Dale Earnhardt Jr. implores NASCAR to make major change to race rules

Dale Earnhardt Jr. wouldn’t mind if NASCAR made one big change to its races in the foreseeable future. Earlier this month, Earnhardt talked about changing NASCAR’s caution rule on Dale Jr. Download.

“Get rid of stage cautions entirely,” Earnhardt Jr. said when talking about what Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch discussed on the Actions Detrimental podcast. “No stage break caution, that goes away. You still pay points out at certain moments in the race, as we do today. I’m fine with that. I like people accumulating points during the race.

“It does create a conversation that I think we need to have around somebody who finished 14th getting fifth-place points or the fifth-best points, or the guy even winning the race not having the most points as the guy in second or third because of what happened throughout the race. I don’t know if I love all that, but hey, that’s another conversation.”

Dale Earnhardt revealed the one challenge with the potential NASCAR rule change

Earnhardt then said, “There’s a lap clock, a lap counter. You run a certain amount of laps green, and if no caution has come out, you throw the yellow. If there’s a natural yellow at some point in that mix it resets the clock. I like that. That way, I think it changes fuel strategy, all types of things to be able to get the teams to have to… They have to race a little bit.”

Later in the conversation, Earnhardt implied that the change might be difficult because of TV. “The networks want yellows so they can go to break,” he said. “I’m sure the plan stuff makes it easier. That’s a part of it. The networks have a lot of leverage in terms of when we’re going to start races and how races is going to look and all that stuff.”

As mentioned by USA Today, NASCAR has been racing with stage cautions in the Cup Series since 2017. NASCAR removed stage cautions from road courses in 2023 but brought them back last year.

For the next Cup Series race, which is the Coca-Cola 600, NASCAR will have three stage cautions for the four-stage race. The cautions will be thrown every 100 laps at Charlotte Motor Speedway.