After a clearly excited and emotional Ryan Preece, who had never before won a NASCAR Cup Series race, emerged from his No. 60 RFK Racing Ford following his Cook Out Clash victory at Bowman Gray Stadium on Wednesday night, he let out an F-bomb on live television during his interview.
This naturally led to questions as to whether or not NASCAR would fine him or otherwise penalize him for using the word on live television, given the distinction between live TV versus something like an in-car radio where pretty much every driver in the garage has used profanity at some point.
The answer was "no", and that drew an interesting reaction from Dale Earnhardt Jr.
I want my 25 points back. 😂😂
— Dale Earnhardt Jr. (@DaleJr) February 5, 2026
Dale Jr., of course, was docked 25 points (and fined $10,000) after using the word "shit" in victory lane following his victory at Talladega Superspeedway in October 2004.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. docked 25 points for swearing in 2004
"It don't mean s--- right now," Earnhardt said of his fifth Talladega victory. "Daddy's won here 10 times."
That win initially shot him up to the points lead with seven races remaining on the Chase calendar in the inaugural season of the postseason format, but because he was credited with only 165 points instead of the 190 he would have earned without the profanity, he found himself in second behind eventual champion Kurt Busch.
He did not get back to the lead the rest of the year.
Those 25 points technically made no difference in the long run, even in terms of the gap from fourth to fifth, but things did not go Dale Jr.'s way after that deduction.
Aside from his win at Phoenix Raceway later in the year, his average finish the rest of the way was 18.67, and that included back-to-back crash DNFs after he had crashed just once earlier in the year.
To this day, there are those who argue that that 25-point deduction stripped of him of much-needed momentum at that point in the year, and while it's hard to say one way or the other, it's a point that certainly can't be disproven, given everything that was at stake and just how much losing 25 points would have affected the Kannapolis, North Carolina native mentally at that stage.
Preece is certainly not the first driver to swear on live television, and several other drivers who have done so recently have also gone unpunished, so it was no surprise to see him get off without any penalty.
That said, it was no surprise to see Earnhardt respond the way he did either, given the very different reaction from NASCAR over an objectively much more mundane "curse" word over two decades ago.