Dale Earnhardt Jr. Still Not Interested In Twitter Despite Teammates Tweeting

The Auto Club Speedway garage was so noisy, I couldn’t hear anything Dale Earnhardt Jr. was saying – and I was pretty sure he couldn’t hear my question.

So I took out my BlackBerry and typed in the notepad app: “Why won’t you use Twitter? Even Jimmie is on it now.”

He read it and chuckled, then gave pretty much the same answer he gave when I asked a year ago: Dale Earnhardt Jr. doesn’t want to use Twitter because his perception is it will take up too much time.

“I used to have a MySpace page and I used to have a Facebook page; I don’t anymore because it was just too much responsibility,” he said, yelling over the din of the engines. “I felt like you had to plug in and be involved with it so much and I just thought that personally, I don’t need to do it.”

Earnhardt Jr. said he thought tweeting “would be fun for about a month.”

“And then I would start to feel like it was a job, where people expected me to do it,” he said.

NASCAR’s most popular driver remains one of the only Twitter holdouts among the sport’s big names. Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon have joined recently, leaving Earnhardt Jr., Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards (who uses Facebook) among the few superstar drivers who don’t tweet.

Another reason Earnhardt Jr. doesn’t want to start tweeting, he said, is he’s had some Twitter-using drivers tell him “some of the people (on Twitter) aren’t too nice.”

“So that part of it, why do I need to put up with that anyway?” he said. “If I don’t have to put up with it, why do I want to bring that (negativity) into my life?”

Earnhardt Jr. said it was a “never say never” situation, but through his previous social media experiences, he just didn’t see it happening anytime soon.

“It was fun trying to be cool, creating your page and being the hipster that you thought you were,” he said. “But in the end, I needed to get outside and I just needed to get rid of it. It just wasn’t for me, I guess.”