Dale Earnhardt Jr. realized a long-held ambition when JR Motorsports entered the Cup Series at the start of the year with the Daytona 500, and Justin Allgaier delivered a top-10 finish in the team’s very first outing. After watching the No. 40 car navigate the highs and lows of the event, Dale Jr. stepped back to offer his overall perspective on the state of the sport.
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Allgaier, who secured the strongest result of his career in NASCAR’s crown jewel, guided the No. 40 Traveller Whiskey Chevrolet to P9 place after steering clear of a last-lap overtime pileup in Turn 3 and charging to the finish. His previous best Daytona 500 result came in 2014, when he finished P27, and his top performance at Daytona before this year was P18 in the 2015 summer event on the 2.5-mile oval.
Dale Jr., watching every lap and evaluating the car’s behavior throughout the race, said, “I’m a critic of the sport… But things are really good right now, things are really, really good… We ran Daytona, and I was there right. We had a car in the race. I was really frustrated with the way the cars raced in the way the product on track product, I was frustrated with it.”
He added that a casual viewer might not recognize the details that set him off, explaining, “A casual fan would have watched the race and not seen the things that I saw that bothered me, so there’s that, but I saw things that I’m like I wish they would fix this sh*t, everything from that moment on, all the races that we’ve ran have been fantastic, spectacular.”
He also pointed to the informal poll Jeff Gluck posts on X after each race, using the results to gauge fan sentiment. Junior noted that the races have consistently trended in a positive direction, with very few events drawing a split response or a wave of fans saying “that sucked.”
Although he acknowledged that X does not represent the entire NASCAR audience, he believes the poll still captures a meaningful snapshot of how viewers felt about each race, since fans on the platform are under no pressure to give a favorable response to something they did not enjoy.
