Dale Earnhardt Jr. calls out need to assign blame in wake of big wrecks after Daytona

The big one at Daytona often strikes at the worst possible moment. It happened early enough in the race on Saturday that, at least for those it didn’t take out of the race entirely, it wasn’t something that couldn’t be overcome.

But there’s one element of the crash at Daytona that involved about 10 cars that struck a nerve with Dale Earnhardt Jr. He explained why on the Dale Jr. Download.

“The big one: Who’s to blame for the wreck?” Earnhardt said. “That, why is everybody so wanting to blame some f****** body for this s***? It’s just a wreck.”

The veteran driver turned broadcaster wasn’t a fan of the need to pin blame to someone right away. Bubba Wallace ended up taking the majority of it for the wreck, but to Earnhardt it was just racing.

His co-hosts on the podcast pushed back a touch, wondering whether trying to find blame is really all that new. To them, it’s been going on for a while, long before Daytona.

“Nope. Nope. This feels different,” Earnardt said. “I’ve been around this s*** a long time. And when the big one happens, it just f****** happens.”

Of course, Denny Hamlin took issue with Wallace for the big one at Daytona. He did so after the fact, though.

“That didn’t happen till he got home,” Earnhardt said. “But like, as soon as this wreck happened, like there’s been this sort of conversation that started immediately like, ‘Whose fault was it? We’ve got to f* settle this.'”

Again, Earnhardt is not a fan of that type of discourse. It’s just not particularly productive for the sport, especially during one of the most viewed events of the year like Daytona.

“I don’t know that we need to be so… it’s just like this f****** insistent ********,” he said. “Do you not see that? It’s like as we’re going through time, right, as we’re evolving like we’re having to be more, there’s this insistence to like, ‘This was his fault’ or ‘this was this person’s fault’ on everything.

“This kind of s*** right here is just what might happen today when you go to Daytona or Talladega. And in the past when there’s been big wrecks like this, yes, there will be a quick, ‘Well, I could see what happened there. That guy hit this guy and that guy wrecked that guy. He moved this way’ and there’s a person at fault for sure. But this was like a two-day conversation that Denny had to finally settle.”