Ever since Katherine Legge crashed out of her debut Cup Series race in Phoenix, there have been numerous discussions about NASCAR’s driver approval process. The biggest contention has been that the promotion needs to be more strict about who it allows to race in the Next Gen car. Dale Earnhardt Jr., as is expected of him, views the issue through a different lens.
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What led to Legge’s misfortune was the lack of practice she had in the Cup Series car. She had never driven it before and had to resort to simulator training to get accustomed to it.
So, Junior believes that drivers like Legge need to be given more practice time ahead of races. But then, NASCAR has reduced practice in recent years to minimize the costs incurred by teams.
Junior retorted that argument by explaining how teams aren’t saving any money by not practicing ahead of races. If a team saves a million dollars by not practicing, it just uses that money toward other practice modules such as simulator engineering, or toward hiring more people in the race shop.
Junior said, “If they came tomorrow and said, ‘We are adding an hour of practice to every weekend,’ that wouldn’t change a thing. There are some people in this building who would probably argue with me but at the end of the year, it ain’t going to amount to nothing. We ain’t going to ruin our business. We will find a way. We always have.”
Other insiders, including veteran reporters Jordan Bianchi and Jeff Gluck and the hosts of the Door, Bumper, Clear podcast, had similar opinions. NASCAR has added some practice time for the races in the 2025 Cup Series season. But the current situation demands a more drastic change.
What Jordan Bianchi and Jeff Gluck said on The Teardown
In his argument, Junior mentioned that Bianchi and Gluck believed that more practice time is the solution as well. Bianchi said on The Teardown that reducing costs by cutting practice time in one of the premier racing series in the world is not acceptable. He stressed that there are other ways to reduce costs, and messing with the on-track racing product isn’t one of them.
In his words, “There are a lot of reasons to cut costs in NASCAR. Actually cutting practice isn’t one of them and from a lot of people I’ve talked to, they’re not really saving that much money, if at all.” Gluck concurred with his thoughts and added that making Legge race through the lower tiers before giving her a Cup Series start wouldn’t be a feasible solution either.
The common voice at the end of the day is that NASCAR has to have more practice time for both its regular drivers and the newcomers.
