Dale Earnhardt Jr. had his fill of the Brickyard 400 and didn’t need to see the overtime that most fans felt robbed of due to the timing of the caution that ended the race.
He felt the race was decided and felt like any additional laps around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway wouldn’t have been rewarding anyway.
“I’m not saying how it played out is how it should have played out,” Earnhardt said on Tuesday during his Dale Jr Download podcast. “I’m not saying that. If they throw the yellow, great. They didn’t throw the yellow, fine. I didn’t care because I had enough of that race. I think it’s incredible to win there, I think it’s a hell of a thing to have on your resume, Indy is freaking amazing. But something about the race product just doesn’t check all my boxes. And so I wasn’t sitting here going ‘Man, damn it. I got robbed.’ I just was like ‘Whatever. It’s over.’
“Now if we go to another track where I really love the racing product, of course, I want more racing. I don’t know how else to say it, and it’s flawed. My opinion is flawed. It’s just my opinion. I’m not going to hide, I’m not going to run, I’m not going to bullshit you. My opinion is likely flawed and inconsistent. Fine, but I will agree if that’s a yellow on Lap 2, which it is probably before the leader gets through Turn 4, it’s a yellow every time.”
Earnhardt conceded that Indianapolis is ‘an insanely cool racetrack’ and has a lot of motorsports ‘history’ but also concluded the long held conviction that it is ‘not a great racetrack for stock cars.’
Earnhardt said he had his fill of NASCAR that day and was just ready to do something else because he knew the race was over and that the right car won, even if he was rooting for Ryan Blaney over Kyle Larson, personally.
“I don’t know how else to say it because I do not want to insult the racetrack or anything about its legacy,” Earnhardt said, “but it’s a one-groove track. There will never be an outside groove there because it’s 90-degree turns, and the best way through those turns is in the bottom groove, and it’s always going to be only, only about the prestige of the event and the location and the track itself. The actual racing product isn’t as exciting to me as it might have been somewhere else.”
