Dale Earnhardt Jr. realized a long-held ambition when JR Motorsports entered the Cup Collection at first of the 12 months with the Daytona 500, and Justin Allgaier delivered a top-10 end within the staff’s very first outing. After watching the No. 40 automotive navigate the highs and lows of the occasion, Dale Jr. stepped again to supply his general perspective on the state of the game.
Allgaier, who secured the strongest results of his profession in NASCAR’s crown jewel, guided the No. 40 Traveller Whiskey Chevrolet to P9 place after steering away from a last-lap additional time pileup in Flip 3 and charging to the end. His earlier greatest Daytona 500 consequence got here in 2014, when he completed P27, and his high efficiency at Daytona earlier than this 12 months was P18 within the 2015 summer time occasion on the two.5-mile oval.
Dale Jr., watching each lap and evaluating the automotive’s conduct all through the race, stated, “I’m a critic of the game… However issues are actually good proper now, issues are actually, actually good… We ran Daytona, and I used to be there proper. We had a automotive within the race. I used to be actually pissed off with the way in which the automobiles raced in the way in which the product on monitor product, I used to be pissed off with it.”
He added {that a} informal viewer may not acknowledge the small print that set him off, explaining, “An off-the-cuff fan would have watched the race and never seen the issues that I noticed that bothered me, so there’s that, however I noticed issues that I’m like I want they might repair this sh*t, all the pieces from that second on, all of the races that we’ve ran have been incredible, spectacular.”
He additionally pointed to the casual ballot Jeff Gluck posts on X after every race, utilizing the outcomes to gauge fan sentiment. Junior famous that the races have persistently trended in a optimistic route, with only a few occasions drawing a cut up response or a wave of followers saying “that sucked.”
Though he acknowledged that X doesn’t characterize the complete NASCAR viewers, he believes the ballot nonetheless captures a significant snapshot of how viewers felt about every race, since followers on the platform are below no strain to offer a positive response to one thing they didn’t get pleasure from.
