Dale Earnhardt Jr. breaks down Marco Andretti losing rear axle at COTA

Dale Earnhardt Jr. went through times when he had similar incidents. Wheel hopping can tear up a race car or truck. While Earnhardt has tore up some rear ends before, he’s never done what Andretti did.

“This thing went through forces that we’ve never seen. We never see trailing arms, dual trailing arms break in half and the whole rear end, that rear end housing, whatever went on there it went through some forces that our cars never see,” the host continued. “Unless they’re flipping down the damn front straightaway at Daytona or something like that. It’s just driving around on four tires, we’ve never seen it rip the rear end out, straight out of a car or a truck.”

NASCAR is going to get to the bottom of this. Overall, they want to find a way to prevent it from happening in the future. While Andretti was going relatively slow at the time, that issue could cause a major wreck. If that happens in the pack going into Turn 1 at COTA, then you get a lot of destroyed trucks.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. believes wheel hopping is to blame. Perhaps even damage in practice helped cause the issue.

“When I see that happen in that truck race that’s the only thing I can think of, is Marco is downshifting and using the engine braking, probably downshifting too early and wheel-hopping a lot. And maybe did some things in practice also that created some damage that sort of continued to worsen as he went on into the race, I don’t know.”