man, if you change this, then this is the race you’re going to see,’” he said. “Because we did that last year with Indy and that was garbage. We were led to believe we were going to have these awesome passes and we’d be able to move out from behind a guy and go by him on the straightaway with this giant spoiler. We all wanted to buy into that idea. Many of us were like, ‘No way is that going to happen.’ But inside, all of us were like, ‘Please let it happen! Please let this be the coolest (stuff) ever.’ And it wasn’t.”
Earnhardt fears a lack of testing in a real environment would lead to similar guesswork at Talladega and Daytona International Speedway, which could ruin the racing at those tracks. And as a driver, he said, there’s been enough change over the years.
“In a sport I’ve seen make so much change, not all that change has been great,” he said. “So it’s kind of hard for me to want to do anything about it for fear of creating a worse problem and creating something that’s not fun for anybody.”
And as for the suggestion from some fans that NASCAR should bring back the tandem-style racing that ruled at plate tracks earlier this decade? Earnhardt said he would “just as soon retire before we had tandems again.”
“I seriously do not want anything to do with that,” he said. “That was a mistake. It happened unintentionally and it’s unfortunate because now it’s this little egg in the basket everyone wants to grab anytime anything bad happens.”
Earnhardt spoke to Paste BN Sports during a publicity tour for CMT's new docudrama series NASCAR: The Rise of American Speed. The three-part series, of which Earnhardt is the executive producer, premieres at 9 p.m. ET Sunday.
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