With six career NASCAR Cup wins at Talladega Superspeedway, Dale Earnhardt Jr. knows the key to success at the track, which will host the third-to-last race of the 2025 season this Sunday.
Advertisement
Obviously, the eight drivers that remain eligible to win the Cup championship — particularly Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney, who are at the bottom of the list of those eight still remaining eligible — will have to be very careful to stay out of trouble, particularly trying to avoid being in the thing ‘Dega is famous for, namely, “The Big One” multi-car crashes.
With the race falling in the middle of the Round of Eight semifinals, drivers will need to be aggressive but cautious. If they spend too much of the race hanging near the back of the field in an overly conservative effort to avoid trouble, they could end up hurting their playoff chances.
That’s especially true for Blaney, who sits 31 points below the provisional cutoff line, while Logano is one spot ahead of him in seventh, 24 points behind the cutoff.
On this week’s edition of the Dale Jr. Download podcast, Earnhardt made it very clear that drivers such as Logano, Blaney, William Byron, and Chase Elliott — the latter two are fifth and sixth in the playoff standings — need to be cautious but not conservative.
They basically have to go for the jugular right from the start at the drop of the green flag, all the way until the checkered flag falls after the 188 scheduled laps (or more, if there’s overtime), Earnhardt opined.
“The wrecks are the wrecks,” Earnhardt said. “When you go to Talladega or Daytona, you can’t strategize for crashes. You’ve just got to race and run wide open and try to qualify upfront. I feel like that your chances of crashing in Talladega are 80%.”
“Now that might drop down to like 70% if you race hard all day. If you’re in protect mode and defense mode and conservative mode, you might actually raise that percentage. I just feel like that if you’re racing hard all the time, then there’s a better chance of you being in front of the crash when it happens. At least that’s what my experience was.”
Earnhardt made 35 career starts at NASCAR’s largest oval, the 2.66-mile tri-oval in eastern Alabama, earning six wins, 12 top five and 17 top 10 finishes, as well as one pole. He is tied for the second-most number of wins at Talladega with Brad Keselowski and Jeff Gordon, all with six triumphs apiece.
Junior learned how to successfully navigate Talladega so well from his father, the late Dale Earnhardt Sr., who made 44 career starts at the track, captured 10 wins (the most of any driver in Cup history), along with 23 top five and 27 top 10 finishes, plus three poles.
The elder Earnhardt taught his son to be smart but not conservative. Find openings at the right time, get to the front as quickly as possible, and stay there as long as he can.
“Any time I tried to be conservative or chill or lay back or settle at any point in the race, I’m like I’m actually in the danger zone right here, this ain’t good at all,” Junior said. “I’m actually going to drive into the wreck when it starts to happen, you know?
“So, I think it’s a good practice to be of the mindset that I want to lead every lap. It’s not realistic that you’re leading every lap, but if you’re in the mindset of I’m going to be doing everything I can all the time to try to be in the lead, then I think that you’re putting yourself in a safer spot.”
