Dale Earnhardt Jr. has probably been one of the very few NASCAR drivers to remain so deeply involved in the sport even after hanging up the helmet. Retirement did not loosen his grip on the sport. Instead, it expanded his reach in a way. From co-owning a NASCAR team to offering straight feedback through his weekly podcast, Dale Jr. has stayed in the middle of most of the conversations. Yet even with that level of involvement, Dale Jr. admitted he had reached a point of fatigue, where his emotional connection to the sport had begun to thin.
Much of that weariness stemmed from the playoff format. Dale Jr. lived through NASCAR’s evolution from a full-season points championship to the Chase, and over time, the growing reliance on surprise outcomes and elimination drama dulled his enthusiasm.
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The constant sense of randomness, the feeling that too much hinged on isolated moments, began to sap his interest as a fan. However, NASCAR’s decision to revert to a revised Chase-style format, one that merges season-long points racing with postseason elimination while rewarding consistency, seems to have shifted his perspective. Junior laid out that change straight during a recent episode of his podcast.
“I feel like 36 is the best way to decide it,” Earnhardt said. “You’re not gonna change my mind. I don’t expect us to ever get there. We need to keep in mind that that is truly the best way to do it, so this new system has to have a feel for that, an element for that.
“I remember being a kid and just wanting to devour this sport every weekend. I was like what’s going to happen? I imagine that diehard fans, they tune in and they want to know how that guy’s going to do,” he added.
Dale Jr. followed that by explaining how the old full-season points format once demanded attention every single week. “And when we had the full season points, you couldn’t take a week off as a fan. That race that’s in the middle of the year could be the one that loses you the championship.”
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“We had lost that. I had lost that…. I was sitting there going, ‘You know what? I can miss this one. I don’t need to tune in today.’ I had gotten to the point where it was like, man, I was falling out of love with it.”
For Dale Jr., the issue was not drama but dilution. Knowing that a late-season reset could decide everything reduced the urgency of each race. The sense that drivers merely needed to survive until Phoenix turned the championship into a lottery, something he described as too close to potluck.
The revised structure changes that equation. With points once again carrying weight throughout the calendar, fans can track a long-term objective rather than juggling constant elimination scenarios.
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Under the new format, early success will no longer guarantee a smooth path to the title. Bonus points matter, but they only retain value if drivers continue delivering results week after week. Every lap will now carry consequences, from the opening race at Daytona to the finale at Homestead. That clarity, Junior believes, restores meaning to the struggle.
For fans, teams, and drivers alike, the payoff is that the championship path becomes easier to follow and more complicated to game. Instead of decoding shifting cut lines, viewers can focus on performance and momentum. In Dale Jr.’s view, that return to a narrative does more than fix the format as it rekindles the attachment that once made missing a single race unthinkable.
The post “I Was Falling Out of Love”: Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Shocking Admission About Being A NASCAR Fan appeared first on The SportsRush.
