Dale Earnhardt Jr. details his conversation with Sammy Smith following Martinsville

Following a disastrous ending to the Xfinity Series race on Saturday night, all eyes turned to Sammy Smith. He had plunged into Taylor Gray going into Turn 3, wrecking him in an attempt to take the lead.

It started a chain reaction. Cars piled up behind the start/finish line, just the latest bit of egregious contact on a day that had plenty of it.

It was a bad look. Very bad.

Bad enough that Dale Earnhardt Jr., the owner of the JR Motorsports team that gives Smith his ride, was fuming. He reached out to Smith on Sunday after the dust has settled.

“I called Sammy (Smith) on Sunday and I talked to him for a while and told him everything that I needed to tell him after I’d calmed down,” Earnhardt explained on the Dale Jr. Download podcast. “You don’t know whether it sinks in yet. I can’t sit here and tell you, ‘Oh yeah, man, he’s sorry. He’s really sorry and, man, he’s going to do better.’

“But he says all those things. He says that he understands that he screwed up. He knows it gives himself a black eye, he gave JR Motorsports a black eye. He knows that we’re very disappointed in him.”

Smith also might have made things worse by appearing unapologetic after the race. Instead of chalking it up to a mistake, he backed his move to a certain extent.

In hindsight, Sammy Smith would likely admit that was a mistake. Certainly after the talking to from Earnhardt.

“He certainly has tons of regret,” Earnhardt said. “But the work forward is a long road. He ain’t going to fix it in 12 hours. He’s got a lot of work to do to repair his reputation. That was a heavy blow. People look at him; I told him, I said, ‘Hey, everybody thinks you’re a spoiled punk. That’s what a lot of people think.’

“I asked him, I said, ‘Don’t you agree that people have that perception of you?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘You gave them an opportunity to be right. You can’t do that.’ Unfortunately the situation that he’s in and that a lot of other drivers are in, it’s perceived that they’re only there because of some extra funding or family connection or what have you. There’s tons of drivers, it’s talked about openly in the Truck Series and the Xfinity Series, fans have certain opinions about them being spoon-fed and what have you.”

Those perceptions already influence how fans look at drivers. And how fans look at drivers can influence how sponsors look at drivers. There’s an entire ecosystem built around it. One Sammy Smith is a part of.

“And I said, for Sammy, I said, ‘You have to work harder because of that to prove you belong there,'” Earnhardt said. “‘You can be frustrated about that or whatever, but it doesn’t change anything, you still have to go… if you want to be a racecar driver for the rest of your life, if you want this to work for you, you’re going to have to work harder and you’re going to have to walk the line straighter. And you can’t do sh*t like you did this past weekend. You can’t.’

Will all of that sink in for Sammy Smith? Time will tell.

“So he has two routes,” Earnhardt said. “He can continue to make it more challenging on himself and anyone associated with him, or he can try to clean it up. And that’s a process. That’s not something he’s going to fix this weekend.

“He can do it. I know him, he’s a nice kid. Wants this really badly. Wants to win, wants to be successful. And I want that for him. I want that for him here. Now I guess we’ll continue to try to help him understand how to get to where he wants to go.”