Dale Jr. likes Joey Logano to win NASCAR championship at Phoenix. Here’s our Q&A
Between hosting his own podcast, becoming an executive director of iRacing, calling a championship race with the NBC Sports broadcast booth and spending time with newborn daughter Nicole, Dale Earnhart Jr. has his hands full as the 2020 NASCAR season comes to a close.
The retired Cup driver still found time for a conversation with the Observer ahead of his travels to Phoenix to answer some burning questions, including why Earnhardt Jr.’s podcast was promoted in Chad Knaus’ first tweet, which driver he is predicting to win this weekend and whether a call to not pass a teammate is cheating or par for the course — or rather, par for the track.
NASCAR’s championship Cup race, the Season Finale 500, is Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern on NBC.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Alex Andrejev: I just listened to your most recent episode on the Dale Jr. Download with Chad Knaus, so naturally, my first question: Did Chad ever send you a picture of him wearing leather and street-racing a motorcycle?
Dale Jr.: He did!
AA: No way.
DJ: Yeah, he went home and dug up some photos and shared ‘em. It was pretty cool.
AA: You’re gonna have to post that or something. That’s too funny. It’s hard to imagine.
DJ: He had this whole other life we didn’t know about.
AA: And he’s finally on Twitter. He linked to your podcast episode as his first tweet. Was that planned? Did he do that from the studio?
DJ: That was just spontaneous right there. Mike, my podcast co-host, was on top of the fact that he was joining Twitter. I didn’t know anything about it, but I guess he decided that trying to promote himself on the Dirty Mo Media podcast was a better idea on the spot. And I appreciate it because we’d like to get our listeners however we can.
AA: For sure, so I have some racing-related questions, too. You’ve had a lot of success at Phoenix and know the track well, but this is a new package. Who you think is going to run well? Who’s your championship prediction?
DJ: There are no clear favorites if you’re looking at performance and speed, what’s happened on the race track, so I think maybe the best thing to do is look at their personalities. Look for the guy that has the mental toughness. As far as I can tell, Logano leads that group in mental toughness and the ability to do whatever it takes. He just doesn’t have a conscience in these moments. He doesn’t feel any remorse or guilt or anything, and does what he needs to do to win. Not that he’s done anything in the past just downright wrong to anybody, but we know that he can get physical with his car if he has to. He doesn’t choke or buckle in these situations. We haven’t really seen Chase (Elliott) in this type of a moment. I don’t know. He’s kind of a dark horse in my mind, but I think it’s going to come down to who’s the most headstrong or stubborn and tough mentally, and I believe that it’s Joey.
AA: Could this be the year for Denny Hamlin to win a championship? What’s been the hurdle?
DJ: Well, only really Denny can answer that. But what was interesting last year is Denny had this new crew chief (Chris Gabehart) who had the attitude of, “We can win anywhere. We can win any time, and we’re gonna go do this.” Denny was at the Homestead race last year with a shot at the title. We kept saying, “This is Denny’s best shot.” All he kept hearing about was how that was his best opportunity and his response to that was to try to walk it back a little bit. It wasn’t the same sort of messaging that his crew chief had, which was interesting to me then. It was like he was mentally preparing himself for it not to go right. He was sort of like, “We’ve had an amazing season and if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. It’s a weird format and we might lose this one race.” He kept walking back that spotlight that we were putting on him and his crew chief’s attitude was completely different. He was like, “This is ours to win and we’re going to take it.” I feel like maybe this year it seemed like when he was winning, when he was confident, when he was happy, he was adopting the mentality that his crew chief brought to the table. If that stays with Denny all the way to the end, I think that’s the difference in him winning a title or not.
AA: There’s been a lot of debate about the call for Erik Jones not to pass Denny late in the race at Martinsville. NASCAR did not issue a penalty for that. How do you feel about that? Is that type of teamwork normal or is it cheating?
DJ: It’s not cheating, but it is not in the spirit of competition. It’s been a part of other motorsports and it is accepted in other motorsports as a strategy or tactic. It’s not one we’ve put a lot of focus on in our sport. It’s probably been done before just not with a lot of publicity except at Richmond several years ago with Martin Truex Jr. and Michael Waltrip Racing. I see a lot of similarities with what happened in Martinsville and what happened with Michael Waltrip Racing, but I think NASCAR may have made a different decision this time because of the fallout from that decision many years ago. It was not good. MWR basically closed the organization. They lost their partners. It was just a bad deal all the way around. And I feel like with NASCAR, that wasn’t their intention with their punishment, and maybe this time around they didn’t want to ruin an organization over it, so they decided not to penalize the (No.) 20. I think that I would have had to sit down and think long and hard about penalizing the 20 car team. I don’t think you can do anything to Denny (Hamlin) because he’s just out there driving his race and doing the best he can to hold that position. But if you don’t deter that type of activity, then that will become commonplace in the series. And if that’s OK with NASCAR, if they’re OK with that being something in the toolbox teams can pull out if they need it, then they basically opened the door for that by doing nothing.
AA: I see how it crosses a line when there’s an actual call to not race 100%. It seems like it would be difficult for NASCAR to judge just the action of a driver not making a tough pass in the future.
DJ: Yeah, I think without the radio communication, you’d have no penalty at all. When there are radio communications that are clear to direct that driver not to pass, that to me is wrongdoing.
AA: There’s also been a lot of debate about this aero package. It seems like there’s a camp against it. Then Jimmie Johnson told Sports Illustrated this week that he wants to drive stuff with more horsepower and that’s not the direction NASCAR is going. How do you feel about the package?
DJ: I’m not a big fan of the big spoiler. I’ve got my own personal opinions about it that don’t really matter because I don’t get to make the decision of where the rules go from here. When I was a driver, I would complain. I was very clear on being vocal, but now that I’m beyond driving, I just kind of embrace whatever it is they’re going to put on the race track instead of complaining about the negatives of the package. If it puts on a great race and I’m enjoying myself and walk away pretty happy, then I’m good. I’d definitely like to have my hands on the rules and make some adjustments to see if I can come up with something. I think everybody in the industry has an opinion like that. But I don’t hate the package. It doesn’t frustrate me like it might frustrate a lot of the drivers because I’ve watched it as a fan and I’m more often entertained by what I see on the race track. If I thought the package was ruining the entertainment value, then I’d have a big problem, but I don’t think it has.
AA: I feel like we saw that play out at the end of the Kansas race especially. That still seemed like an entertaining race to me.
DJ: I was entertained. I thought it was awesome. I can look at it through the lens of spoilers ruining this experience because Harvick can’t pass, or I can look at it through the lens of the spoiler being used as a tool by the lead driver and can he do what he needs to do effectively to keep Harvick from passing him? I had a better time looking at it through that lens of, all right Joey’s got to make all the right decisions when Harvick gets those runs to try to take that away and do what he needs to do. He did, and it wasn’t easy. If the spoiler on the No. 22 kept Harvick from getting within 10 car lengths or five car lengths, that’d have been a big problem for me, but Harvick was able to get it pretty close and I thought there were a couple times when he almost had it. It was pretty entertaining.
AA: You said a few weeks ago that there wouldn’t be an asterisk on this 2020 season. What did you mean? What does this year say about NASCAR?
DJ: NASCAR put together a year that was worthy. They put together a schedule that was worthy of a season. I feel like there was no clear advantage for any team or any driver. What we all had to do and the changes that had to be made didn’t seem to give someone a clear advantage, so I feel like whoever wins the championship can be as confident and proud of that moment as any other year, and this year may be even more challenging, so this might be one to embrace even more if you win it. It was absolutely worthy of the type of product that NASCAR hopes to develop and produce each weekend. When you look at the whole season, it was entertaining. It was dramatic. There was really, really good, tough competition. There were highs and lows and surprises.
It had everything.
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 10:01 AM.
