Dale Earnhardt Jr. questions NASCAR decision to move Daytona from being final race of season

NASCAR officially unveiled the 2025 Cup Series schedule Thursday and among the many changes, Daytona will play host to the regular season finale.

Daytona hosted the regular season finale in 2022 and ’23, but this season, it’s Darlington that gets the nod. “The Lady in Black” hosts the Southern 500 this Sunday. You can bet that Dale Earnhardt Jr. is fired up about the switch back, seeing that he didn’t understand why Daytona moved to the penultimate regular season race in 2024.

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“Isn’t it hard to remember it’s not the cutoff race or not the last race of the regular season?” Earnhardt said on ‘The Dale Jr. Download‘ following this past Saturday’s Coke Zero Sugar 400. “Damn you, NASCAR. I’m just giving them a hard time. The schedule got jumbled up and they didn’t wanna move the Darlington date off of Labor Day, right. … It still did have the same potential to be a spoiler race. Did it change at all moving it away one week? Not so much, because we still got the underdog winner that they’re trying to give that race that chance to be. And it was that.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. not optimistic about bubble drivers’ chances of winning at Darlington

As Earnhardt mentioned, Daytona did yield a first-time winner this season in Harrison Burton. 34th in the points standings heading into the race, Burton scored the upset victory to become playoff bound. As for those cutline drivers such as Bubba Wallace and Ross Chastain, they both got into trouble at Daytona and now are in near must-win situations going to Darlington.

That’s not where you want to be, Earnhardt explained, calling Darlington the “Everest” of NASCAR.

“The thing that it was missing was that if a guy did crash, you were like, ‘Oh, that’s it.’ Now, you still have Darlington,” Earnhardt said. “Now, Darlington is the Everest of NASCAR. Going to Darlington for a must-win [is] impossible whereas Daytona you’re like, ‘I got a shot.’ Who doesn’t have a shot? Anybody that has to go to Darlington in a must-win situation certainly wishes that Daytona was the cutoff race.

“It’s funny. All the drivers when they moved Daytona to the last race of the regular season [went], ‘Oh my goodness, what a terrible idea having that race. Oh, man.’ And now, they wish they were going back to Daytona. A lot of them because they damn sure ain’t got a shot at Darlington.”