Dale Earnhardt Jr. reacts to NASCAR executive Ben Kennedy attending Darlington as fan

“He said to me there’s a lot we can do to make it easier to buy a ticket,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said about his discussion with Ben Kennedy. “There’s a lot we can do to make it easier to find where to park. All of those things he thinks need to be improved.

“It’s really, really cool that he himself tasked him and his team to go through this experience and this process. They sat in the grandstands and watched the race. They rented radios, they did all those things.

Ben Kennedy makes Dale Earnhardt Jr. ‘proud to be a race fan’

Earnhardt also told Kennedy that what he did on Sunday makes him “proud to be a race fan. This is the kind of stuff that I think his family was very, very good at.”

Kennedy is NASCAR’s Executive Vice President and Chief Venue and Racing Innovations Officer. Before being a NASCAR executive, Kennedy was a driver, competing in 73 Truck Series races and 17 O’Reilly Auto Parts Series races. He is the great-grandson of Bill France Sr., who founded NASCAR in 1948.

In January, Kennedy discussed NASCAR’s decision to bring back the Chase format to determine a champion. “Some people wanted a 36-race championship, others wanted the Chase, and others didn’t want to change the playoffs at all,” Kennedy said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio in January, per YardBarker. “If you look at all of the feedback we had from many of our stakeholders and you melt it all together, you end up with a format that is probably pretty similar to what we’re creating today, where you’re rewarding consistency throughout the entire season, you’re still incentivizing wins.”