Dale Earnhardt Jr. implores NASCAR to make drivers uncomfortable again in restrictor plate races

If NASCAR attempts to fix the current superspeedway product, Dale Earnhardt Jr. doesn’t want to see any band-aids or gimmicks.

“If we take this issue seriously and really go after trying to make it different and improve it — let’s not f****** add a stage, let’s not put a smaller fuel cell in there — those are band-aids. Let’s not add gimmicks, that is not a long-term solution,” Earnhardt said on this week’s Dale Jr. Download. “Those are things that will get somebody back tomorrow, but they won’t stay. We gotta reimagine how to do this from the very basics and see if we can’t have an entirely different product. And that may take a while. That may take a year.”

Earnhardt, making his plea to NASCAR following this past Sunday’s Daytona 500, said it’s time to reimagine superspeedway racing. For Earnhardt, one of the sport’s greatest superspeedway racers, that involves making the cars harder to drive again.

Dale Earnhardt Jr: ‘Handling has to be important’

“Handling has to be important,” Earnhardt said. “There’s so much drag and downforce, the cars barely have real balance problems. … At Daytona in 2004 or 2005, we were lifting in The Duel because the cars were so tight. We would go down into Turn 1… up to wall because if you ran wide open, you’d knock the damn wall down and everybody was plowing. And here comes Jamie McMurray around the bottom past all of us, his car just turning better than everybody else’s and he drove past us. Nothing we could do about it.

“I’m sitting there running third or fourth like, ‘Oh, f***, I’m tight.’ You get out the car and you’re like, ‘Tony [Eury] Jr., we gotta work on the damn springs, we gotta do something to get this thing turned.’ So, you know what that meant? I was gonna practice my ass off tomorrow because we’re gonna change the rear springs, we’re gonna try to put some rubber in the right rear and we gotta get out there and get 30 laps on these tires and get in a pack and try this out in practice. You saw people practicing because they had to work on their cars.”

The Next Gen car has done the opposite. Introduced to the sport in 2022, parts come from a single supplier thus limiting the difference in speed between cars. In short, good cars can’t drive away from bad cars. Couple that with a decrease in horsepower, and drivers are on top of each other in pack racing. As a result, superspeedway races often feature more than a single “Big One.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants to ‘reimagine’ superspeedway racing

35-of-41 cars in the field were involved in at least one incident in this year’s Daytona 500, the most since 2019, per Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic. William Byron, running seventh on the final lap, took the checkered flag after avoiding the multi-car wreck in front of him. Byron’s victory and how most of the race transpired with fuel-saving taking centerstage, has sparked discussion for change.

Earnhardt wants to get back to the cars being more difficult to drive. That, he said, will lead to drivers actually needing to practice and will fix the fuel saving problem.

“If you bring handling back and you make the cars handle, ain’t no way you’re pushing anybody around the racetrack because they’re gonna bust your ass or you’re gonna bust your ass,” Earnhardt said. “If we can figure out how to take some drag away and take some of the grip that the aero creates, you’re gonna have some handling issues. … You’re gonna see the field disperse and separate itself between good handling cars and bad handling cars over the course of a 15-20-lap run. Then, guys ain’t gonna be saving gas anymore. They’re gonna be trying to f****** keep up.

“… We have quite a bit of practice right now and none of them want it. They’ll want that s*** when their cars don’t drive good. The reason they don’t want practice right now is because their cars aren’t hard to drive. They’re very easy to drive and so, it’s boring for them to practice. … If I was worried about my car and how it drove, my ass would be at practice, and I’d be asking for practice. I can fix what the drivers are saying by making their cars drive bad. They’ll be begging for practice.”