There have been so many rumors about possible changes in the NASCAR playoff format for next season that it’s almost hard to keep track of each one. But one format that Dale Earnhardt Jr. is in favor of is the so-called 3-3-4 system.
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This means the first two rounds will have three races each, while the third and final round will have four races to decide the NASCAR Cup champion. And if that’s the format NASCAR ultimately decides to go with – if it changes the playoff structure at all – Earnhardt would welcome seeing Talladega Superspeedway be part of the four-race final round.
“Why not?” Earnhardt quipped in response to a fan question posed to him during this week’s edition of the Dale Jr. Download podcast. “I mean, what’s the problem?”
Earnhardt has long had an affinity for ‘Dega: he won six times at the 2.66-mile oval (his father won there 10 times).
When pressed to further explain himself to the fan, particularly about the concept of having a superspeedway in the proposed four-race final round, Earnhardt said he didn’t see what the problem was.
“What, should we just get rid of them all together?” Earnhardt said of the less conventional tracks such as superspeedways like Talladega or Daytona, or perhaps the Charlotte Roval road course. “I mean superspeedways have kind of been in part of our DNA and I don’t know why that’s so problematic to have one in a final round.”
When asked the logic that superspeedways should not be part of the final four-race round because of the possibility – make that likelihood – of one or more multiple-car “big one” wrecks, Junior’s response was rather poignant.
“Try to avoid the wreck, try to win the race,” Earnhardt quipped again. “Try to win, go win. I don’t love road courses, I don’t. But I still think that that’s probably a perfectly fine idea to have a road course in the final round.
“I mean, a superspeedway, a mile and a half, a short track, and a road course. Let’s see what you can do. Road courses aren’t at the top of my list, but I’m not over here going, ‘We shouldn’t have any road courses in the final round.’ We’ve been going to Daytona since the 50s. They built Talladega in the late 60s. This has been in our sport forever. I think that it it’s perfectly normal and fine for me for it to be one of the races of multiple events in the final round, unpredictably be damned.
“I feel if there’s a problem with the racing, if there’s something about the racing that we don’t like, we should fix the racing and keep the track.”
Unpredictability has always been part of NASCAR’s DNA, and Talladega embodies that tradition for Junior. While critics argue that superspeedways introduce too much chaos into a championship-deciding round, Junior sees them as a necessary piece of the sport’s identity.
To him, the solution isn’t removing tracks like Talladega or Daytona from high-stakes moments; it’s improving the racing product itself. As he put it, if NASCAR adopts the 3-3-4 system, a final round featuring a superspeedway, a short track, a mile-and-a-half, and a road course would be the ultimate test.
In Earnhardt’s eyes, Talladega doesn’t retreat from a fair fight for the title. It enhances it.
