Dale Earnhardt Jr. gives honest take on NASCAR transition to TNT, reveals aspect he hated

TNT began its NASCAR coverage from EchoPark Speedway in Atlanta. Dale Earnhardt Jr. was on the broadcast. Earnhardt has made the move from Prime Video to TNT to keep the train rolling along with Steve Letarte and Adam Alexander.

In 2024, Dale Jr. took time off from broadcasting. Not necessarily on his own accord, either. Coming back to the booth with Prime Video, the Hall of Famer debuted a new and improved production that fans fell in love with.

With TNT, much is the same, but there are differences as well. It’s almost like a mash-up of The CW Xfinity Series broadcast and the Prime Video Cup Series broadcast. Which is nice.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. talked about the change on the Dale Jr. Download this week. There were positives and some “what-ifs” that he went over with the debut of NASCAR on TNT.

“When I worked with NBC, we had 20 races and we would spend half of that time working out little kinks and never feeling like we were doing our best work, or at least, I felt like I wasn’t doing my best work until later toward the end of the year,” Earnhardt explained. “And we’ve got five races here [at TNT] to get this right. So, pretty smart for [TNT] to bring in some of that experience that NBC has.

“The weather threw us some curveballs, and we had this stage that we were going to use behind pit wall that we didn’t get to use. We had to rush our pre-race team up to a booth that we weren’t planning on using. And it just, I hated it because it just didn’t give us a chance to get off on the right foot. We had a plan that I thought was going to be great, and we didn’t get to utilize it as we had prepared and expected.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. expects big improvements for TNT

With TNT joining the cast of media partners, NASCAR gains a bit of legitimacy once again. Known for its NBA coverage for years, TNT has cultural cache with a younger audience who still watch cable TV.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. thought the first race was great, but he expects more for Chicago. The production for the street race should be fantastic.

“I think we’re going to make a giant leap forward. I was pretty pleased by the end of the day with what we did as a broadcast team, and I was, obviously, the race itself was incredible,” Earnhardt continued. “No matter where that race was broadcast, it was a great race. But I feel like that we’ve, I’ve talked to people in the past 24 hours with our TNT team, and I expect there will be a big chunk, a big leap forward in how we do the job and how well we do it.”

So, one race down, four more to go. TNT a great schedule of races. Atlanta to Chicago should be a fun and interesting transition.