Dale Earnhardt Jr: 'The NASCAR I knew doesn't exist anymore'

Dale Earnhardt Jr. recognizes the winds of change have blown in NASCAR. The sport looks a lot different than the one his family grew up in and helped popularize.

The NASCAR Hall of Fame Inductee joined Kevin Harvick on the latest episode of Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour to discuss the topic. His JR Motorsports’ entry into the 2025 Daytona 500 taught him a valuable lesson — gone are the days of being able to enter a NASCAR race because you love it, it’s all about how much coin you have in your pocket.

“I have been around long enough to remember that if you and I just woke up one day and said, ‘Man, we’re going to enter a Cup car in any race we want,’ we can go find us a car, find us a driver, get all the parts and go do it, right? Now, there’s some couple hoops. You’ve got to get licensed and got to enter the car, pay the money, the entry fee, all that good stuff. But it was pretty much an understandable challenge,” Earnhardt Jr. told Harvick.

“Today, to just get out there and compete, you need that $50 million charter, and that charter is going to be $100 million and $150 million and $200 million — it’s going to go to the moon over the next several years. It was a good time to buy it 10 years ago. I regret that I didn’t. But it’s become this place where only people with that kind of money can play.”

“The world, the NASCAR that I knew, in terms of just being able to field the car and go race, doesn’t exist anymore. That’s hard for me to just believe, that we’re in that — for me to go run an open car isn’t realistic. It’s not realistic for anybody to do it every single week. But while that is tough for me to stomach, it is incredibly great for the current people that are involved in the sport. Great for NASCAR, great for the France family, great for the owners and teams that have those charters that are appreciating year after year, hour after hour.

“They’re just going up. But for somebody who’s trying to get in? You can’t play unless you got a big entity behind you. Somebody with real cash.”

While the change in NASCAR is understandable, as the sport has grown immensely, Earnhardt Jr. yearns for a day where it was more for the common man than ever. That’s not the case nowadays, and it bleeds through in a myriad of ways, and it has the two-time Daytona 500 winner a bit disillusioned.

Regardless, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is an important champion of the sport, and however he can contribute to the future of NASCAR, decision-makers would be wise to include him. His opinions will only grow louder as he returns to broadcasting later this summer, and that should be music to the ears of every fan, driver and media member for 2025.