Door Bumper Clear - We Asked NASCAR President Steve O'Donnell Your Questions

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

No need to pinch yourselves, Door Bumper Clear fans, this is real! NASCAR's President Steve O'Donnell joins the show, and yes, we are just as shocked as you are. We start off with Freddie Kraft asking Steve about the topics he saw come up most in a post he put on Twitter, where he asked fans what they would ask NASCAR's President if they could. The topics covered the Next Gen car, stage breaks, and the return of Preseason Thunder at Daytona. After that, the crew digs into the action from the three top series of stock car racing this weekend at Bristol. In Spot On, Spot Off, the topics we brought to the table were:  - Christian Eckes & Corey Heim's incident - Rodney Childers and Tyler Allen's strategy calls - The probability that Ty Gibbs wins another race this season - Talladega's stage changes and what it means moving forward You guys brought the heat this week in Reaction Theatre! Callers weighed in on Blaney's pit crew, the unreal amount of Landon's racing in the CARS Tour, and a fan's tale of two dollars. After a fiery S*** Show Hall of Fame (pun intended), we ask Steve about advice he's been given over his career and the role social media plays in the sport. In closing, we make our picks for Kansas, shout out the winners from the weekend, and wrap up a great show with Steve O'Donnell. Thanks for listening, and be sure to check out shop.dirtymomedia.com to get some DBC merch - we see you out there wearing it! Want more DBC? Check out and subscribe to the new DBC YouTube channel! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The following is a production of Dirty Mode Media. What if we left all the spotters out of everything? That's a terrible idea. You know what Steve? What page are we on? Why you cursed that? This is why I'm just you cursing to me. I think he's a whiny.

That's what I think. Next thing you know, I got no fire suit on. Grouty nation fans are getting lucky tonight. Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to Door Bumper Clear. I'm Freddie Craft, Spotter for Bubba Wallace, Dean Thompson, Gio Riziro this week. Pretty solid week at the old Coliseum.

How are you today, Tom? I'm doing great. Still, still same place. Same place. Same shit. Nothing changes. No. Boys driving.

No, they're doing a good job. It's just everybody else around them is. Carson, how are you today? I am great. We had an electric weekend in Nashville at the fairgrounds. So it was, we needed that. after our last one. And, I mean, it was just incredible.

Did you survive Nashville? I survived. I only hit Broadway one night, believe it or not. To the party of Tutsis? Yep. And continued on after that party. But I could not afford to feel like shit on race day. So we limited it to one night.

That's good. I'm proud of you. I am too. It's shocking. Joining us in the guest chair, something that I never thought I would say ever in my entire life, the president of NASCAR steam, O'Donnell, how in the world did you end up in this position?

You know, I have no idea, but I'm a big fan of the show, actually. Sometimes, you know, sometimes I might tweet out or send something to Ford about what the heck was that. But, I mean, you guys are the voice of the fans, and I think it's awesome. Tommy and I go way back. We see each other at the track all the time. So I'm happy to be here. Tommy, this is your fault, essentially. It is?

How did that happen? I walked in. It was like a hostage city. I took over the Nesco Trail. I walked in, I pointed out, and I said, which one of you coming on to the show? Helton went, doop. I said, you're right. That's great.

It's great. Steve, I don't think people realize how long you've been a part of NASCAR. When did you get started in NASCAR? Yeah, I started in 96. So I was the Victory Lane pre-race guy, a hat guy working back with Bill Broderick and, you know, moving around the track. So started out, started out early on the marketing side and then kind of migrated my way up. Got a little luck. If you don't know who Bill Broderick is, you haven't been watching racing.

You got a lot of it. Because I don't know anybody, there's probably not many people that knew Bill's name, but you saw that guy every week. 76 guy. Yeah, he was in Victory Lane handing out all the stuff in Victory Lane every week. But I mean, obviously, like you said, your first job in there was there. And like on race day now, obviously, I know you're in the control tower most of the time. Like what's your duties on race day during the race now? Yeah, they kind of kicked me out, which is a good thing.

I think the fans should be happy. If they learn one thing, they kicked me out of race control. A lot more kind of moving around just with sponsors and the tracks. and, you know, just kind of being present. And I look at my job now as just having conversations. I think, you know, Kevin Harvick talked to me early on about, you know, you just got to have that dialogue. And if you don't, all of a sudden, things start getting away from you.

And I think we got away from that as a sport. So I look at my job now as just be more present, talk to people, what's going on. We can't be all things to all people, but we can certainly listen and make some moves that, you know, when the majority of your people in the industry are saying, hey, why aren't we trying this? you probably need to take a look at it. Yeah, for sure.

And, you know, you mentioned, like, we kind of, we try to on here be the voice of the fan at sometimes and just, you know, and there's, I've obviously caught flack. I've had a couple trips to the hauler. Speaking of the hauler, I did bring this with me just in case. I've only taken, I've only taken one hard card in my life.

Is this Thomas? No, that's my. You're taking mine. Someone's taken, Joey Dunwoods is the only hard card. Really? Yeah, that's ironic. He blew by the, uh, the, uh, the security gate guards. I didn't know who he was, right? So I followed a man at Daytona.

I was like, who is this clown? And then, uh, it was great. So, uh, so now, Joey and our good buddies, he's done a great job at NASCAR. But yeah, that was a poor moment for him. Yeah. And of course, now, Joey, he just got a promotion, I believe, right? So I don't even know what his new title is. I don't even know. What is it? I don't know. Who know? Joey's just going to make up his own job usually most of the time anyway. But I figure I just leave that there in case you want to take it home with you. I think he's more worried about leaving his here. He texts me the next day. He goes, I might be fired on Tuesday, so we'll see how this goes. But speaking of the fans, I did reach out yesterday, and we'll kind of get through this as the show goes,

but I wanted to hit a couple topics because, you know, I put out yesterday, like, if you could sit down with the president and ask what was something you would ask him? And obviously, we got a lot of responses. Some of them, you know, there's stuff that would never even be remotely possible to ask. But two of the things, the main things that came up, obviously you could probably. guess the car stages just repetitive repeated over and over again the questions where where do we stand with the car i mean a lot of people in the mentions talked about how great the packages on saturday they put on great racing obviously the short track i feel like and i've said this on here before and it's probably gotten me in trouble on here before i think the mile and a halfs are as good

or better than they were before short tracks and plate racing now is kind of where this car seems to have a little bit of struggle but how do you respond to people when they talk about how bad this car might be So I guess I don't think how bad it is. Yeah, yeah. I think where could we improve it, right? And so I agree with the fans in terms of where we can make improvement. So if you look at the intermediate, let's go back to why we put this car together, right? The teams were out of control in terms of money, and it was not sustainable.

I mean, Tommy knows, right? We didn't have any new owners coming in. If they did, they were gone. Guys winning championships out of the sport. And so when we looked ahead for that model of where are we going to go, we didn't a bright future. OEMs were talking to us about this isn't sustainable. Sponsors were getting out of the sport. So we made a decision. We thought working with the industry to come up with a car model that would kind of try to curtail some of the costs. Not perfect by any means, right?

But we saw new owners come in. We saw new teams win, which is great for the sport. We got some things right, the intermediates, and we got some stuff to work on. And so the short tracks, you know, we're adding some horsepower, not as much as fans would want. I understand that. looking at some things we could do with the spoiler on the car. And then on the super speedways, certainly, when we look at what's the balance? I got together with Junior and Jarrett and a bunch of guys, Harvick, Blaney down in Daytona, and we talked about super speedway racing. And, you know, all kinds of discussions going on.

And one of the things that you talked about was, well, then it'll just go back to single file up against the wall. And then the fans would complain and say, what is this? So somewhere there, there's a balance. The fuel mileage thing is not great. So we're going to make some tweaks in Talladega. Not perfect by any means. I don't want any fan to say, hey, NASCAR did this, and I think it's perfect. This was a short step so we can get to January in the offseason.

We'll go back to a test like we used to have and hopefully make some broader changes because we don't like it either. Yeah. Is there things that we can look at with that Xfinity car? Because obviously the Xfinity packages, I'm sorry, O'Reilly package is great. You know, is there things we can look at with that car and advance into maybe helping the Gen 7 car or even helping. Obviously, I think, I don't know, I don't expect you to break news, but I'm sure we're not too far down the road from having a similar kind of situation in the O'Reilly series and the truck series where we kind of trend towards a spec car. Is there stuff we can learn from this package now that we can apply to help the Gen 7 car and help future cars down the road? Yeah, absolutely.

I think we take stuff each and every day, not just from our own series, but other series that are out there as well. I think one thing to keep in mind, Freddie, is, you know, if you put all the engineering in the cup garage into Saturday, I'm not sure that. that show looks the same. But there are some aspects of it that are different, that are good. So, yeah, we look at every part and piece. The thing that we got to keep in mind, and this is tough for fans to hear, is we got to make changes, but we got to think well ahead of where we're going. Because each and every week, when we used to just kind of change the rules every week,

we ran some teams out of business. I mean, Tommy Norie, we'd send a bullet, and he's like, what are you guys doing? And we did that every week. Now, when we introduced the new car, you saw it was pretty good racing, right? because a lot of guys caught up. So the challenge for us is get ahead of it, make sure that we give teams ample notice. Don't let them test a ton,

but introduce some new things so that we mix it up each and every year and you don't have the same guys win in every race. Yeah, the other thing obviously came up with stages. Yeah. Stages, listen, I might be in the minority and as far as the fan base goes, but I'm four stages,

but why are stages important in NASCAR? So if you asked about race control when I was up there, the reason why I'm probably kicked out is I would go absolutely crazy when a caution came out and we're just running lapses. It's driving me crazy. If you asked John Proppes, if a red flag came out, I would say every television in America just turned off.

And so our job is to always speed it up. But if you go back to, you know, when I first came up in racing, right, we went away from commercial. Racing was going on, nobody saw anything. We introduced the stage break so that TV could kind of load up their commercials. We saw that, worked pretty well. Now we have some side-by-side racing, which is good. And now the next thing to work on is the length of those stage breaks,

because especially at short tracks, you know, I've heard, you know, get rid of the actual break and just run it. When we did that at the road courses, getting small sample size, but it was terrible. Yeah, it was awesome. But we're still looking at it. And I think, you know, the drivers are pretty loud. I spent some time Friday with a couple of guys,

and they've got to do something, the Martinsvilles of the world. So it is high on the radar to figure out how we kind of keep moving that. But nobody up in race control is saying, hey, let's make it longer. Yeah, for sure. I think it's a big focus for it. us and we got to get that right. All right, before I let you off the hot seat for now, I kind of went around the garage asking people around just like for decent, some stories, some fun stories until we don't have to sit here

and ask, talk shit all day long. But I did hear one, was there a driver's meeting where you and Harvick might have gotten into it a little bit. Yeah, I thought we were going to come to blows. Kevin, so, listen, Tommy knows this. You know, I wear my emotions on my sleeve too much sometimes. I get that. I'm passionate about the sport.

I would say Kevin does the same thing. And I, that look you tweeted out with that look that I gave in the press. I think I gave that look to Kevin. And that was it. He kind of came up and said, listen, pal, and it was like, uh-oh, this is not good. So, yeah, but listen, I respect the hell out of the guy because he works hard. He cares about the sport. Same thing with you got.

You can be doing anything you want on a Monday, right? And you're here talking about the sport, trying to grow it. We're not always going to agree. If we did, this sport wouldn't be worth anything, right? And we got the most passionate fans. So, yeah, Kevin, he'll always not. afraid to give me his opinion, which I respect. That's what you want, really.

Yeah, absolutely. No, the worst part, right, is someone's quiet and they're like, yeah, guys, I say behind your back or something like that, yeah. I have that problems. Yeah, yeah, with me. Thomas says that often again. No. Have you had any run-ins?

I mean, you've got a memorable run-ins of Steve? Yeah, we've had a couple. Would you do wrong? Nothing? I'm sure. Which fight was it surrounding? That's not true. I mean, it just, we've had some in, in office meetings that we've had our

difference of opinions. Or I was trying to explain some stuff that he really probably didn't pick up on why I was trying to explain it. Yep. Right? And, you know, I'm trying to cover the whole group by saying something because I understood being... What's happening out there? Yeah. And sometimes when they don't pick up on it, it gets aggravating for both of us, right?

Because you're trying to beat around the bush because you don't want to let everybody have it, right? I'm trying to... Okay, Steve, I'm giving you a little feet. here, man. Here's what's happening. I'll give you a good example. I remember when I was working on. It was the old Bush series, and we were going to get rid of testing.

And I had one owner, Coach Gibbs. You know, I go in. It's the first time going to meet with Coach, and Coy and J.D. We were racing at the time. And I thought it would be a layup. You know, I'm going in. We're getting rid of testing, coach. This is great.

And he destroyed me. And he's like, what are you doing? This is the worst idea ever. And I walked out of there. I looked at Mike Hilton. He's like, whose kids are trying. They need more testing. I was like, all right.

It was kind of the first lesson of, you know, knowing who you're talking to, where is it coming from, you know, what's the background. But Tommy was always good coming in. Not saying this because he's here, but it wasn't just a selfish thing. It was like, I got a couple guys feeling this way. You might want to look into that, which is big. Yeah. And, you know, you mentioned testing and the other, the one thing that I did come up was practice. You know, I feel like we're in a pretty good spot with practice for me.

But obviously, there's some guys, like you said, need more seat time. Where do you feel like we're sitting with practice right now? Man, if it was up to me, we'd have a lot more. But I get it. We've got to manage what goes on, when teams get to the races, what's happening. I think for us, it's just more maximizing the time when we are there and not sitting around. So that's the goal as we look at it. If it's not on track, then what can we do with the drivers or the teams so the fans get to see everybody?

And we're doing a better job with that. And the drivers have been awesome the last two years getting out there and interacting. So as long as we've got that going, I think we're okay. And how much of it is a team related, too? Like teams were also asking for, you know, spending less money on this stuff, right? Oh, this was all, yeah, this was all team. This was, hey, we don't want to, we don't want to go out there. But you're seeing it, you're seeing it move a little bit.

And I think that's a good compromise where we can talk about it. Certain racetracks will go in maybe a little bit early and let guys work. And the biggest thing for us at NASCAR is how do you move somebody up? Because you're seeing a trend, right? If someone who comes up really, really good in the O'Reilly series, you got about a three-year window where they're a superstar. And if they're not winning, they're kind of forgotten about. And that's been a trend that we've seen.

And we've got to make sure they got proper C-T, time. Yeah, and I think it's a nice balance now where the trucks in O'Reilly series have the full basically hour, 50 minute practice where a cup is split up into two different groups and have 20, 25 minutes, whatever it is at some places. But I think it's better for those younger guys, Tommy, to have that extra track time because you can run. I mean, we ran, Bubba ran, I think, we almost ran 70 laps of practice yesterday. So, I mean, that's halfway through a fuel load for us, basically. So, I mean, I don't know how much more you need on track time in 20 minutes, but those guys need a little bit extra for that, you know, come in, make adjustments and stuff like

that because in that 20 minutes, you don't have a lot of time to make adjustments. But for that series, you got time. I think Dean did three or four different runs on Friday, and same with Gio. Yeah, so obviously the Cup teams are a lot more prepared because of engineering behind it. So we show up a lot closer. So we have the ability to be able to go out there and run fine, right? Run a bunch of laps, burn a lot of fuel, get ready for qualifying because we've earned a lot of fuel. We have nose weight.

There's a lot of different things that we're doing. And you can see that a little bit in the O'Reilly's and Truck Series as well. But to have the ability to run 50-minute practices in the other divisions are important because most of the teams don't have the tools. And you mentioned it before, Steve. You said, you know, if you brought the engineering into those series, we're going to start having problems. Well, we are. We are starting to have problems.

I agree. Right? Because. And there's two things. You're not seeing a lot of new winners. No. There's two things that you mentioned that like perked me up a little bit. that you're seeing the teams that have all the engineering are really fast in both the truck and

O'Reilly series. And then we are seeing a problem in the truck series with the inspection process and the rule changes and the stuff. It's going to be a problem. I see it. I've been a part of it now for about a month because Luke's involved in. I've been standing back and watching. And I'm like, we're getting into the same problem that we got into the cup where

change of rules late. We're costing teams money. We're going to put teams out of business. And I understand you guys will try, you know, hopefully working on a new model, which is going to be difficult for those guys. I mean, those guys don't have the money level that the cup owners have. So it's going to have to be a compromise somewhere, I feel. But having the practice and having the guys, so we failed that the Re-e-Ome team truck fails twice in the last two weeks, right? so Luke loses 10 minutes of practice. Well, I should a driver, what's the penalty? You guys are just working every day just trying to get to the racetrack,

and now my kid that has no experience, right? Could be any kid. Does even less time. Now has less time. So it's like you're not helping the program. You're not helping the show. So it's important for these kids to get time, seat time, the 50 minutes. It's important for the teams to make changes because they have,

that's the only way they can build their, their book, right? The notebook. It's the only way they can do things. They don't have the simulation. Seventy-five percent of the teams don't have the simulation. They don't have the tools. They don't have the things that they need to do to be successful. So that's why I'm guessing that you guys get to do that and we don't have to do that. Yeah. To make sense? Yeah. Yep, for sure. All right, quick question. How many drill bits have you guys snapped just by trying to finish one job? Yeah, same for me. Nothing kills you momentum. faster. That's why I like hand-cut drill bits. They're American-made, family-owned, and pros have

trusted them for many years. And right now, you can get 25% off with code 30-mo. I have used these drill bits time and time again. Normally, one or two times I got to throw drill bits away, not these, still acting like they're brand new. That's the difference. These things are built to last. High-speed steel all the way through, so you're not burning through bits every job. and 135-degree split point means no pilot holes. Just pull the trigger and go. Bottom line, you save time, you save money, and you get the job done right the first time.

Check out cancut.com. Use code dirty moe for 25% off. Don't mess around, guys. Use what the pros use. Cars, take us to Bristol, will you? Yeah, all right, let's get into it. Truck race, there was a ton of cup drivers. There was a ton of cup drivers.

That's good. I like it. How do you guys feel about that? I like it. I think we went too far for a while trying to get in. And now it feels like a good balance. Yeah, I like it. I think you only get better having to race against people.

Unless the cup driver has sped people out. Well, he's not a cup driver anymore. Oh, yeah, that's right. Thank you, Tommy. No, I think it's great for the cup drivers because that's who you compare yourself against. I remember when Bubba was running the KBM truck, like we were just comparing ourselves to Kyle every week. Whatever Kyle did, if we could beat him. any week, whether it was winning the race or not, like, we did something because we beat Kyle in the

same equipment that week. You know, I think that's what a good bench to measure these guys at. And I think that you see when they're running the O'Reilly series or the truck series, it helps kind of close that gap to when those guys make the leap to Sunday. And they realize, you know, like we talked about here before, Jesse Love was like, I'm going to go into Bristol and run top 10, my first cup start. And he got out there. He's like, holy shit, I can't run top 30, you know? So, you know, I think racing against those guys more helps close that gap a lot. I did see Frankie, right?

Poor Frankie Malcolm in the middle got Malcolm there. He was, to his credit, and there was, like he was doing a, I would say 90% great job of this. He was giving everybody the top. You know, everybody wanted the bottom in the truck race. The bottom was kind of locked down to the bottom with the PJ1.

But he was staying on the bottom. Every time we caught him, you know, you're like, all right, this one's not coming off the bottom unless you kind of muscle them up off there. So you're going to go around him. Everybody was going to go around him, going around him. But he would kind of, when he got clear, he would kind of blend up in front of you. like and then like be you know on the top of the straightaway and then try to come back to the corner

well it looked like he just didn't get a good run off of two and uh rife got underneath him and frankie just kind of came down across his nose and so i understand that he thought he was out of the way and doing the great job on the bottom but when you blend up to the top like that you better make sure you can get back down there and unfortunately i just don't think he did and i don't think i think he came across rife's nose i don't think rife really did anything too too wrong there how was luke's race it was oh he was running okay in the middle i mean look the whole the whole thing is getting laps and getting towards the end of the race and start then start making the moves and it got you know he was still in the lead lap after the second

stage and it was time to go racing a little bit so he just got into I think 19th to 20th and then just got taken out yeah plain and simple Steve I know we watch these truck races and kind of it's it's fun to watch throughout the weekend because it shows you I don't want to say talent level but experience level maybe more so like the truck race was kind of really locked down on the bottom you know we really really never were able to get off the bottom. And you see almost halfway through the race on Saturday and then really early on Sunday, earlier than I expected on Sunday, we kind of migrate to the top and we can get there.

And I really think it's more experienced than anything. Even with all the cup guys in the race, it was still harder to get up there. It was pretty dirty because so many guys are running the bottom in the beginning. But how fun is that to watch? Like, you know, I love old Bristol around the bottom, kind of got a root and gouge. And we got to see that on Friday night, I feel. I think it's awesome. The trucks are always, I think, you know, trucks are my favorite a lot of times getting out there.

and you see the young drivers coming up through the system and then seeing them progress, you know, on up to Cup is fantastic. So, you know, it's the reason, you know, shorter races, right, for sure. Fans love it. They love the beating and banging. But those guys, you know,

for the most part, have put on really, really good shows. And, you know, even at St. Pete, which we thought was going to be a tough, tough show. They did a great job. Yeah, a lot of talent there. Shout out to C Bell. Seabell wins the race. Kind of found himself in position.

He found himself on the outside, and he, with all the experience he has and passed on the outside. Yeah. You know, Kyle, Kyle kind of had control the race, couldn't get it. I'm assuming he was, I know he was a little short, so I'm sure he was saving fuel and just couldn't get it refired one time. I thought there was a questionable call on the choose, on the control car because of the, so the seven's leading. The one is second, the 91 is third. The seven chooses the top.

The one, Corey chooses the top behind him. The 91 choose the inside. Well, Kyle runs out of fuel. They made their correct call, unfortunately for me, because I thought I was going to gain that of this. But they made the correct call of, you know, the seven blended. He was running against. So he went to the bottom. But he chose the top.

So when he blended back in line, he kind of just blended back in the inside lane, which wasn't right. They moved into the outside lane, which is the correct spot. But they made the 91 to control car. And I don't know what the wording is in the rule, Steve. But the one chose second. Just because he chose the outside lane, I felt like when he moved up to the front row, he should have been to control car because he was running second at the time. of shoes. So I don't know why he wouldn't even know if the rule is written the other way.

I think the rule's wrong. I said, but, you know, I think the one should have been the control car because he was running second at the time of caution. And when we chose, he just never been like that. What does it ever happen? It only happened one time. It happens all the time. All the time when, Tom. All the time when some admit. Yeah. And who was control car? The guy on the outside that chose second because they split the front row. Okay. They didn't, they didn't choose his line. Okay. So obviously that's been a rule. Yeah. The fucking rules the guy's second, Tom. Like I said. to choose. Jesus.

Whoever's first or second and something happens. It sounds like race control. Yeah. Whatever. Anyway, that was the only question I had. But I thought that was a great race, obviously. It must have just screwed him up a couple.

No, I said, I didn't get screwed, but what screwed me was the right call. Putting Kyle back in the outside lane, it didn't really screw me. It just put me back to where I was supposed to be, but I was hoping to cheat something out of there. But no, but anyway, Bell, capitalized, wins the race. Good for that team. Sorry, and I, did anybody, was Dale still racing when these guys all were up there winning races?

Yes, yes. We were close. You guys won everywhere. We did. I know. How much did you guys monitor Nashville? Like the reaction, the stuff of your thought process of the future? I mean, it's, listen, it's been a weekly dialogue, right?

I know Marcus is trying to get there. It's an uphill battle, which I don't understand, you know, when you think about the noise. I mean, they got concerts and all kinds of stuff. It's, but it's, it's, it's tough right now. Explain to the fans, because I'm not sure many, like, really know the issues. What are the issues? So the issues, obviously, you know, one of our most historic track. We'd love to be there.

We'd love to be at both places in Nashville. It's a great market. You know, they built the soccer stadium and really right on top of the racetrack, right? Didn't allow for a lot of movement and a lot of things going on. That was the first kind of red flag. When you walk out of the front grandstands, you literally have maybe, five yards before you're touching an apartment building. Like the fan midway is between an apartment building and the front gate.

It's very, very tight. It's tight. And then, you know, there's a pretty vocal, vocal group there about, you know, noise ordinances, what could you do? But, you know, there's been a lot of plans put together around what we could do to offset some of that. You know, it's always been there. So it's been a disappointing battle. I think, you know, we've got a lot of, obviously a lot of hardcore racing fans there. We'd love to go there.

But I was glad to see the cars tour go. great crowd, which was awesome. So hopefully that maybe builds a little bit more momentum and gets it back in the limelight, especially from the media. The thing I wanted to ran about this week was, and this is this list. This is going to be me on the NASCAR side, believe it or not, or the track side

at least. Don't bitch at me about the attendance at Bristol while you're telling me we need to go to Nashville. Because, like, just because Bristol maybe looks empty on television, I don't know what the numbers were for yesterday, but half a full Bristol is still

what, 75,000 people? I mean, that's way more than we're going to have when we go to Gateway. Nashville, I would assume. You know, there's, I mean, that's still a great crowd in most sense of the word. It just doesn't look great on TV because the place is so huge and it's built to hold, what, 150,000 people. But all these people that are coming and going, look at this terrible crowd at Bristol. Let's go to Nashville. Nashville, I mean, it probably holds a third of that.

But, you know, it's just like the common sense doesn't so common all the time. Yeah. We know that. We know that one. We know that one. Um, cup race, anything, or anything else from O'Reilly race? Or would have a good cup race. Um, no, I mean, obviously, we'll get into Rodney and Connor's good call there. Um, Larson really fast. Really, really fast. I thought there was no way he was going to lose that. And that was kind of the only way he was going to lose it, I think. Uh, cruzzie. Good battle between him. Fran did a really, really good job. That kid is going to be really good. And it wouldn't surprise me if he's the, if he's the long term plan for the 11 car moving forward. Um, well, I, I think he did a good job up to a point, right? I, and, but I think, but I think,

And next time he's in that position, you're going to see a whole different cruisy, right? You're going to see him a little bit more calmer, not making the mistakes he made, not overdriving the car. I mean, listen, it was his first time getting in a position to take advantage of a possible win there, you know, and just seen a lot of mistakes, right? You've seen a lot of overdriver and a lot of things. And I know he's going to take all that in and he's going to, like, harness it all for the next time, you know? I mean, a lot of people say you've got to lose a couple before you can win one, right? and I think that was a big, big learning curve for him because he did make...

He could have won that race very easily. He had a better car if he just had a little bit more patience. Yeah, to his credit, I mean, he made mistakes, but so did the best driver in the world. Yeah. He made the very similar mistake a couple laps later. So, you know, it's just they're on the edge there and they're pushing for all their worth. And talked about earlier, racing against cup guys, cruise, you know, he got a lesson right there. Yeah.

It's awesome. Awesome race. Cup race? Yeah, I don't know what else. I don't know what that happened yesterday. What happened? I'm thinking about it. We were pretty, I mean, I think I ran ninth to 11th all day long.

I did tell you, I seen all the grooves working. You know, I mean, you know, I just, I was surprised about the tire wear. I mean, I'm sure you guys were, too. I mean, it was, it was odd as hot as it was, the changes I thought that was made to the tire that there wasn't any tire wear. And it's just like, you know, and I'm, I'm. Maybe it was the low downforce packaged. Worked opposite.

I don't, that's what's confusing. You know, you look back, it's like, man, these things should be out of control by lap 60 or 70, and it going just as fast. Yeah. So very confusing. Obviously, you and Goodyear work together on this. How much input does NASCAR have on the final decision

of what tire to bring to each race train? That's a good question, Freddie. You know, ultimately it's a good year, right? But what we do the tire test, we work with the drivers and teams to kind of weed out what would be the best. avenue. You know, we'll put pressure on them to continue to go further and further. I think they've done a good job for the most part trying to push that. But I agree with Tom. It was an odd, you know, especially at the end of that race when you looked at that last, you know, even the last 20 laps, you know, I thought no way that Gibbs is going to be able to hold the, he's going to finish, you know, fourth, fifth, six. And I mean, got to give him credit for what he did, right, racing against those guys. But still, yeah, the tires did not come in as much at the end. Yeah. The, you know, it was, I don't know where I land. Because, you know, I mean, obviously you want to see the best car win the race for me always. I think

Ryan at the end of that race was the best car. I thought he was the fastest car. He was the one that could get through traffic the best. By no means to tie back into this win either. Like he was good all day long. They were in position to capitalize. He drove all the way up to third. Yeah, he was up the third. He had a really fast car. He could pass late in runs, which was kind of hard to do. So I don't know like if I just want

I didn't, I didn't like, I like this better than chaos. You know what I mean? I thought that, you know, that kind of I know it was probably more entertaining to watch their shit show. But I think for us, like, you know, the guys that are on the racetrack competing, like you'd rather have something a little more in your control. But still, at the end of the day, this tire opens up strategies that we see and we end up

with a great finish because of the tire, you know, not falling off and the tie's able to stay out and Ryan's there racing them hard on tires. So at the end of the day, I want, but this is, like, this is the first time we've seen this. Somebody stay out on old tires at Bristol and hang on. I remember Elliot Sadler did it in a 21 car 100 years ago. It feels like, you know, so this isn't like something new, but like where do, what, I don't know what we want. I saw Gluck's pole was around 60% today.

I don't know if people just wanted the chaos back or what, but I felt like this is a pretty good mix. Obviously, we want maybe a little more tire fall off, but I thought this was a pretty good mix for Bristol. I thought it was, I mean, I think the drivers thought it was, which sometimes, you know, that goes against, you know, the fans at times. But, you know, I thought the ability to race, yeah, with a little more tire wear, I think we're kind of hitting on what we need to.

And when you're seeing the guys up front who have the best cars, being able to go out there and battle with each other, I think ultimately that's what you want, is the best cars going up and winning. And if tire work can come a little bit more into it, I agree with you. How is, how is, I've always wanted to ask you this, how is your driver chat after these races? I hear it's pretty, I mean, I don't want any details, obviously. Yeah, no.

I just stay in the test. I walk, but like, but I just don't know how entertaining it is for you because. Yeah, and also speak for yourself because I want the details. It's funny because I listen, you know, talking to Bubba. So it's like, it's like they'll say something about, you know, one of the drivers may say something about the race, critical of the race. And then that driver will get an argument with another driver in the chat. And it just sounds like it gets pretty entertaining. Yeah, so I'm not on it anymore.

But it used to be, it was fantastic. Can you tell everybody why you're not on it? I had a driver, I think, accused me of, I don't know, not wanting a great outcome in a race that went pretty far. And I was like, all right, I got to get off. It was a little too far. Yeah. But it wasn't my guy. No, no.

No. But it is funny because you get guys, you know, someone will send something in about, hey, I think we should do with this, you know, something with a tire. Oh my God. And if it's the wrong call, 20 guys are just, boom. Oh, blast. Oh, yeah. It's like, all right.

Don't even have got to answer this one. I've thought about starting a driver chat like that with, like, our cars or guys just to be able to sit in like, like, quick, easy stuff that I need to share with them. That's what it was for originally. About autograph sessions or anything like that. And then, but I dread Sunday when they all have something to say. And they always do. It works for a while on that.

That's what it was for. Hey, this is what we're doing. drivers meeting at this time. Nine times out of ten, you shouldn't have to respond to this. And then Sunday nights, kabum. We had a spotter chat with NASCAR,

not that long ago. I don't even know if it's still available. I know I have one with Brown though, yeah. Well, no, you know, because it's same thing. We've ruined it. Like, you know, the same thing. It was like, this is for like rain delays. You know, like when we're thinking about getting back,

you know, like you got 30 minutes to get back to the roof or whatever, you know. And of course, and they made it very clear when we started, like this is not for in competition chat. Like this is like go to your official on the roof. We have soccer up there every week. But go to him. He'll relay questions. And of course, like first race out, somebody's like, I belong in front of the 98 or whatever.

And he's like, shut the, please stop. And now that's why you have representatives. And now that chat is gone. This is why we can't have nice thing. I did want to touch on Bell quick. I thought he had another super fast race car. You know, obviously he gets a speeding penalty. He ends up in the back.

Just brushes the wall off a four. Broken toe link. His day's ruined. I mean, Tommy, how finicky is this series where, like you said, one little mistake and just snowball into ruining your entire day? Especially there, how fast you can get lapped. I mean, the Green Flag, you know, flies, you're half a track behind already, right? And you're going first four or five laps. You're half a second slower.

So next thing you know, you're only a straightaway back, and you've got to fight and scream. But let me tell you something. We need to talk about Todd Gillen. I don't know if you guys watched him yesterday, but he struggled the first 100 laps. All of a sudden, that's something bitch went to the outside. I mean, outside and passed all those cars, right? He got to Stenhouse. Stenhouse did what Stenhouse does.

They blocked him, you know, just moved up on him. He took his lane away, you know, for about 20 laps. Finally, he had to give up because the other guys started passing both of them on the bottom, right? But that kid drove his ass off yesterday. Yeah, there was one. He got the Lucky Dog one time. Yep. And I said, all right, Lucky Dog's coming up top, whatever.

And it was a 34. And then the next time I saw him, he was two cars. behind us and I'm like, oh shit. And he was, we was racing for like 10th or 12th. Well, he drove up to 4. Yeah. And then he got, he got, he did the right thing. They put two tires on one point.

And he was like, he was running like 10th or 12th. They put two on. He came out fourth and I was like, ooh, this will be interesting. He was able to hold on to 4th. I mean, he faded a little bit, maybe fifth or sixth. But then he just turned, I don't even know where he ended up finishing. But, um, it had to be in the top 10 somewhere. Um, but he, I thought, yeah, they had a really good day.

Your boy, Stanhouse. You mentioned him. Yeah, he did good. He got rid of Keselowski. Clear. His quote about TJ. Inside, TJ. Inside.

He said, Gluck tweeted. I think Stanhouse said, T.J. sucks or something like that. And they play it back. And it's clearly he says, inside T.J. And I was like, no, we're sticking with T.J. sucks. That's the old motto of the show. The reason why I wanted to bring up Todd is because he did get the lucky dog. And he had to start last.

And he drove. He went and drove to the front. So if you have a really good car, you're capable of doing that. But if you're stuck, If your car is just stuck that it could only handle in one lane, you're going to have problems, right? It's a long day there. If your car can't move around, it's a long day. I mean, look at 24.

I mean, I know he was having steering problems all weekend. I'm not sure if he still was during the race, but he couldn't get out of his own way all day. Aside from Larson, they really, the nine had stayed out at one point, but he kind of faded when the 21 didn't. So, you know, I felt like, you know, all across the board, except for the five to five, was obviously really good at that racetrack. Five and a 77 was the only two Chevroletes. We did see, and that's something, Steve, that I think we always loved about Bristol, was we saw a lot of guys contact, you know, Riley Herbs, Kyle Bush, back and forth, Stanhouse.

You know, that's not what we missed about Bristol. That's what the fans love, right? Credit to Riley, qualified fourth. He ran really good, the first stage, got stage points. He kind of got swallowed up on a restart. I think the biggest knock that I have on Riley, and we've talked about this 100 times in meetings, is just kind of gamesmanship on restarts. He kind of gets used up and taken advantage of.

And you saw that kind of once he kind of fell back into the clutches of outside the top five, he kind of got swallowed up on restarts. And then once one guy moves you off the bottom, you're trying to fight back to the bottom. And another guy moves you off. And next thing you know, you're a straightaway behind where you were. But I thought he did a really good job yesterday. He dumped the eight at one point.

He comes back, spins him out. Do we think Kyle Busch is savvy enough? This is a question for you, really. Yes. Do you think he's savvy enough to spin out the 35 while the 54 is leading his old car? Oh, I didn't think about that. Do you think he notices, oh, my old guys are leading there? Like, this is a really good time to pay this guy back right here.

I don't know about that. Enough shit that's going around when Kyle said what he's got going on. I'm not sure. I think he has bigger fish to fry. I was glad to see Alex Bowman back at the racetrack. Yeah. Just in general. Agreed.

back from I'd like to see Alex he tweeted something really funny this week I forget somebody said something like Oh like personality Yeah so personality

And he just had a really funny response to that I'd have to go back and find it I think it's one He sent since the chili bowl And it's probably the last one He'll send since Until the next one

But one thing for me I thought it was an interesting choice To come back at Bristol Of all places But it seemed like I haven't heard anything different That it seemed like he got I mean I know they got in a wreck

But I had the same I talked to Mr. H I think Tuesday And he said that they were over at 10-tenths. And he's like, I think he'll be back for Bristol. And I was surprised at the track as well. Yeah. You know, he had run well there in the past and he runs really well at Kansas.

So I don't know, maybe that was something kind of just to get his bearings back in before we go to Kansas. I don't know running Bristol gets you parents back for anything. Well, I feel like if you can run Bristol, you can probably go anywhere. Yeah, but if it rattled it up a little bit, I'm... Oh, there's the tweet. Somebody said maybe he'll have personality now and he said not likely. There you got, yeah. That was well played by him.

He's got such a dry sense of humor. Do you want to touch on the next point? No, we are not. We are not talking about this for the third week in a row. You just said it. You said it. I do have a legitimate question. I'm so tired of talking about this.

I have a legitimate question. With him not being approved for Talladega and being only approved for short tracks. Okay. Is it the rest of the year that he has to run? Or like, is it kind of just until you guys see what you want to see out of? of it and then he can be approved. How does that process work once you get? It's kind of every race. So now, you know, he'll go to the next race. We'll see. Obviously, you know, there's some progression we need to see. And I applaud the team. Look, our guys, it's a tough call. He's a hugely popular driver.

But, you know, these are the best drivers in the world. And we've got to make sure that we've got the right guys out there. There's always controversy of who's approved, who's not approved. But I think it was the right call. Let's see how he does it the next race. You know, certainly we'd like to see him keep progressing. But he's got to do it the right way. Yeah, I felt like coming out of, of Corey, here we go again, I'm going to talk about it. I felt like the fact I didn't love that he got approved for the O'Reilly race

at Rockingham. That's fair. I think he kind of showed that that was a stretch. He maybe wasn't ready for that. And I thought, like, you think about, like, what we want this to, we want to pump him up. You know, we want this to be a great story and how great the story would have been if he come out of Rockingham where Cleetus run top five in the Archer race, he's getting better, progressing, but then

right after that he jumps in the O'Reilly car, and he runs 35th or whatever it was and five laps down. And now that's all we're talking about, We instead of talking about how great he did in the Arca race, we're talking about, did he do enough to get approved? Is he shouldn't do it? And so I feel like just running ARCA, kind of building some momentum up behind him

and kind of, let him learn, he's going to get better, and he'll be approved eventually. Like, I think it's coming. It's just, he just has to show more, I think. Yeah. Hey, I can flip a little positive to our clearest conversation

since you've shit on him every week for the last couple weeks. I've never shit on it. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I had to raise your blood pressure a little bit. He called me old. Well, you are old.

I don't know if anybody told me. I don't know if you've forgotten. But my brother went and ran Freedom 500 this weekend. And watching the content all weekend was insane. You can so tell, like, he's in his element there too. Like, Cletus especially. Like, that is just they, I think he, well, he ended up wrecking out why it did. But he ran like top five most of the, most of the time.

He had a blast. And, like, he was like, I have watched a video last night. He's in a drift car with Kenny Wallace and Cletus. I'm like, you have no idea, like, how lucky you are right now, like, where you've made it up. He puts on a great show. He does. He does. When they come up to Stafford Motor Speedway, that place is sold out, packed for two days.

Yeah. My parents said it, the atmosphere, it was just the most fun weekend. They've had it a long time. So just wanted to do. For as much as we hate each other, we have been in communication about maybe coming in here or maybe one of us going and doing some stuff with him on his, one of his races. I think he's a spot for him. I told him. I want a spot for him.

He's got a spotter. Kevin Hamill does a really good job with him, so I don't need to horn in on that. But I offered the spot for George at Talladega if he gets approved there. Because I think he's got to run Kansas before he gets approved for Taledega. But if he needed somebody, I told him I'd be willing to do it. I don't know if they got somebody or not. But, you know, even if we go, like, just do something with him at the Freedom Factory

or if he comes in here and does a podcast, like, there's a clear mutual respect there. And I think he understands where we're coming from when we are critical of it. You know, but he's got, he's also, it's a content game. We're all going to play on both sides. I think after Rockingham, he stepped back and went, whoo. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Way different arcer versus O'Reilly's.

A whole other step in the game. I think everybody, I mean, listen. And that's what we said. Listen, and, and, you know, people have critical about Luke's results. You know, Luke's the same thing. Luke's learning the hard way how difficult it is to jump from a modified to a truck or to an, a rally car, Martinsville. Like, everybody goes through that leap, and that's kind of what we were getting at the whole time was this is a big jump from where you're going to where you're trying to end up.

And everybody's got to learn along the way. Yep. All right. Should we move into a little spot on the spot off? No, hold on. Let's talk about the preseason. Tommy wants the dates. No, no, no.

Because I want, I know you touched on it before. I think we need to get a little more why we're, why you wanted, why we're doing it. For Daytona? Yeah. Well, hopefully, two things. The ability to make some further adjustments, not just. hit stops or length of races, but to the car. So I think we're looking at some arrow things.

We've worked, we've got a whole working group with the cup teams right now to look at what we could do. We didn't want to plop it in the middle of this season, but kind of work with that, do some SIM, do some testing, and then let's see what it does on track in January, which gives us enough time to implement four of the 500 or speed weeks if it worked out. And it also, that was a good place for us to get some drivers out there and give them some track time. So kind of twofold, in my opinion, and fans loved it.

I mean, EMSA does it with their races, and they get a huge boost of kind of promoting their season. So if we can do it in a smart way, I think the teams can get behind it and help start kind of kick off the season and lead into the 500. Yeah, I think it's a great idea. I mean, as long as the packages are like reasonable, reasonable of what we need to do. I mean, I think it's a great lead into, it's always been a great lead into. the season, right? Everybody else has preseason stuff, right? We kind of got away with that, away from it.

You know, I mean, think... We shortened speedwigs up way too much. And so, you know, there's a balance. But if you could tie this in and then do some cool stuff during speed, I think it's a good balance. Yeah. Preseason Thunder and the clash back at Daytona would be great. Could happen.

He didn't say no. I did not say no. I think we need to have it at the freedom factor. Oh, that would be awesome. There we go. But like, what is that test going to look like? Is it everybody invited? Or is it probably one car per organization like we've seen?

Still TBD. It's got to be everybody. I'd like to have everybody. Yeah. It's for the packages to everybody understand, you cannot learn, especially Daytona, you cannot learn with 10, 12 cars on a track. I mean, you know that. We all know that.

And then we also learn, right? One of the biggest things is you got the haves and the have-nots, not as much. We're getting a little better at this. But when you don't have people at tests, at Tommy's point, you know, you kind of go in blind. and we need as many folks as possible going out there knowing what's happening for the biggest race. Spot on. Spot on.

Did you want to go first? I think he's a whiny bit. Send it. Why me? Okay, now are we ready for spot? Sure, let's kick on. Sorry, didn't mean to skip over that. Bring the Martinsville tire so we can run.

All right, there we go. Just bring it. Just see what to do it. Just bring it. It's a good thing we only have like two hours in here. I feel like Tommy and Steve would end up. We'd come out here with some crazy ideas. It's not that crazy.

Well, you. Christian Echis says, quote, it wasn't intentional to spin him or even hit him, end quote, when asked about the incident with Corey Heim. Spot on. Yeah, I was looking at you. You were already shaking your head. That was probably the first wreck I've looked at and go.

Hmm. No. That was just a mistake in racing. I mean, I agree with Tom. Yeah. I think that he was, Corey hadn't moved him twice before. I think he was in a hurry to get in line to move Corey back.

I think he had intent to go in there and maybe running the back of Corey and knock off the racetrack. But I think he, to your point, two things happened. I think he maybe was in a hurry to get down behind him. And I think Corey might have had a little gamesmanship to try. Because like in that position, you know the guy's going to move you. You kind of try to hang him outside of you so you can't get in line behind you. And I don't know if Corey played that game a little bit to try to keep him out there.

And maybe that's why it became a missing. He slowed down a little bit. You know, he might have slowed his entry up, and that's why Christian kind of misjudged. But, you know, we, I don't, again, I don't think this was intentional at all. I think both drivers agreed it wasn't intentional. But, you know, we have seen intentional crashes. We've seen, you know, this.

And what factors do you guys look at when you're trying to determine penalties and determine a driver's intent? That's a great question. First of all, no two are the same, which you always got to go back to. I think you've got to take in, has there been history, right? If something happened, race before, have we called them in, if some things happened, what's happened leading up to that in a race. And then what are the factors?

I mean, drivers always say, where's the line? I think for the most part, you guys have been doing this a long time. You know when someone drove it straight in there and had the intent to take someone out or if it's truly a racing accident. Sometimes we get it wrong. You know, we'll be the first to admit that. But we try, obviously, with NASCAR to err on the side of, hey, we're a contact sport. But when it goes too far, you've got to make the call.

Otherwise, it's chaos. So on this one, I agree. I think it's, you know, let that play out. Yeah, for sure. I think you guys have done a good job of drawing a line in the sand of that, you know, when it's an intentional right rear turn like that, that is maybe the worst thing that happens in the sport. And those people have been suspended now almost every time. So I think we're at a good place.

And there's no that I don't think we've, I mean, maybe the couple that we've argued on here that were close calls, but there's never been one that's kind of clearly intent. And that hasn't been called. Yeah. Rodney Childers and Tyler Allen's call from the pit box won the race for their drivers. Spot on, spot off, Freddie. Spot on. I mean, obviously those guys had to had to race their ass off at the end of the race to hold on to those wins, but they're not in that position without Rodney and Tyler.

And, I mean, a great story, kind of a redemption story, a little bit for both of them. Honestly, you know, Rodney's not a sport for a year. I think this is his first win. Somebody tweeted since 2022, which is hard to believe. But, you know, he has to sit there all year, comes back. And now that car has been really fast. No matter who drives it this year. There again, same thing.

Didn't back in anything. They were on top five all night. Rodney makes a great call to stay out. And Tommy, how difficult does that call? When you are a top five car, you're running in the top five. So now you don't, there's a lot of guys behind you on lead lap. So you know, if you come, you could be trapped. You know, if you don't come, everybody may come behind you.

And now you're the first guy on old tires. Like, how hard is that call from the pit box? It's hard. But, you know, Bristol's a little bit different because when the car comes out, the rubber gets picked back up, right? So I don't know if you got you, I don't know if you guys noticed yesterday. It would take probably about 10, 12 laps, but of speeds to come about. back down.

So it was probably, you know, in Rodney's mind, it gave him a little, a 10-lap buffer, right, to start, right? Because they weren't going to come in the first 10 laps. And then, boom, right? Kasha comes out, right? Kosha came out again, right? So he got lucky and he got good, right, at the same time. And I bet, Tyler, I bet they learned something from that night and took advantage of it.

So, yeah, I mean, it took, shoot, it took us about. 12 laps, 15 laps yesterday to get back down to running the times. It was crazy to see. Yeah. Tyler, another great story. I knew. I met Tyler back probably shit, 12, 15 years ago. He was an engineer at Venerini when I met him. He kind of just come up through that. So he owed a program. He was at Gibbs since, I think he went from Venerini to Gibbs. He was in the nationwide probably or Xfinity program at the time. Just kind of worked his way up. I think he went through, kind of got caught in the crossfire last year of that whole thing with Gabe Hart and tie and kind of at one point maybe got replaced.

I don't know if he was ever really replaced, but Gabe Hart was calling the races. And just really good to see him come back, win this race in that fashion where it's his call, his first cup win as a crew chief, Ty's first cup win. I mean, Steve, this is not what we want. These great stories, but then the ability to have these guys make these calls,

and this is what you want. I mean, I'm sure if you could dial up with a crew chief to the end of these races, like some of you guys stay out and shake this shit up a little. No, I thought it was great, you know, and it played out. it was great to see, you know, certainly the emotion in the sport, right, is what fans want to. And, you know, seeing coach who's, you know, I was with good buddies with JD growing up and seeing him and, you know, seeing Ty, dedicated, you know, to his dad. And that was a cool moment. Yeah.

Cool to see. Did I catch, I was walking out of the racetrack as I, coach was getting interviewed, did I catch a Cole Pern shout out? Yes, you did. On the microphone. On the microphone, right? Yes, you did. I thought I heard that. I was like, same.

I'm like, wait a minute. What's going on? on here, yeah. I don't know what's going on. I'm sure. I'm assuming Cole's helping them behind the scenes a little bit, but I thought that was pretty interesting. I was like, oh, did I hear Cole Perrin's name right there? So maybe that's, I don't know, I don't know what, I mean,

Coles. I mean, Colorado, he's from Canada. Canada. Where is it? Who knows where he is? But I thought that kind of perk me up a little bit. It's a good catch, Freddy. Yeah. Well, that leads us perfectly into our next one. Ty Gibbs will win another race before the season is over. Spot on, spot off.

I'm going spot on. I think he's run up front a lot this year. I think he's got the confidence to go out there and do it. You know, I don't think it'll come easy, but I think he will win one more this year. Yeah, I think getting that first one out of the way, it was like, I feel like once you get that first one out of the way, then after that.

If it was a fluke, but he's been running up front, top 10s. He's got a good car. Fast cars and confidence can be a dangerous thing in this sport. And a crew chief who made a call to win the race. Now he's going to have the balls to do it again. Hell yeah. I mean, it could come as soon as this week. that's good. Toyota's, Toyota's are super fast at Texas, everywhere right now, but Kansas,

we've been really good over the last couple years. And, I mean, Ty's no different there. He's going to be right back in contention again this week. So I think you'd be foolish to not say spot on this at this point. I mean, there, I think of what, up to fourth in points? Like since, and you think about it, like, we'll be a little better. Since we left Daytona and Atlanta, which are kind of wildcard races and anything could happen. I think he erected Atlanta. I don't remember what happened at Dayton. They've been switched on. I mean, they've probably been top five or six every race since then. So, I mean, they're just hitting on all cylinders right now,

and it's really shouldn't come as a surprise anybody, I don't think. I mean, look, he's an O'Reilly's champion, right? He did it the right way, come up through all the series, you know, and it just shows you how hard the next level is, right? I mean, he's in the best equipment, right? Possible in the Cup series, and it took him this long, right, to win a race. But it shows you how tough this division is. And it shows you that the people that you got to put together behind them, you know, the confidence level for the driver in order to do it.

You know, they made some key moves last year, right? Yeah, Cheddar. Cheddar, you know, put some strength in that team. And, you know, look, we're all around together in the garage. But you can see that team once Cheddar got there, the change of that team, right? The trust that, like, okay, we got a leader in the garage, right? And then it, believe it or not, it just, that helps the crew chief. that helps the engineer, right?

They don't have to worry about that anymore because they know, you know, they know the car chiefs got it, right? So it all works, man. And as it starts building, the trust starts going, the confidence starts going. Now the call, the win, he's going to be fine. Yeah. All right, last one.

The changes made to Talladega stages will be enough to end fuel mileage racing. Spot on, spot off. Spot off. Yeah, okay. It's a small step. Do you? No, I don't want, I don't want fans to think that that's a game changer.

But Steve, do you think looking back before this car and all the, like, we've learned things all the time, do you think with the old car we would have gotten to this point? I think so. I mean, it's AI, everything that's going on. It's unbelievable where you're seeing the OEs kind of hit, you know, what you're doing. So the strategy, it's fascinating how much it's changed. So it's on us to kind of keep going. You know, the stages as we came up with them, we had a certain.

mentality of how you do it. Now it's totally flipped because we want to try something new. But I don't want fans thinking that's the be all-and-all. Yeah, there's a lot to do to figure out, you know, what we could do. I've heard there's so many idea points, all kinds of things. So we're going to spend a lot of time, not just on the car, but we've got a great group of smart people in the industry, too, to listen to to to continue to work on it because we want the best race impossible. Yeah. I didn't mean a student. No, you're good. I mean, I'm, I'm glad. We're letting you speak. I'm kind of glad you said that because I was hoping I was You better say spot off.

I was going to be like it. Listen, I have concerns. I think anybody does. Let me see. For the listeners, just so you know, Freddie's hard card is sitting on the table between he and Steve. I'm wearing this next week.

You know, it's hard to pass is why we've kind of gotten to this and it's hard to pass when everybody is all out, is the problem. So my concerns lie with the longer, I think the idea is, I don't think we have the exact stage limits announced. Yeah, it's coming out.

Today or tomorrow. It's going to be a long first stage and then two shorter stages to end the race. The first stage is going to be so long that I'm worried that we're going to have to, because what we've seen in the past is we all save fuel, we pit, we come out, we race our asses off to the end of the stage, repeat for the second stage, kind of repeat the third stage. You know, you always have that one run where you save, save, save, save, save, then you race. Then we save, save, save, save, race, save, save, race.

I'm worried that we're going to have to save, save, save, save, pit. continue to save, save, save, just to make the first stage on one stop. So, but it's going to be exciting to watch because when we are saving, we're three and four wide the whole time. So, I mean, it's going to be kind of fun to watch, I think. But then my biggest concern is we have a planned caution that's going to be with whatever you want to say, 40, 50 to go, something like that. So we're going to save up to that point because we know that we can jump guys on pit road

under the stage two. And then we're going to run all wide open because we don't have to save. Now, some guys may short fill. to try for get track position. That's a crew chief question. But, you know, I think we're all going to be pushing wide open at the end. And I'm worried we're going to end up with two by two, hard to form that third lane again. But here's one thing.

We've always gotten to that position. We start pushing with only about 10 laps to go, right? Yep. So now it's going to be. Hopefully open it up a little bit one. Right. One of the things you saw, right, that is not good is, you know, when fuel mileage, he used to, at least, Denny used to always do this.

And I used to be like, thank God, he's out there because he pull out. out. You'd at least make a run. There was no, everything was blocked. And that's not a good thing either when you got the entire track. I don't know who did that. That was a terrible idea. No, no.

It's smart. It's smart. Yes, it's kind of what it's gotten to, you know. And that's what I mean of all these things have evolved. So I would do the same thing. Yeah. And listen, I hope it works. And we have seen it get better.

Like, when we first started with this car, once we decided to go, it was two by two, and that was it. We have seen with some of the changes, the shark fin and the A post. Like we have seen that third lane be a little more viable at places. And I hope to God that that happens again. I'm just, those are my concerns of once we get to that last stage and we restart and we can all make it on fuel and we all start going wide open, hopefully we can still race each other because that's been the problem from day one is you don't want to be trapped in the back because you can't go anywhere. You feel like you're locked in. And hopefully that doesn't happen.

I hope this is a step in the right direction. We can go further the next time. We'll see. We're going to see something to learn. from something. And there's more coming, right? I think there's definitely more. I mean, I don't know.

Did Propos say this publicly about the pit stops? I don't know with the mandatory. No, it's okay. Oh, I don't think he has yet. But that is something. No, I think that's something that actually, I'm sorry, he did. We're not looking at it this year, but for next year, you know, four tires that you've got to take with fuel, whatever. We're looking at a lot of those things.

So if you come down and put fuel in, you have to take tires. So that makes the pit stop longer. So there's not that such an urgency on saving. Jesus. These tire chains are going to making $300,000. There we go. There we go. Here we are.

For 10 years. But no, yeah. So, but I mean, this is what you want. You want to see steps because you want to see that you guys are acknowledging that it's not great. And we're taking steps to make it better. All right. DBC fans, it's time to react. All right.

My favorite part, it's time for reaction theater where fans can call in and voice their opinions from this weekend's race. Just so you know, Steve, we don't know what's coming. We don't have no idea. See that room, it's that fault. If somebody fucks up here, take Dalton's hard card. No problem. Totally fair. I met a DBC reaction theater caller in the wild this week at one of our cars

race. And apparently he's like in our pinneria most weekends. I have no idea. Perfect. Hey, do you want a job in NASCAR? Are you semi-athletic? Can you put a nut on a fucking bolt? Well, come on down to Penskeen Motorsports for open tryouts.

Where you, yes, you could be the new tire changer for the number 12 car. You can't be any worse than the assholes we've got, so come on down and give it a try. Wow. I wish he would have said what really. Was that Blaine? That might have been Ryan. Ryan's been saying he's going to call in.

That might have been him finally. Holy cow. I did see, and I thought I saw like the end of the race was better for them, but I saw a great stat from Bozzy, who if you want to follow somebody that is tuned in with stats and stuff during the race, he's a great follow on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. But after the first four pit stops, Blaney's pick crew was averaging two seconds slower than the five car.

and you're never going to win like that. And especially from the first stall where it should have been taking advantage. I mean, they got better. I saw a couple nine-second stops at the end where, I mean, the only person to beat him off had a road in the last stop was the five that took two. And they had a nine-second one earlier in the race

to keep the lead. So I don't want to shit on them completely. They did their job at the end of the race, but those middle of their race blowups, you can't have them if you want to contend, especially for a championship where they're already in the hunt for. Right. Hey, that car's threw a race from Nashville.

It was pretty awesome. Watch the Dale Jr. Out there, all those fans enjoyed it in Nashville. So my wife, due with our second baby, gonna be a son. I'll tell you what, I'm gonna name him Landon. This way I get a ride in the car to her.

Landon, McKenzie, Landon, Pendon, Pendon, Landon, Huffman, Landon, Landon, Landon, Landon, Landon, Landon, Landon, Landon, London, Landon, Landon, London, London, McKinsey, but the rest of them are Landon's, yes. There's two Landon Huffman, isn't there? Yeah, there's Landon. And they're not even related.

How did El Dale do? I think he ended up like 13, 12th or 13th, maybe? You could hear every time, I mean, I know this is no surprise to any of you guys, but I mean, I was down in the restart zone on pit road. And any time he made a pass, whether it was for 20th or 10th, you could through my ear molds, through the noise at the racetrack, you could hear them just going crazy. When he was racing, you didn't have to look to see who was leading.

No, no, because it's kind of gotten that way with chase now. But before, I mean, it was way worse with Dale. You'd be, I was spotting for your car. We're running, you know, 20th, 25th. and we're back here racing, and all of a sudden you hear a standing ovation, like, oh, yep, Dale just took the lead, no matter where he's at. Yeah. How much, Steve, how much do you guys follow what Dale does with the short tracks and what he's

trying to do, you know, the vision and the fan reaction? What do you guys get, you know, take from that? Yeah, I think we work with every series out there. I mean, obviously, you know, with Kevin and Jeff and Dale and those guys, we're in constant contact about, you know, what we could do. I think they see some things sometimes now that, where they were on us a few times when And, you know, hey, how's your scoring work? How's this work?

But I think it's a really good series. I love the passion. You know, the fans, anybody that's going to come and watch short track racing, watch these drivers come up, give them a chance to make it to the tops. Fantastic. So the more, the better, in my opinion, I think I love Dale's passion for not only the racing, but the tracks that are out there that are just iconic in the sport. Do you guys know Dr. Phil was a listener?

Oh, shit. What? No, Dr. Phil here. My wife, Robin, hasn't gotten me and the Coontaine because of this Kyle Bush debacle here. I really ask the rest of the field, please. If you could just please move over

so my wife could bend over. I'm very much appreciated. And I think we'll all learn something from that, okay? All right, we'll be right back. We'll be right back just like what he said. We've had a rash of Kyle Bush. Kyle came in here last year and Rowdy Nations. Apparently, their love life depends on

Kyle's results. Wow. And they're pretty hard. Having a rough year. They're very hard up the last couple of years. He's going to have to get back to legend race into something. Yeah. They are waiting for the summer shootout to roll around.

I mean, who. Fuck me to tears. Chris Neckis just cost me two fucking dollars. God, baby. This is one of my favorite things on, like, especially social media is,

you know, you can tell when somebody, most people's opinions is directly related to whatever they bet on that day. Oh, yeah. You guys screwed Blaney today. And I'm like, Blaney was not, he wasn't even going to be in contention. But because you had $5 on the finish in the top 10, I'm sorry. Your day's been ruined.

Carson Gwapel got me my $2 back. There it is. There it is. That's good. He's back in a better mood. Full circle. That was great. That was great.

That was absolutely incredible. Oh, man. My name is Chris. I worked for someone. fire. I'd like to know what that Gibbs car had today. Thanks a lot.

Thanks a lot. Hunter Zilich needs to not do sim racing. He needs to do celebrations. Simulations. Similations. What the hell, man. You can.

I was, I text him on Saturday night, and I said, man, I'm really proud of you. And it's not because you won. It's because you didn't cut yourself in victory lane. The sword. Whoever gave that guy a sword was really asking for trouble. Oh, Lord. Well, to leave an audio message 24-7, you can call our number at 704-802-9572, and we'll play the best ones each week on the show.

It's time to move into the shit show Hall of Fame. I think the biggest one I saw was them telling Chandler that he won money and then did not. Yeah, that was tough. That was on Fox, I assume, right? I think they kind of made that up on their. I mean, I know they just misunderstood the ruling or the wording on the word. the wording on the format. Look at this picture of Chandler's brother.

That's like me in that press conference. That's a tough look right there. So Chandler finishes second, and they tell him he won 50 grand for being essentially the highest finishing truck guy, but that wasn't the case. You had to win the race to get the prize, I believe. And so he thought he won 50 grand, and then turns out he, in fact, did not win $50,000. So it's tough to get out and hear, hey, here's 50 grand.

Just kidding. Sikes. Just kidding. So that wasn't ideal. where was this at? The Pace truck driver. I honestly don't know. I saw, I couldn't tell from the picture,

but they were, I guess they were getting ready to roll off for like the heat races. And the Pace truck driver locked his keys in the truck. So there's a group of them with a slim gym or something. I would have just took a rock.

That's a group. Blew out the window and kept going. That reminds us of Jesse and Phoenix. You know, remember when we ran into the same? Oh, yeah, yeah. So you guys got, his nickname, Sam. man now. We play the tune every time we say oh yeah he loves it. He reminds me where was it

Florence last year we had to load the cleanup truck. The cleanup truck ran out of gas. The cleanup truck ran out of gas. They loaded it on a flatbed but it still had to do it. That's awesome. And the people were still in it just riding on the flatbed down the front stretch. It was like anything I've ever seen. Oh, what else? Oh this was big. Watch background. Supercross. Oh my Lord. I thought it was I thought it was AI when I saw it the first time. So this is Super Cross, I assume. I don't know where they were at. Nashville.

Nashville. This guy flying through the air got back up and finished. Well, how about the motorcycle landing on, look, it's ready to go? It was just looking for a rider. It laid it back on two wheels. Yeah, somebody sent me this, and I wasn't expecting it because I thought it was going to be something with these guys in the booth. And then you just see this guy flying through the background. How about the guy turning around at the last minute?

What just happened? Oh, shit. There's somebody in the... Oh, shit. Holy shit. But that guy was okay. From my understanding, he finished the weekend. So that was good for him.

This guy was talking about, my favorite part of this is when he reaches in his pocket to get his phone. Like he's going to take a picture of it. It's the guy in the red shirt right here. Hold on. I got to see this. Let me record this for everybody. It almost burns down here. And then, you know what?

This is a good time to get a picture. Shout out to the crew guys, though. Obviously, other teams in there trying to help Mason get out of there. Obviously, that was kind of scary, especially where it's at there behind pit wall. There's kind of fans. Absolutely. Not everybody in safety. So what do you guys say when you see that, Steve?

Like, okay, like, you notice there's issues. So will you guys meet about that this week? Yeah. So every race, usually Tuesday, they break down kind of everything. They go back through the recordings of the race. They'll go back through fire and safety. So, yeah, that'll be one. And I think they'll go back and look at who that individual was.

And where the past came from, probably Freddie. Yeah. It's my cousin. I don't think he was doing anything wrong. He wasn't, but it becomes, you look at, you know, we want as much access as possible, right? But then you look at some of these things. And, you know, we get a lot of flack a lot of times

for, you know, kids on pit road or kids on the pit box. And there's a reason, you know, it's very rare, but stuff like that happened. That's a good example for that reason. You say on here a lot of times you've got to protect people from themselves. Oh, yeah. I say that to myself. Same.

All right, this one is, we haven't. I haven't seen this one at all. Is this Doug's wedding? Yeah, this is Doug's wedding. Okay, so it's a video and in one backyard There's a really nice, classy wedding event going on And then the next best shot They're like bare knuckle fighting behind chain link heads

It's Ducks friends, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Hey, the wedding was great. Yeah, that was interesting. The A-car, yeah, this was, this is kind of becoming a weekly occurrence. Kyle's frustrated. I think Jim Pullman, who left over here

after winning 100 races with Justin last year. And they are not doing well. And I don't know if you know this about Kyle. When he's not doing well, he kind of wears his emotions on his sleeve at times. Oh, yeah. So it's kind of like an oil and water right now where they're not jelling very well. And they're kind of, but they must have been yelling at each other before this. Derek Neeland gets on and says, I know you're frustrated,

but us yelling at each other during the race isn't going to help. We're in this together. He got no response to that. I think that's on two. That was on two. Yeah, yeah. It's on two. He's talking to Pullman.

And he got no response, and Derek said, did you copy me? And Jim's like, yeah, Jim's response was, yeah, but it's the same shit every week. Tommy, what do you think about like this? Where's this truck? Because you're kind of not involved over there, but, I mean, it's an alliance for you guys. It's difficult to see. I mean, it's hard to explain because, you know, they have all the information through the key partners, right? So they're seeing a lot of stuff, right?

They know what Hendricks got going on. They know what track house has got going on. And look, to be honest with you, as a Chevrolet as a whole, it's not good right now, right? They're not as strong as they used to be. There's something missing that everybody's missing. And then the five car was really the only Hendrik car that ran well yesterday, right? And the 77 was a top six or seven car all day as well. But they're not even key partner, right?

So, yeah, there's something going on there. There's definitely something that Kyle does not like in these cars. He does not like the feel. He has driven his whole life off side force, right? And there is none on these cars, and he's struggling with it, right? And it's just something that's going on that he just doesn't like the feel. And it's giving him a false feeling getting into the corner that he doesn't like. And it's hard because when you try to fix that, it affects the other part of the corner, right?

So just look, man, he's, I know he's frustrated and I know everybody's frustrated, but he's got to start becoming part of the solution, right? creating more problems, right? He's got to, if he's going to be a leader, he's let him start being a leader and taking charge of trying to make it work, he's, he can't, he's going to tear down the whole team by what he's doing, in my opinion, right? Because it's hard, right? He's, frustrated, he's frustrated the way, what he's feeling, he's frustrated where he's finishing, but he's got to take responsibility of trying to fix it, trying to help fix it. Jim's a smart guy, obviously, right? He's won a lot of races, a lot of championships. He's won a lot of

races at Abraham, you know, being a car chief doing all the thing. He's smart. He knows what he's doing. But it's not one person making a mistake, right? It's everybody like getting together and doing the things. And he's going to have to step up, man, and fix it. I think that, you know, one of the things I take away from it is, if you asked me before the season started or even maybe early in the season,

I would have told you I thought there was a really good chance that Kyle would be leaving to get in the seven car next year. At this point right now, I don't know why you would replace Daniel Suarez, with Kyle Bush. I think Daniel's doing a great job in that car. Kyle's struggling. And when you see Kyle struggle, you see this side of him a little bit. And like, I don't know that you'd want to bring that into your building. Yeah, it hurts. You know, so, like, right now, I think I don't know why you'd get rid of Daniel. Like, we talked about that Kyle being maybe the domino, the first domino to go into the kickoff silly season. If that's what you're waiting for now, I don't know, like,

where is he going to go if it's, you know, if this is what you're getting, like, who's going to sign up to take that on. Yeah, I mean, there's a reason why he wasn't, he left Hendrick. Yeah. And the beginning. There's a reason why the 18, right? Now, like, there's stuff going on, man. I mean, it's like the guy's one of the best race car drivers ever, right?

Ever, ever has, no one will ever catch his win total, ever, from this point on. There's no one going to be able to do it because it's not set up like that anymore. Yeah, no. One of the biggest lessons, Bill France taught me when I was young, is being pissed off isn't a plan because you'd walk around, right, and he's like, that's not helping. And I think to your point, you know, that team's going to go as Kyle does, right? And if he kind of comes back in the garage, so let's go, let's put it behind us and let's go,

I think the guys will rally around it. He's got to do that. I mean, he's got the credibility, right, to go do it. And you know Richard's going to do everything you possibly can, right? He's working his ass off. They've got a really good core group. I mean, I'm there every week, right? But the core group there is there.

I mean, it's a championship caliber program. It's just, you got to put, I mean, Austin's not running that bad. I mean, you know what I'm saying? He's fighting for his life every day. He's not sitting there complaining. He is complaining, but he's complaining for the right reasons, right? He's doing all the right things. So just, man, Kyle, you're one of the best, take the leadership role and fix it, right?

Help him fix it. Yeah. Yep, and you can vote for those nominees. You can check them out in the YouTube description. and then you can vote for them on Dirty Mo Media's X profile. Hey, everybody, this is Dale Jr. And for the latest DBC gear, go to shop.dirtymo Media.com. We've added some new shirts.

There's one called Win or lose. We're drinking booze. Everything seems to be about drinking here at Dirtymo Media. Go check it out now. It's time to move on to ask DBC, where listeners submit questions for our guests. I'm actually really interested to hear your take on this first one. Do you feel that social media ultimately damages or benefits the sport as a whole?

Well, I think we have the most passionate fans, which I think is awesome. So ultimately, it helps the sport. The only thing I wish we thought about a little bit more was how cool this sport is and that you can be pissed off right about a race or about a call. But ultimately, that doesn't mean the sport is terrible. And I think too often we jump to that and we don't keep kind of the big, picture in mind. So I look at my job as to, yeah, listen, but make adjustments, but think about where the sport wants to grow and how do we grow. But no, I think it's a great avenue for our fan base

to have access to people and to see what's going on and to have dialogue and be able to answer questions, right, that come from fans. Between like, and I've been thinking about this, just listening to you tell stories and during this podcast, but where do you find, like, how do you draw that fine line between when you're getting feedback from the fans, but then also drivers and then people who have been a part of this sport for a really long time that are on committees and things like that. Where do you, how do you take all of that feedback into account? And then what do you, how do you decide what stuff you want to take and do something? Yeah, no, it's a great question.

So any decision we make, you got to think about, you know, this is another Mike Elton one, too, of like, who needs to know about what decision I just made? And it's going to affect drivers, teams, podcasts, spotters, everything, right? So you got to make sure you communicate. The biggest thing that I've learned in the sport is you do a lot of listening. Tommy may have an idea that we don't go with. Tommy's pretty good about this as long as you come back and explain, hey, here's why we did this.

I remember Joey Lugano once, you know, I'm not going to give you my opinion anymore. You don't listen. I was like, no, we listens, but we went a different direction. You were like one of a hundred, and you were the only one who felt this way. But you got to explain why you made a call. Where we get in trouble is when we just kind of make up a decision. and we don't explain what the hell we were doing. And fans are right and the industry's right to call us out for that.

So the biggest thing for us right now is where are we going. And we are on display right now for the next media deal, for where we're going to race. So it's all about kind of 2031 and making sure the sport is set up for that. What's the schedule look like? What's the car of the future? You know, where are we racing? How many races? All of those things.

So there'll be some noise kind of race to race. You've got to take the good stuff that you can build to where. we're going to go. And some of this stuff, you know, you're going to get criticism and you deal with that. That's part of the job. So sometimes do you guys, as an industry, throw some things out for the fans to be the judge to just to take a... Yeah, I think from time to time, you look at it. And where we've been at our best is when we've got, you know, you can over-committee things, right? And I get that. But where we've been at our best is, you know, when we looked at, you know, bringing the chase back or going to stages, that was an industry group who got together and

threw everything up on a wall and said, what do we think? And when we're aligned and we go out and we make a decision and people say, I believe in this, you know, if you miss a couple things, the industry at least say, hey, I was part of that. Where we really screw up is, yeah, if we make a decision on our own, we haven't talked to folks, you know, we should be taking a task for that because that's not right. How important is it stuff like when we saw Ben do at Darlington? How much feedback do you get from that where I saw, if you guys weren't familiar, Ben Kennedy and I saw Joey, I think was part of the group. There was a group. there was a group of NASCAR employees that went to Darlington.

They all kind of bought tickets through different vendors, I think. And I forget the whole story, but they kind of all took a different approach to getting there, and then just went through the fan experience, sat in the grandstands for the race. I mean, I don't know how many people could notice that Ben Kennedy was probably sitting next to him. But how much feedback do you get from stuff like that? Because I thought it was really cool and really good idea. I think that's huge. I did that years ago in Bristol camped out for three days, no hard cards, no anything.

And you learn a heck of a lot. So Ben's got a lot of good ideas. You know, the At-Track experience is big for us. So we've got some facilities that, you know, have some age on them. And so what can we do to bring some things in that are cool for the fans when they're going out to the racetrack? Access is always going to be our number one avenue as a sport. You know, I go to a lot of sporting events just to see what's happening. And people are amazed when you go to a race.

And I know it can be annoying at times for the drivers. But the access the fans get is beyond any other sport. And if we can continue to bring that, got to be safe about it. You know, with the drivers, there's a lot going on out there. But, you know, it's key. You see it in the cars tour everywhere else. It's like people want to be down in the pits. They want to see the drivers.

And they want to interact with people who are like them. And I think we're getting back to that. We've got a crop of young drivers right now that are really kind of, they get it. And I think we want to take this sport to the next level. Yeah, I think back, I hate to say back in the day, but in the 90s and the 80s when the cup drivers were going to the local short tracks on Saturday nights and putting on a show, I think that was very important for our,

series, right? How it grew, man, because the local fan now had, became, it was a hero now, right? They, like, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, all of a sudden, then you could follow them on Sundays, right?

So, um, the more we can get these drivers to interact with the fans on a, on a local level, um, I, look, I'm, I'm, you, you have to race to race, like, in my opinion to, race fans are race fans, right? Yeah. They don't necessarily want to go to a concert, right, to meet fans. They want to go to a racetrack, man.

I mean, let's bring them to the racetrack. Let's get them to put on these shows like we used to do. I mean, I felt that was the best interaction. I mean, every time we did that, those places were packed. They created a show. There was all kinds of different things going on. And even the local shows put on a better show because they knew that those drivers were there. They were coming.

Yeah. So, I mean. We chased, you know, we're guilty of, we chased trying to be like other sports too much. And to your point, fans want to come see a badass race, right? And we're going to be proud of that. When they're there, there are different reasons. People like being at the race. We'll have some cool entertainment.

But at the end of the day, it's about what's happening on the racetrack, drivers you care about and want to believe in and grow their fan bases. Yeah. Is there a piece of advice that was shared with you throughout your career that you still think about regularly? Yeah, I think it goes back to the, you know, who needs to know about the decision you just made. because I've been guilty of that at times, you know, where you think you've talked to the right people, but there's so many stakeholders in this sport. And if you just take the time to reach out and over-communicate,

and then doing a better job for me personally of just going out and spending time with people, you know, it can get tough. I think you guys, you know, you move around the garage and you see people every day, and there's times you just want to be like, oh, man, I just need a break. But when you're at the track, that's the time when, you know, you get some great ideas, you hear from people about different things. So, you know, being on and making sure you take notes and listen to people, especially the fans. I think we got away from that a little bit.

And you're seeing that come back with the people that we have in place. So I'm excited about where we're going. The one question I had for you was, you talked about mistakes, maybe not talking enough people. Is there one thing, rule change, gimmick at an all-star race? One thing that you watched and you said, holy shit. We're never doing that again. It's like 10 of them. 10, 20 of them, my opinion.

I'll tell you the biggest one was, and this kind of ebbs and flows, but when I first came up to the R&D Center, we were getting destroyed on penalties and post-race penalties. And it was from owners a lot of times, say, you're killing me with sponsors. You know, if you penalized me, you're killing me with sponsors. So instead of saying, just, you know, fix your shit, we didn't let guys get away with it,

but it was a little bit more lenient. And when you open that door just a smidge, it's over. And I had guys who were like, hey, don't go this route. Don't go this route. I got it. And I learned a lesson a hard way in that year of like trying to bring it back and just say, nope, the rules, the rule, that's it. I don't care if you're going to call me up and MF me, you know, fix it.

And so that was a hard one to do. And if a sponsor left, I don't want a sponsor to leave. But ultimately, you guys made the call. Yeah. So that was a tough one culturally to watch it. And you know, you let one thing kind of creep in. there and it's and then everybody's doing we always say give us an inch we're going to take a mile and to at the Steve's point the the the fight that we've always faced with you guys is the longevity of the

problem yeah when the longevity of the problem finally got to the lower the lowest team and then everybody got it everybody had it then you made the rule change and then a little i totally agree with you right versus making it don't let it go right and way in the beginning yeah right when you're seen the top guys show up because all the money and all the engineering was spent on it. You hemmed and horn, next thing you know, a month later, everybody had it. Everybody spent it. Oh, no, we're going to make a rule change. Or we penalize the little guy who all of a sudden day.

Right. And that's what's going on in the truck series right now. You guys let these bodies. I heard you. I'm going to go back. No, that's all. I'm not happy about it. I'm not because I see a problem.

I see a potential problem in a series that's really good that a lot of guys are having internal fights about. And there's just just, I witnessed the other day. cringed, man. I just, as for all of us. Not just, for all of us. No, it's what I always appreciate. You have a, you have an opinion usually that's beyond just your team, which

I'm not, I am not ignoring that. It's bothering me, Steve. Nope, nope. I'm taking that back, we're going to come back to you. 127 over. Hey, I went the other day. He sent a picture 117 over what is 70% or something? Every day. Every time I get out of my kids like, oh, your blood pressure

got high today. Nope, 170, whatever. He says it stays regulated. He just has a, I think he just keeps sending me the same screenshot. That's exactly what it is. That's exactly what it is. He does not know how to use AI. He does not know how to use AI. There's no way Tommy knows how to use AI.

AI, what is that? Alan Iverson. He's a way of that. All right. DVC picks. Shout out to Casey. We'll probably have you bow out of this. I don't think you can take the guest pick this week.

Wait, wait, who goes first? I think you do, Tom. You do. Casey picked Ty Gibbs, so thank you, Casey. You know what I will say while you're thinking, Tommy? I did want to give credit to Blaney, because we've talked about this on here before. He gets shit for this, and I don't understand why he gets shit for it. He is the cleanest race car driver in our sport because he could have very easily,

and nobody would have really faulted him for it, I think. Door slammed Kai Gibbs the other night or ran him a lot dirtier than he did, and he ran him as clean as he could possibly run him. They battled to the end. He lost by a half a car on a race that he probably should have won. I don't know how much credit you can give Ryan in that moment because everybody needs to take notice man because like he is this fair time to me Ryan Blaney is still to me watching him still a badass but does that and that's hard to do right and I think that's cool

that's an ass car to me he's the biggest guy that I think about when you talk about what we how we used to race Mark Martin theory of like letting somebody go I'll get him back later which we don't do that a lot now obviously because racing's different but he's the guy that I just look back to you and they say who's the guy that could have raced in this era and been just as successful I think Ryan's the guy. Throwback. I don't know how many times I've said it even in the local

industry driver meetings and stuff. Like this week? Yeah. Yeah. He's ready. So you're getting choked up about it? No, no. It's like... Blood pressure. At the end of the day, when the check and flag falls, right, and you're sitting there an inspection line or you're sitting after the race,

everyone's having more fun the way they raced cleanly and how they raced. when instead of running each other. There's a lot more like, then all of a sudden it starts getting better, right? That they start racing. Like you see some, like we've seen a change, right?

We've seen a change in the cars when we've seen a change in the smart car, right? Both, both, you guys had to come to Jesus meeting and so did we on Friday. I mean. Not many people know that was planned our meeting. Yours was too, but we, you know, it was planned for me to talk. I didn't do that. As planned as it is, though, there's a casualty. there's a casualty, like casualness to it.

I mean, it was literally... Not casualty. Not casualty. Tommy probably could have had a couple casualties in this reading. There was no casualties, just casualness. But it was 1 o'clock in the afternoon. All the drivers only sitting up in the grandstands and they all had an opportunity to, you know,

Dale started and then they had an opportunity. Chad McCumbie got up, Lannon and Huffman, Mason Diaz. I was laughing. Do the do to Mason Diaz? I was going to say, I don't know. I don't know if y'all's was like this, but ours, to me, after a certain point, I'm like, you guys are losing me

because it felt like an AA meeting. Like Mason Diaz got up there. He's like, hi, my name's Mason. I was suspended from the car store in 2023. And this is why I can say what I'm about to say. Like, everyone was just getting up. Hi, I'm Connor Jones. I got suspended last week.

Like, whatever. And it was funny. But it worked. I mean, you saw, and I mean, Nashville, too, is a place that I think they knew that we didn't need to go in there and obviously be stupid. But I think all in all, we saw just a better product of racing too. And you will.

You will. You will. I'm saying once you call these guys out, they have to be reminded once in a while. I mean, the perfect example is the 77 car. Look of the progress that he has done since he stopped running into people. Look at the progress. We also can't go fast with torn up shit. NASCAR had the same meeting with the Xfinity guys after the Morgansville, wasn't it?

Yeah. I mean, every once in a while, you just got to lock these guys in a room. All right, Tom, get picked. Sorry, I got a sidetrack there. Redding. You mug. Where the hell are we going for Kansas? Yep.

Yep. Damn it. That's what I was going to pick. Yes, you are. Damn, I picked Denny last week. I'll take Kyle Larson. I'm going to take William Byron. You mean Steve.

Right. I can't believe Freddie didn't pick this guy. I am going to. Yeah, I picked him already. I picked him at Martin'sville. I'll pick him. That didn't fucking go well at all. I'll pick Denny.

I'll pick Denny Hamlin since Freddie can't. Oh, man. Yeah, that Mornsville. That Morgensville pick wasn't a good one. And we lined up behind the 77 on the last three-star yesterday. I was like, oh, boy. Oh, man. Here we go.

What else we got? Weekend winners. Weekend winners? Steve, do you see anybody across the world in motorsports this week that you noticed that won some races? I'm going with Stephen Cops. You get a little back-to-back. Two-in-round. Yeah, man.

So I got the chance last year. I got to make sure I do it again. year. Modified racing to me is the greatest racing. Just in terms of you go in that garage area, just a passion, seeing the young guys come up with the veterans, right? So I had a big, a lot

of time for that. I want to get up and get to some stand-alones again, get yelled at by Tommy every once want to show up. I won't be there this year. Shout out to him for sure. I think the biggest thing you take away from that modified garage, for me anyway, is, I mean, I would say what, 90% of that garage is volunteer

help. You know, there's not many full-time modified employees. It's guys that are there on the weekends and they've got to go home and work on Monday. The drivers, a lot of the drivers, I mean, silk's a plumber. You know what I mean? You know, these guys are just...

Sondior lays wire he thinks, whatever he thinks he does. But no, yeah, for sure. Obviously, that's where me and Tommy, you know, obviously that's where we come from. So it has a special place for us. I'm a northeast guy originally too. So, and it was good that you hired

a blue collar guy to be Run the series, right? Yes, sir. How's you doing? I think he's doing all right. You know, you tell me, right? It's funny, though, I was at New Smyrna, and it was the first time, like, handed him the mic, and you can tell. He's like, I don't want to be on this damn mic.

No, but that's okay. I told him that's what I told him at Martinsville, because the varsville's the only race I've done so far, and I said, I told Joey, he was standing. I said, well, public speaking's not Gary's best set, but nobody really gives a shit. As long as he does a good job on his other part of his job, nobody's going to care if he's got to read that paper. It's going to be interested when he's going to be interested when he. when it's time for him to start calling the races. Oh, that's, yeah. He's got a couple more.

Jimmy's still doing it. Is he planning? Are they playing on having him call races? Oh, yeah. That'd be interesting. Yeah, that was going to be interesting. Let's see, so Smart Tour. Danny Bone. Danny Bone, yeah.

Jack. Kate. Kate and Quappell and Dawson Sutton. What happened to Jack? I know. What about the Landons? How did all the Landons? The 22 Landins.

Jack, though, touch on Jack quick. I know he was running well. He was the name. Point leaders. He still leading points. Now we filled a third. He got a flat. He got a lap car running to him,

gave him a flat running second. Catching the leader and with 20 to go. And no good. Give him a shout out. I know I saw that. He's doing really, really good this year. Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Cars do it. Caden Quaple. Dawson Sutton. And then we handed out a floatium bonus this weekend to Rackley War. So that was cool. Oh, nice. I did want to give a shout out. Parker Eatman.

Really good kid. I felt so bad looking at that picture afterwards. He was obviously upset. He led. I think he lost a little 10 to go. maybe or something like that. He led the whole entire race. Really good kid.

I met him in your backyard at one point last year. That whole group of kids, man, coming up is really just a really special group. Keith Rocco, they put on a great show. I heard it was a great race. Him and Todd Owen, right? Danny Cates. They said they were slop, swapping the lead multiple times over the whatever, 20, 30 lap. Keith Rocco, just doing Keith Rocco thing.

The guy's been winning forever. A good dude. And now he takes care of a lot of race cars. You know, I mean, I think he still does anyway. But prepares a lot of guys cars at Stafford. But yeah, if anybody wants to have a shot of moving up in the ranks up there and starting the SK Light and SK Division, call Keith Rocco, because he puts together really good cars.

He's a really good teacher. It'd be a good start for anybody to want to get a start in the modified, for sure. Your old driver, John McKinney, won the Tri-Track race. Yep, and he ran good yesterday, too. I think he finished fourth yesterday as well. Yeah. In the tour. Shout out to Mikey, Christopher.

I think he finished third in the tour race yesterday. Yeah, he came on strong at the end. I've seen some clips there and came on strong. I don't know if I don't know if they had a little bit different tire strategy there. That's what his uncle always did there. I remember him and Brad would pit late with 20 to go and blow through the whole field. It'd feel like it wasn't fair. I saw JD, John Davenport, swept the weekend for Lucas Oil at Lucas Oil.

Briggs-Danner won the USAC race at Lawrenceburg. somebody else won. Kyle Cummins won last night at Terre Haute. The USAC cars. Aaron Willison won that big sprint car race, the pavement sprint car race at five flags. Yeah, I don't know, he won 30 grand. I don't know what the race for the million is. Yeah, it is race for the million

is the series called. I don't know what the Oh, maybe they're doing like multiple races. I didn't know they had that many cars, man. There was a shit. That series is growing. Yeah, there was. It was fun racing to watch. I mean, they're falling. That's around five flags. Let's see what else we got here. Cole Denton won the Archer West

race at Tucson. You talked about Stephen Copsick winning, which back to back for him. He's now the point leader of the modified tour. One, Kurt Busch won the high rock race. Oh, yeah. I saw it. Were there, Steve? Did you say you were there? No, I wasn't there, but I saw that, yeah. It's pretty cool. He said it's a great race, him and Jeff, which is cool. I mean, I know Graham, I talked to Graham Smith a couple weeks ago about that

event. Man, they were really looking forward to it. It seemed like it was a hit by all accounts. The other one, did you see Tommy, Tony won, Smoke won this week as well. His whole team you said, right? They had a funny car team. Hagen, I think Hagen in the funny car and he won top fuel. That guy's just amazing. I mean, is there anybody, everybody asks, like, when they ask you, Mount Rushmore or Drivers, if he's not on your Mount Rushmore or drivers, you're missing out because the guy could do it

and everything. Mount Rushmore is what I call my ownership group. I had a pleasure to work with him for a short period of time special, man. Would you say you had a pleasure to work with Tony? Because Tony might have been the most critical guy. Tony's not a huge fan of mine. Yeah, you guys don't like each other. No, that's not, that's a one way thing.

I respect the hell out of what he's done, yeah. Then there was one I had to give a shout out to. It was kind of a couple people sent me this. Daniel Webster won the UARA race at Citrus County. Outdouled Stephen Nassie, obviously one of the best super late mile drivers in the country. They said it was Daniel's first win in 12 years. And then his spotter got out of the car. Spotter got out of the spotter stand, went down a 19-year-old kid named Cody Struble, I believe.

I hope I didn't butcher your last name. He got out and won the pro stock or the pier stock race. That followed up that. So that was cool. Thanks again. Guys, again, shout out, sending submissions to me to DM me or tag me in a tweet or something. If you got somebody you want to shout it out on here that won a race this weekend, it's a cool story.

We'll share it. You can tell Nassie's getting old, man. Hell yeah. Was he nice guy or something? Uncissies in. No. They're calling him now Classy Nassie. Switched over from Nasty, Nasty.

That's good for that. But I don't think there's, I mean, that's, I don't know what it is. Racing is starting to ramp up now. Yeah. There's going to be a bunch. I apologize because I don't have the whole rundown of everybody that won at Thompson. I don't know who won the late model races or anything like that. Yeah, unfortunately yesterday.

How did Salamino do a legend coach? He's running this week. He's running, I think, at Nashville or somewhere. Yeah, him in the lab. I'm sponsoring something. What am I sponsored? Probably the kids. Me too.

I got it. The dirtiest trick in the game is having these kids FaceTime me, three of them. They're all like 10 and under. And they go, hey, can you sponsor a car? Yeah, send a post. Yeah, the kid, yeah. All right. But, yeah, so they're running, Band-Alarire.

and Timmy's running an alleged car race coming up somewhere. What do you got going on this weekend? Modified? No? Nothing? No? Just going to the cup race? Yeah, I mean, there's a chance Luke might be there Saturday as well. That's good.

That's running the O'Reilly's. We'll see. Carson? I will be watching Wyatt race at Tri-County this weekend and then celebrating one of my really good friends' graduation from nursing school. What series? Just local late-old tri-county. How did he do in the Freedom 500?

Oh, that was another one. Deegan. Brian Deegan won the Freedom 500. 100. Shout out to him. I think that's the second time he won. But how do he do? He ended up wrecking out. It's probably for the best because I don't think that Wyatt needed to win an airplane. I'm just saying.

That's, that was my honest. I swear, that was my biggest concern. I'm like, what are we going to do? Like, because he's going to, I guess you could get the airplane where you could take money. But, I mean, he's going to want the airplane. I'm like, what the fuck are we going to have an airplane? Next thing you know, Wyatt would have been getting his pilot's license probably. Steve, again, I can't thank you enough for coming in. and subjecting yourself to this.

I did want you to close out on one thing. I had one more question for you just in closing. Like the other thing that got mentioned brought up over and over again and those replies I had last night was the old school fan kind of feels like they're being ignored or left behind. What do you say to those people when you hear stuff like that? So what I would say is if you look at our campaign this year about hell yeah and embracing kind of who we are and where we're going to me,

that is our old school fan. So bear with us a little bit. You know, it's not going to happen overnight, but I think we've got to, we're on a journey to, to keep this thing going and get back to who we are. And the essence of who we are, we got good people that want to see the sport grow. So we're going to get it right. But what a balance is that, man?

I mean, having to deal with the old school and new people coming in, it's, I know for a fact it's such a different thought process. And with the way the world is changing too. Here's the deal. We've got to get back to having a little bit more fun too, right? Yeah. So if you want to bring a new fan in and they see people say, ah, I don't like this.

Well, who the hell is going to want to watch, right? But I think you're seeing more and more of people in the garage area, getting back to, yeah, this is the pinnacle of racing, right? But it's also we're pretty privileged to be a part of it. And I think we're getting there. We're getting the group back together. We're all working together to kind of showcase how cool this sport is. And then new fans come along. You don't have to chase new fans, you know, just to be like other sports.

They want to be part of something that's cool. And we have that. We just got to showcase a little bit more. Yeah, we got to create them early, man. We've got to create them at the short tracks. There's got to all the way. You know, it's hard. To me, it's always been hard for them to get plugged right into the Cup series, right?

Because who do you know, right? Who do you follow, right? It's the people that the hard-nosed fans, right? The old-time fans, they met their people, like I said, at the short tracks. Man, we need to get those, we need to funnel those kids into the short tracks. We need to get this short-track program going, man. We got a lot of good short tracks across the country. I don't know.

You got to get them to the track, right? And then we always talk about drivers, right? But we need drivers that people want to get out and get after. And when I talked about the young guys, the ziliches, the Jesse loves, right? Those guys, they get it. And they've seen kind of the ebb and flow of drivers. And candidly, they came through with some of the drivers who are like, eh, it's a pain in the ass, right?

These young guys, you know, hopefully they don't get jaded, but they're out there. They're interacting with the fans. And that's what we need. We don't need NASCAR as the sanctioning body being the number one. licensed brand. We need our drivers. I try to keep them grounded for you, trust me. No, no, that's good. You do a good job. I think the biggest

thing to take away from it is like, you're welcome to criticism. You know you're not perfect. You know what I mean? There's just a way to go about it. Instead of saying this sucks, just give me a reason or give me a solution to why, you know, whatever it is, I've been guilty about it, just getting in a bad mood about a bad plate race where we couldn't do anything coming here and going, man, this car sucks

on this plate track. I might still feel that way, but if without a solution, what's the held what am I accomplishing so I think like I don't I think everybody's growing up I think as long as you're growing out I think we're rubbing rubbing off our wisdom is running out more than up but here's

here's the deal like you can get on here right criticize that that's all okay but I think at the end of the day at least I think you love this sport right and and I think fans believe in you and all of you guys and so sometimes that gets missed of I feel like it comes from a place a lot of times of I love this thing I just

want it to grow. I want to be better yeah and And that's okay. That's what we got to do. Yeah. Well, again, we appreciate you coming in. Hopefully, this won't be the last time we get you at the table. No, I'm all in. Tommy's, Tommy, Tommy, thanks for boxing him into this. You got to get Mike for sure.

I want to get Jim on, too. I think the key would try to get both on the same time. Yeah. I think, you know, there will be comfort level with Jim. Yeah. Well, I mean, they got some great stories. Same thing with Ben with Jim. Yeah, yeah.

He walks around the racetrack. Nobody knows. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah, hi, Jim. Yeah. We got to get Mike in here so I can pick a bone with them about my hard card from when I was little. I used to get a hard card when I was younger. Like I would even just, I would get one.

And now I don't anymore. I'm like, now I need it. You see that guy that almost got caught on fire? No, I need it. There's a reason why, yeah. Now I need it. I need it now more than I. No, you don't.

You're busy with the cards. All right. Thank you guys for listening. We hope you enjoyed. We will be back next week. I'm trying to drag Boyers in ass in here after Kansas. But he might have some stuff to do next week. So that's coming.

I actually talk to Tyke. Gibbs people before this weekend. He's maybe coming down the road sometime this year. So we got some cool guests coming up. Maybe you're really cool one after Talladega. We'll see what happens there. But we again, thank you guys for listening and we'll be back next week. We're out. Bye. Check out Dirty Mo Media on Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok.