Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants everyone to ‘chill’ on fixing restrictor-plate racing

Dale Earnhardt Jr. has a message for those calling on NASCAR to change how it conducts races at Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway, the sport’s two restrictor-plate tracks that features pack racing and often an inordinate number of wrecks.

“I think everybody just needs to chill,” Earnhardt said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Tuesday. “There’s really no reason to make a knee-jerk reaction to what we saw Sunday and see how it plays out the rest of the year.”

Earnhardt is referring to Sunday’s Talladega race where 35 of 40 cars were involved in at least one accident, and Matt Kenseth and Chris Buescher flipped in separate incidents down the backstretch. Kevin Harvick’s car also lifted off the ground before settling on its wheels when he crashed on the frontstretch coming to the checkered flag.

One contributing factor to 87 percent of the field crashing, Earnhardt believes was the weather. The Geico 500 took place under threatening skies, which spurred drivers to be as near the front as possible in case rain ended the race short of its scheduled distance.

“When the weather is great, everybody knows they don’t pay until the last lap, so we sort of try to take care of ourselves so we can be there at the last lap,” Earnhardt said. “In this particular race, it looked like everybody was just putting a lot more emphasis on their track position, and if they didn’t like it, they needed to work on it instantly, right then and there. That made for a lot more action, a lot more accidents.”

Cars getting airborne has recently become a common occurrence at Daytona and Talladega. Austin Dillon’s Chevrolet catapulted into the fencing along Daytona’s front stretch last July, sending a debris field into the grandstands. Dillon walked away uninjured, though 13 spectators were treated for minor injuries.

Dillon’s crash was nearly identical to Kyle Larson’s crash in a 2013 Daytona Xfinity Series race that injured approximately 30 spectators. Larson was unhurt.

NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer Steve O’Donnell said the sanctioning body is investigating what transpired at Talladega during a Monday appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio saying, “We’ll reach out to the teams to see what we can do to immediately take some action to work towards correcting that.”

But Earnhardt cautions against NASCAR making any dramatic changes, as little short of reconstructing Daytona and Talladega (an unlikely proposition for myriad reasons) would limit how restrictor-plate races often play out with a high volume of accidents and drivers at risk of getting airborne.

NASCAR’s previous attempts to modify restrictor-plate events produced mixed results. An aerodynamic rules change earlier in the decade created a proliferation of tandem racing that saw two cars run together instead of a large pack. Many drivers and fans, however, decried that form of racing and NASCAR later outlawed the practice and altered back to pack racing.

“There isn’t a fix,” Earnhardt told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “The cars are going to draft, they’re going to stay close together.

“If you’re wanting to go try something, you’ve got to be willing for it to not work, and if the race is a snooze-fest, you’ve got to accept that and own it. You either do that or you leave it as it is and look back over the track record of this package has been pretty decent and it’s had some pretty good races.”