Dale Earnhardt Jr. airs frustration, begs NASCAR to fix superspeedway package

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is pleading with NASCAR to fix their superspeedway package following the 2025 iteration of the Daytona 500.

While The Great American Race certainly had some exciting moments, Earnhardt Jr. believes the racing could be much, much better if NASCAR made a few adjustments. He got down and dirty in the details during the latest episode of his Dale Jr. Download podcast, believing it’s not too difficult of an issue to fix.

“The issue that I have with the current product at Daytona and Talladega and Atlanta is that all of the series, no matter what series — ARCA, Trucks, Xfinity, or Cup, they all suffer from this. We have choked everything down and put so much drag on the bodies that they can’t get away from each other,” Earnhardt Jr. proclaimed. “A good car can’t drive away from a bad car. An experienced driver can’t distance himself from a [driver] who doesn’t have the experience.

“Years ago, you’d bring a car down and pick any type of racing. You’d bring a car down there and if you were fast, you drove away from the slow guys. You break the draft and they’re inexperienced and their car’s inability to perform would separate the field. We don’t have that anymore.”

“The cars are so draggy [now] and the engines are so stifled that everybody’s all over the top of each other. That just leads to some of the silliest crashes, that are just so unnecessary. This has been going on for a long time, over a decade.”

While the comments may seem a bit bleak from one of NASCAR’s loudest voices, it’s not all doom and gloom from Earnhardt Jr. regarding superspeedway racing. He thinks it boils down to putting the power back in the hands of the drivers on tracks like Daytona.

“It’s really simple. It’s not hard. We don’t need to blow it up. We just need to get in a room and reimagine the drag-to-power ratio,” the NASCAR Hall of Fame Inductee added. “How the cars react to each other, and around each other. We need to figure out a way to allow the car — we’ve got to change the drag-to-power ratio to where the delta between what a car can do by itself on the racetrack versus in the pack isn’t such a big range.

“What happens now is, when you take that car and you do put it in draft, you can’t get out of line unless you know you’ve got a lot of help, because the car has so much drag, it’s just going to fall on its face. That’s the core of the problem. That is the core of the issue with I have with the way the cars race at Daytona and Talladega. We have slowed them down to try to keep them from flipping up into the air. They have a ton of drag, with the spoilers and the way the bodies are. The motors don’t have any — they don’t have enough power.

“Basically, the motors probably, you know, they want to run the same engine everywhere. They don’t want to run a special motor for Talladega and Daytona. Cost wise, they want to take, you know, have this sort of same blanket package across the entire series, so now the cars have an enormous amount of drag on them, and they don’t run very fast by themselves.

“They can’t get away from each other, with all of that drag that they create. I believe we need to reimagine the way that we’re doing this. All the series suffer from this.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. on superspeedway racing: ‘We have to fix this’

While the change may create less side-by-side racing, Earnhardt Jr. believes fan would welcome the change if it returned tracks like Daytona and Talladega to the racing of old, where drivers could pull out of line and make a move all by themselves.

“It may mean that we’ll see less three-wide racing. It may mean that we’ll see less two-by-two-by-two-by-two-by-two-by-two all the way through the field. But I think it might end up taking away the fuel issue that we have, which we have to fix. We have to get away from fuel saving. God dang,” Earnhardt Jr. stated. “The lead cars are out front running 60 percent throttle. The rest of the field, everybody further on back, less and less throttle. Once they’re three-wide, there’s nowhere you can go. You don’t want to be the asshole that’s the only one out there driving up through the middle of the pack making it four-wide.

“… We have to fix this. We cannot smile and go, ‘Hey man, everything’s fine.’ We’ve got to fix it. But the good news is I don’t believe it’s a very big problem to fix. Try to figure out how to get the Cup cars to change the way that they run these races. But I think it’s there. I think it’s achievable.

“I don’t think that it would take a ton of real hard work. I don’t think you’ve got to totally reinvent the car. I think whatever approach we take is a math problem between drag and power, and I think that you can apply it, once you kind of understand what you’re trying to do and what needs to happen.”

Alas, it’d be prudent of NASCAR to listen to Dale Earnhardt Jr. on the matter, as he’s speaking as the voice of many fans, drivers and media members alike. A change would be welcome after the last couple of years of superspeedway racing, that’s for sure.

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