Dale Earnhardt Jr. suggests new tagline for NASCAR, credits Kevin Harvick

Adam Stern of Sports Business Journal reported in September that NASCAR had developed a back-to-roots marketing campaign with the tagline “Hell Yeah.” NASCAR chief brand officer Tim Clark later said that no official tagline has been finalized.

If NASCAR is still open to ideas, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has one. Inspired by Kevin Harvick, Earnhardt pitched “We Race” to be the new tagline. Earnhardt transitioned into the tagline discussion when talking about JR Motorsports fielding an entry in the 2026 Daytona 500, and the motivation behind that.

“He said that, he goes, ‘We race.’ He was talking about the sport. That’s the tagline that I think they should use,” Earnhardt said on Monday’s Dale Jr. Download. “Remember the ‘Hell Yeah’ campaign? … When I saw it, I was thinking, ‘Man, this is gonna be our next Daytona Day. We’re gonna have this Hell Yeah campaign, commercials and all this stuff leading up to the Daytona 500.’ A lot of people weren’t really that excited about it.

“… Kevin Harvick was on his show, and he was talking about the sport, and he said, ‘We race.’ And I thought, and a lot of other people commented as well, there’s your tagline. And Kelley [Earnhardt Miller] says that — we race, we’re racers, we wanna race.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. pitches simple tagline to NASCAR

Harvick said it first, last month on an episode of his “Happy Hour” podcast. During a discussion about the playoff format, Harvick pushed back on co-host Mamba Smith comparing NASCAR to other sports and said, ‘We Race, we’re racing.”

Now, Earnhardt wants NASCAR to run with those two words which carry so much weight. “We Race” has always been the mentality in the Earnhardt family.

“That mentality has always been the leading mindset when you look at the books, when you look at the money spent,” Earnhardt said. “Everybody’s always said you wanna make a small fortune in racing, start with a large one. I mean, my dad made money as a driver but as an owner in this sport, I don’t know that you looked at it and went, ‘I’m gonna profit here.’ When he ran his own cars, drove his own Busch cars, those were passion projects. He’s gonna spend $80,000 and race for $20,000.

“That’s how it was, and you were lucky back then to find the funding and the partnerships and sponsors that could make up for the deficit. That has all gone away. Corporate America has withdrawn a little bit some of their financial support compared to years ago, so it’s much harder for teams to find a way to cover that deficit. But we race, we wanna go because we wanna race.”