Well, NASCAR has committed the cardinal sin: They’ve pissed off Dale Earnhardt Jr. You simply can’t do that. There are a lot of folks you can anger in the world of racing, and get away with.
Dale Jr. ain’t one of them. You need him on your good side. Even a decade after his retirement, he’s the leading voice in the sport. That’s not hyperbolic, either. He’s got the biggest racing podcast on the planet. He’s extremely active on social media. Fans still, overwhelmingly, turn to Junior for all things racing.
ZERO BS. JUST DAKICH. TAKE THE DON’T @ ME PODCAST ON THE ROAD. DOWNLOAD NOW!
That, by the way, is a major indictment on the current Cup drivers, but that’s a story for another time.
Anyway, all the fuss right now in the racing world is centered around a rumor involving NASCAR fans’ worst nightmare … electric cars. That’s right. E-cars!
Just the thought of it makes folks feel queasy. Fans can take a lot, but even getting a whiff of an electric car in NASCAR sends them running for the hills.
John Probst, NASCAR’s executive vice president and chief racing development officer, floated that possibility this week, telling Sports Business Journal that NASCAR could one day implement a crossover utility vehicle EV into the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series.
Nope. Don’t love that. At all. Sure, it’s all shop-talk right now, but that’s how these things start. Before you know it, the fellas are out there racing in cars we can’t hear and don’t recognize, and pit crews are replaced with charging stations.
We can’t have that, and NASCAR’s O’Reilly Series really can’t have it. In a year where viewership is down pretty much across the board, the O’Reilly Series on the CW has been surging. Fans love it, and a lot of it has to do with A) the racing, and B) the car.
Switching to an electric car, which has long been in development in the NASCAR R&D shop, would be a disaster.
And if you don’t believe me, fine. But at least listen to Dale Jr.
“I think making a switch to anything unlike we have would be a massive, massive mistake,” he said on this week’s “Dale Jr. Download.” “Any kind of change like that, as dramatic as that would be, would destroy the series. I would not be interested in that. I don’t think JR Motorsports would be interested in that.”
NASCAR DRIVERS TAKEN BACK BY WILD FAN RECEPTION AT NEW YORK’S FANATICS FEST
Yikes. Tell us how you really feel, Dale!
That last part is the part that will get NASCAR’s attention, by the way. Like I said at the jump, if Dale Jr. isn’t on board with something, it’s a pretty good harbinger of things to come. If you want to know how fans will react to something, check out how they respond to something Junior says.
NASCAR can’t afford to lose JR Motorsports in the O’Reilly Series. They can’t afford to piss off Dale Jr. They really can’t afford to lose the viewership the series is suddenly bringing in.
Going electric may be the way of the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s one size fits all.
Hopefully, NASCAR listens to its most important voice.
