NASCAR: Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s new perspective on racing

Dale Earnhardt Jr. spoke about the new perspective he has gained about NASCAR since joining the NBC broadcast booth after retiring from driving.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. hasn’t been far from NASCAR since stepping away from full-time Cup Series competition after the 2017 season.

He still owns Xfinity Series JR Motorsports, and in addition to competing in one race per year behind the wheel of one of his cars, which he plans to continue in 2021 despite rumors suggesting otherwise, he now serves as an analyst in the NBC broadcast booth for Cup Series races, a position he has held since 2018.

Asked if he has gained any new perspective on racing itself from being in the broadcast booth as opposed to behind the wheel for the last three seasons, Earnhardt described at length what has changed for him.

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“Absolutely,” Earnhardt told Beyond the Flag after speaking about an exciting new partnership in which he is involved with Nicorette to help smokers stop smoking like he was able to do several years back.

“I feel like that when I was a race car driver, I was very selfish. I would be vocal about what I liked and didn’t like about NASCAR and the rules that they made. I felt like that I knew everything about running the sport, and I knew the rules that needed to be made or changed, I knew exactly what was best for the sport.”

Earnhardt competed full-time in the NASCAR Cup Series from 2000 to 2017 after competing full-time in the Xfinity Series in 1998 and 1999 and winning both championships.

“But when I got out of the driver’s seat and got up into the booth, a lot of my opinions about different things in the sport changed 180 degrees, because when you’re up in the booth, you can see every part of the sport working,” he continued.

“When you’re inside the car, the only part you really see is your own team and how it’s sort of maneuvering through the season and how a race team operates in this environment. When you get into the booth, you can see, just to the right of us or right next door to our booth is the NASCAR booth. You can kind of see how they operate. You know how the network is operating and what they’re trying to accomplish.

“I never knew none of this stuff when I was a driver, and we’re trying, the whole sport, the governing body of NASCAR, the broadcast booth, all we’re trying to do is get people to watch, get people to come, and sit down and show up, and while that’s important to you as a driver, it might not be at the top of that list.

“But when you’re in the network business or part of the broadcast or part of the organization, NASCAR, that is absolutely at the top of the list, turning on more and more fans to the sport. So what’s important to you changes if that’s the most important thing. What matters and what you think the sport needs to survive or succeed changes.”

“Working in the booth made my mind change about my opinion of a lot of things in the sport, I mean a lot of it, probably 90% of the things in the sport, I did a whole 180 when I got in the booth and saw — seeing the sport from a 30,000 foot level or a 40,000 foot level, that sort of, getting that global view of it, you really understand a lot of the reasons why the sport does some of the things they do that always kind of perplexed you as a driver and ticked you off.”