Dale Earnhardt Jr. is growing increasingly concerned that short tracks are at risk of going away on future NASCAR Cup Series schedules.
In a discussion on the Dale Jr Download podcast earlier in the week, Earnhardt shared some educated speculation that the Cup Series could race at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez in Mexico City next season and that Richmond Raceway is the track most likely to lose one of its two dates in exchange.
“There isn’t anything wrong with Richmond,” Earnhardt said in pointing out that the current generation car remains the problem for short tracks.
Earnhardt understands the desire from NASCAR to contest international races but says there is an oversaturation of road courses.
“NASCAR seems really excited about being able to go into either Mexico and Canada, Montreal (and) even overseas, right,” Earnhardt said. “Even if it’s likely a road course every time. There are not a lot of ovals outside of this country, right?
“And so, they’re excited about taking this product in front of an international audience. I get that. That’s amazing for our sport to be able to go into a different country and compete and show them, you know, the NFL does it and obviously F1 races all over the world.
“NASCAR wants to achieve that. NASCAR wants to be big enough and successful enough for it and its race teams to be able to travel outside of this country and have amazing events that’s going to most likely be road course racing.
“And man, we have enough. We have enough. If we didn’t have many road courses, it wouldn’t bother me that much but we got a lot.”
And he says that short tracks are ‘whittling away,’ because NASCAR finally has an intermediate racing product that puts on good races so ‘we are going to try to add a couple of more them somehow’ and it bothers him that it will all come at the expense of short tracks.
It bothers Earnhardt that even when the short track product was far superior to the intermediate product during the previous generation of car, it wasn’t like NASCAR responded to that by adding more short tracks.
They added road courses like Circuit of the Americas, the Charlotte ROVAL, Road America, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course and even the Rolex 24 course at Daytona once.
“So even when short tracks are good, they sort of get the short end of the stick in terms of being part of growth, right,” Earnhardt said. “They’re not building new short tracks. Of course, they’re not building any new tracks.
“But there was a moment where we had a couple big moments at Martinsville in back-to-back years in the playoff races. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘golly, man, if we could have this type of thing happening more often, our sport would be way better off.’
“There would be way more conversation and excitement around it.”
Earnhardt says intermediate tracks were not as compelling then so fans would have to wait until the next short track race for there to be drama and excitement, beating and banging.
“If you look back at the schedule from, lets say 1986 or 1987, there were a lot of short tracks on the schedule,” Earnhardt said. “We were going to them more often and there was rooting and gouging, bearing and banging that would lead to feuds simmering and staying hot throughout the year.
“Those rivalries and frustrations bled into all the other events, whether they were mile and a halfs or whatever. As the short tracks have whittled down, a lot of that went away.
“When the short track package was really good a couple of years ago, we still had those moments that would remind you of what the short track racing in this series could be. I do believe that we will get it back in terms of a great product at the short tracks, but we will be going to one or two less of them by that point.
“And I doubt when that product does return to the short tracks, I doubt that short tracks will be added back to the schedule. So, it’s like this long form sort of regression of short track racing as a part of the NASCAR Elite Cup series.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.