While he still retired from full-time NASCAR racing, Dale Earnhardt Jr. isn’t afraid to hop in an Xfinity Series race or two each season. Dale Jr. raced at Bristol and Homestead-Miami this season, and it was a lot of fun to watch as a fan.
Talking with Kevin Harvick on the Dale Jr. Download, Earnhardt explained what he loved about it so much. As a broadcaster, it reminds him what these drivers go through each week on the track.
“This is what I love about it. So when – you will not feel this way the first year maybe not the second year [of broadcasting] because you’re so fresh out of the seat,” Earnhardt said to Harvick. “All of the things that you know that are going on inside the car you’ll recognize it immediately when you’re sitting in the booth, right? … After that year three, four, or five, a lot of those little tiny details that only you can tell us in that booth you sort of get distance from and you forget. If you don’t write it down, have it in your notes, you’ll kind of forget some of the bells and whistles, the smells, the sounds, the anxieties, the whatever.
So when I race in that car in the Xfinity Series, I really only want to do one. I don’t want to do five. Two, three, none of that sounds better than one. One’s plenty. But it’s a reminder, I get in there and I go, ‘Damn, yeah, oh I forgot.’ I’m driving it and all these things are happening and it just is a reminder of multiple things that a driver considers, thinks, deals with. And it just sort of keeps my thoughts about what a driver’s going through in a car, fresh.”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants fans to know how good NASCAR drivers are
Of course, Dale Jr. and Kevin Harvick talked about the 2024 season. Harvick is joining Fox as a broadcaster and Earnhardt will continue his work with NBC. It’s going to be awesome for fans to have Harvick in the first half of the season.
One thing that Earnahrdt Jr. stresses, is storytelling. He wants to make these drivers in NASCAR the superstars that they are. You can’t do that with just plainly talking over the race as it happens.
“I get in that Xfinity car and I’m reminded immediately, these guys are no joke,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. continued in the podcast. “And imagine the leap to the Cup level, right? Of just talent, with how hard they race, they’re doing it every single week and all of a sudden you jump on that escalator like ‘Oh s**t, these freaking guys know where they’re going, I gotta figure this out.’ I love that it reminds me of just how good they are because we forget to tell people that.
“You get down the road and you’re like, man, I haven’t said that these are the best race car drivers in the world in a long time, and I should be saying that more often!”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. knows how good these drivers are, he competes against them at least once a ear. He just wants everyone else to know it, too.