The Dale Jr. Download - 200 - Breaking Down Texas, Matt Kenseth's News, 2018 Start Times and More

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

Dale Earnhardt Jr. recaps his final race at Texas Motor Speedway, the news that Matt Kenseth does not plan to race in 2018, meeting Daniel Ricciardo, and more. Plus, he fields fan questions during the weekly Ask Jr. segment. Check out Dirty Mo Media on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DirtyMoMedia  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is Dale Jr. and you're listening to Dirty Moe Radio. Welcome back to another episode of the Dale Jr. download. This is Tyler Overstreet. I'm joined by Dale Earnhardt Jr. on the phone. Hello, Dale. Hey, how's it going? It's going good. This is episode 200. We've been building up for this for about five years. So we've made it. Well, man, you've only been on here for about 30. I know, but we're going to take credit for all the work that are forefathers have done. Oh, okay. Thank you to Hopeless Records for providing today's theme song.

That was Catholic Girls by the Dangerous Summer. Let's get right into Texas. We finished 35th. I'll let you walk us through the weekend. Oh, yeah. Well, the car was about, I don't know, the car was about 11th to 18th place all weekend. and in every practice we were kind of 15th, it seemed like, and we couldn't make the car faster.

We could change the way it drove. We could make it tighter and looser and drive bad, drive good, but we couldn't really make it faster. And, yeah, so it was a little frustrating from that standpoint, not really being able to find more speed. We ran really good there earlier this year. So I was thinking the car would drive better than it did, but I knew we were probably not going to be as fast as we wanted to be

because we just haven't been able to keep up with the other manufacturers. So once we got into the race, yeah, the car was okay. We just, you know, would run. I could keep like, you know, fifth, eighth place right in front of me. We would run around 12th to 16th for most of the day. and you know if we got the track position I think we we had a good car that could have ran in the top 10 or finished in the top 10 but we were running along there and burn up the left front hub and basically how that happens is there's just so much pressure on the outer baron on the and it's a small bearing but there's a lot of With that camber in the left run and stop load and all kinds of other things that factor into how much, you know, pressure goes into that varying. It just got hot and burnt up.

It might have had a little bit to do with some break temps or maybe not just cooling the wheel of the hub enough. We did have some ducks run to the brakes and so forth. And we did use a lot more break there than you probably would have assumed. but still I never had any brake pedal fade that would tell you there's heat in the brakes. Usually when the brakes get hot, the pedal gets real soft and that didn't happen. So I think the brakes were probably fine from a temperature standpoint,

but maybe we didn't cool the hub or cool the wheel or whatever well enough. And we had a lot of other factors with the weight and the load on that outer bearing playing a role into burning that up. up. It doesn't hardly ever happen. Greg said he's never had a left front hub burn up in his career, and I don't think I have either. So we had to come in and the damage to the hub tore up the spindle. We had to change the spindle in the hub and got back out there and had a little fun racing with the guys toward the back, the 95, and a couple of the guys. We were in the way a little bit, but trying not to be too bad in the way,

because I still won't have some fun. One thing I was wondering is, like, when you have the left front hub go bad like that, what does that feel like in the car? Because initially it sounded like you thought you had a flat tire. Yeah, it feels like a flat tire, I guess. You don't really know when something breaks on the car. It's hard to diagnose it right there from the driver's seat. But never having a hub burnt up, you wouldn't never think,

hey, okay, the hub burnt up. You would just either think you have a flat tire or a loose wheel or something like that because it was right at a restart. But after that, we got out there and finished the race, and I don't know, it was a pretty weird race, to be honest with you. I thought the track was really slick and it's a bit hard to sort of get the car to drive the way you wanted to. Everybody was really loose into the corner, which was pretty wild to see,

watching everybody deal with that. and the second groove only worked for a couple people and only at certain periods of time. It wasn't there the whole time. The track, for whatever reason, seemed to be in way better shape the first race this year. And I think that whatever they're doing, they have this new idea about aging the track artificially. And I don't believe that that is doing what they think. So I think it made the track real hard to drive and only really a single groove racetrack. So we'll just see, I guess, going back next year how things go.

I think using the Trier Dragons is a positive, but they only need to use it in the second and third groove. They don't need to run the Tire Dragon in the bottom groove where we're racing because we, with our cars, are putting rubber down there. We don't need more rubber down there. rubber in places we're not running. But they'll figure it out or they won't. And, you know, that track's going to be a little treacherous and single groove for a couple more years, I'm afraid. So Harvick chased down Truex, which I think was a surprise to everyone.

So Harvick wins the race. He advances to the championship four. Truex advances to the championship four on points. So you've already got three of the four guys locked in. do you think that's anti-climatic for what they wanted, or do you think that's good? Now you've got five guys going for one spot at Phoenix. I think you could look at it either way. The playoff points and the points after each of these stages has definitely spread out the top eight guys.

I mean, there's a lot of points between guys. And I don't know that NASCAR or anybody really likes that. But, you know, I think that it's still going to be pretty interesting to see what happens in Phoenix, but it's not going to be between a spot or two. Guys are literally either going to have to win or they're out. And so without the stage points and all the other things that have been awarded to the drivers throughout the season, And he'd have a whole lot tighter race, I think, going into these final two events. But before we get the homestead, it's still going to be pretty dramatic.

But, you know, I think everybody's like, I don't know if surprised is the right word. But, yeah, I think everybody's kind of taken aback on how spread out everybody is. Don't you think that that's the case? Yeah, because Brad is currently fourth, but he's 19 ahead of Denny and fifth. So if Brad gets any sort of stage points, really, he's got a nice buffer for that final stage. The 24 and 48, obviously, those are the guys that we would hope would make it in. They're 7th and 8th, so they're truly in a must-win situation. I think everybody is.

I think Denny is too. So I don't know if, you know, I think that the stage points are all being great and fun to talk about. and fun for the drivers to get. You know, these guys that have these big leads right now and the stage points that Brad has and Harvick and all those guys, that they like those points, you know, that you want that buffer and that comfort zone. But I think NASCAR may be surprised at just how spread out these guys are across the board.

But it's been, you know, It's been pretty exciting all the way up to this point. I think it will continue to be. Obviously, in Homestead, it doesn't matter. Everybody goes back to zero, the top of the four. The ones for the championship, go back to zero, and it's an even race. What you think about the fact that everyone else in the field can get stage points in the Homestead race, but the champions cannot.

The guys race for the championship. I mean, it makes sense because once you're eliminated from the point, or once you're eliminated from the playoff contention, you're still like all those guys can still get fifth. So those points, that way it's the same as all year. Because I had wondered that, but then I thought about, oh, well, those other guys who are still jockeying for fifth to 15th

or whatever that got eliminated from the playoffs, they can still work their way up, so they'll want those points. It's hard to understand, I think, but. It's real hard to understand, I think. I think that it's gotten, you know, it definitely was real simple last year. You knew that one position was a point. That's all you had to care about. That's all you had to think about.

This year there's a lot more going on. But I think if they could stick with this system, everybody's going to get used to it and get accommodated to it over time. Yeah, I think the prevalence of playoff points or stage points has really come into effect in the playoffs. Because during the year, it was like, oh, okay, you did this, you did that. And it seemed like people only focused on the guy who won the stages. But in the playoffs, especially I've been following the Xfinity one closely because we've got three cars going. But those stage points add up so much.

Yeah, they do. Yeah, they add up. Another thing that we had this weekend was your friend, Daniel Ricardo, came. He was a guest of Chase Elliott. You guys did a helmet swap. That was freaking awesome. You know, I followed Daniel a little bit over the last several years. and heard about his support and thoughts about my dad.

He was a big Earnhardt fan and like NASCAR and all that stuff. So it was kind of cool to have an F1 guy that thought Dale Earnhardt Sr. was cool. So I was a fan automatically of Daniels. He's fun to watch, man. He's got a great attitude, great personality. He enjoys what he does and enjoys his job, and it's fun to watch him do it because he has fun doing it. And we've talked about, you know, meeting one day and hoping that we could. Our worlds are so far apart.

We didn't know when that would happen, but Chase Elliott hosted him this weekend. So thanks to Chase, we, me, and a lot of other drivers and folks at NASCAR had a chance to talk to him this weekend and it was great to have him at the track. I think that he saw a lot of things about our sport that are quite different from his. And he went to the driver's meeting, obviously. That's completely different than you'll see at the F-1 series. I imagine the grid and driver's intros and all that stuff may be similar. But it was good to have him there to experience it.

And he looked like he was having a blast, you know, watching. Looking at all his social media and stuff, he really seemed to be enjoying it. We did get the helmet swap, which was cool. The thing about that that's tough for me is I only really have about one or two helmets all year. And so for me to give away a helmet means that that's really a helmet that I can't keep for myself. So Daniel has a lot of helmets in one season. and so I had to give up my 2014 helmet to Daniel. But it was worth it because I think that he's a legend

and I was really excited, glad to have the opportunity to talk to him and take a picture with him. So that was pretty cool. Another story from the weekend was Matt Kenseth confirming that he will not be racing next year. Obviously you guys came in. You guys competed together in the experience. Series for those championships came in as rookies together and now you're essentially going to go out together uh yeah we're we're gonna uh you know it's two different situations as matt's explained

in most of the interviews that i've seen um this is a this is him stepping away from the sport and and he doesn't you know he would rather continue to race he would rather have opportunity in a great car. I'm sure people are, you know, assuming that he has no opportunities to race. He does have opportunities to drive cars, but they're just not the equipment and not the talent, not to the type of cars or the caliber of teams that he would want to be with. And I don't blame him. I, you know, with his talent, his ability to continue to win races today, I would want to be with a top tier team or not, not any, not any team at all. It's hard to know, he's been with Gibbs, one of the best teams in the garage,

and it's hard to make a transition and step down at that point in your career. Now, that's something that a lot of guys have to do and will do and can do in the mid part of their careers or in their 20s and 30s. But where Matt's at in his career, he doesn't have to step down. He basically, the decision for him is having, have a great opportunity in a great car, or he'll go do something else and enjoy some time off. So it's a bit different situation than mine, but still a bit emotional. And me and him's actually been talking about this for several months.

And it's been, you know, we've talked about how we're going to end our careers together and how we started together. And it's going to be an interesting weekend. at Homestead, even more so now, knowing that, you know, Matt's going, going out and retiring. That thing about that is, you know, he's going to leave the door open to coming back. And, you know, I hope that we see him again in the Cup Series at some point in the type of car and equipment that he wants to drive. because I think that he's still in great health. He's still a very talented driver.

He's taking really good care of himself. He's avoided injury and all those things. I mean, he has a lot of years to provide some team, you know, one of the best drivers in the series. So it's very interesting, really, to see it all shake out. I think that we wondered when the season started and you heard about this Jones kid going into the 20, what would happen? You know, and as opportunities opened up and deals came together and the season got further and further on into it, you know, it became more difficult decision for Matt. So it's emotional and he's having to make a decision that he'd rather not make.

So it's hard. It's frustrating for him on some levels. disappointing, but like he said, he's a bit relieved as well to just have a decision made and go ahead and make some plans about next year. He's got a family, an amazing family, that he'll have a lot of opportunity to spend time with. His little girls are awesome, and so he'll enjoy being able to be around them a little bit more. And speaking of 2018, yesterday, NASCAR released the start times, which we were very critical earlier this year of the 3 o'clock starts. So, In most cases, they move them up to 230, but there are no one o'clock starts.

They're all, the majority of them are two, two 30 or three, including the 2.30 p.m. Eastern time start to the Daytona 500. Going into the booth, oh my gosh. Do you have an opinion on that? Well, I'd read about this, and I don't have an opinion about it. I just don't get it, you know. I don't get it. I don't understand.

Like, what, uh, 23. I mean, it's just so random, don't you think? Yeah, I mean, 2.30 is more random than three. Yeah, I guess. I mean, it doesn't make much sense to me. I mean, I'm still a, I'm still a proponent of a 1 o'clock start time, a 4 o'clock start time, or a 7.30 start time. Um, similar to the NFL, it seems like you would know you can plan and predict when these races are going to start. The start time is in a bit of a no man's land.

It doesn't have an identity. That's what kind of bugs me. And we're just kind of, we're getting on the train and kind of just taking whatever seats open. And we should be taking the seat we want. You know what I mean? But it is what it is. Another thing that came out of Texas weekend is we announced the in appreciation,

an evening with Dale Earnhardt Jr. event that will be happening on November 28th in Las Vegas to kick off Champions Week? Yeah, that's pretty exciting. We're going to have some fun. It's fans only. And so we have, I don't know, like 250 or some tickets for sale. Or that's, we got 200 and some tickets left. So fans can come in there.

We're going to have some guests. I don't know who the guests are. Mike's going to surprise me with all those. guess. That'll be a lot of fun. That's kind of going to be the most fun part for me. I'm going to host it with Mike. So we thought about getting a host to handle those duties, but we're going to host it. So it should be a lot of fun. There'll be some great stories, and I'm sure that Mike's got a lot of surprises in store. All the proceeds, 100% of the proceeds, go to the nationwide children's hospital. We wanted to do something that the fans could be a part of,

and the fans can enjoy, but also, you know, raise, raise money for the children's hospital. And NASCAR signed off on that. I thought that was a great idea. So here we are. I'm excited about it. You can go to championsweek.nascar.com or we've tweeted it from your account, posted on Instagram, and it's also on your Facebook page. So if you want more information on tickets, go to any of those channels.

All right, now we're going to get to our Ask Junior questions. As always, we get these questions from Twitter using the hashtag Ask Junior. At ZRide 81 asked, if you could design a short track for the Cup Series, how big would it be, what shape, and where would it be located? Well, I would like to design a track either identical to Martinsville, but with asphalt corners, or I would design a track identical, identical to Bristol with asphalt corners. And I would probably put that west of the Mississippi.

I think it would be cool to see how that might do out even in California or somewhere on the west coast. At Sean Dante asked, how did you convince your sponsors to let you keep your beard since they didn't like it at first? Well, I think after I had it for such a long time, it became odd without it. when I shave, when I first started going out with Amy, she hated any kind of facial hair, and now she doesn't like it when I shave completely because it just looks so strange. So I think that's just something that people just got used to. And now, plus, you know, I'm real hardheaded about it. And sometimes they tell me to shave and I just show up with a beard.

And that's fun to deal with, yes. Yeah, you've had to handle most of those situations. All right. At 48 underscore dominates, how would you adjust the rules for the cars moving forward after this year? Changes to the splitter, spoiler, side skirts, anything else, or just leave them alone for a while? I don't know. I think you maybe just leave them alone for a while. We've had changes on top of changes, on top of changes. And I just think that we haven't made the racing better. We haven't made it worse with, all the arrow changes that have happened maybe in the last 10 years, five years.

We haven't really seen a difference in the racing where you go, oh, okay, that's a great direction, or that's made a difference, you know, we just haven't seen that. So I don't know that there's a change that you could make or that you could count on or depend on making that you think, you know, you know would go in the right direction. So I don't think there's no point in changing things just to be changing. So I think I'd leave it alone. Let this ride out another year or two and see what direction the teams go with it.

The teams are the ones that, you know, whatever change you make, they'll adapt and they'll continue to find speed. So I would just try to, you know, keep things the same for a while and allow the teams to continue to evolve and that'd be a good direction, I believe. Some consistency. see. At Susan 345612 asked, will you decrease the amount of cycling you do during the

offseason? How much will cold weather influence your decision? Cold weather shouldn't influence my decision too much. They make great, great clothes for cold weather rides. And I think, you know, I want to stay in shape and I want to sleep well and feel good and have energy and all those things. So I'm going to continue to ride. If you stop riding for a week or two, it's really hard to get back going again. And to be able to sustain the gains that you make on the bike, you've got to continue to do it. So I want to be able to show up next year and ride with all the guys at the racetracking stuff, just like we do now or all my friends back home. And I don't want to feel like I have to start all over again and get myself back into shape.

At pro-hunting asked, how much are you looking forward to Phoenix this weekend after Alex almost won there last year and you won there the year before in the fall race? Oh, pro-hunting, huh? Oh, pro-hunting. This is why I'm doing this on, yeah, this is why we're doing this podcast separately because I'm hunting and you're back at the office. What was the question, sorry? How much are you looking forward to Phoenix this weekend after Alex almost won there last year and you won? there the year before. I'm going in there thinking that we're going to have to work hard to make something

happen. We're going to have to really put a good effort in during practice and show up with a car that's got some speed. It's going to take some effort to get ourselves to make some of the gains that we need to make. But I do like the racetrack. It is the second to last race in my career. So we'll be wanting to make it a memorable one and have a good result.

All right. That's all the Ask Junior questions for this week. As always, you can keep sending us those questions on Twitter using the hashtag Ask Junior. If you love Dale Jr., then Exaltor Racing is your go-to social media account on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It brings you Insiders info all weekend long on the 88 team. It's at Exaltor Racing, a must follow for any Dale Jr. fan. All right. Now, looking ahead, Thursday, we're going to head west, and you'll be in L.A. doing Jimmy Kimmel. live. That's Thursday night. Friday, practice and qualifying at Phoenix. Qualifying at 6.45 p.m. Eastern Time on NBC Sports Network. Saturday, two practices, one at 11.30 a.m. and the other at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, both on NBC Sports Network. The Xfinity race is at 3.30 p.m. Eastern Time on NBC. J.R.M drivers are one, two, three heading into the last race before the championship at Homestead.

So hopefully all three of those guys lock in. Sunday, the race is at 2.30 p.m. Eastern Time on NBC. Yeah, absolutely, man. It's going to be fun being on Kimmel. We've been talking about this for a couple of months, me and you. It's always an enjoyment being on that show. So I can't wait to see what he has to ask us and talk about. look forward to the Xfinity race this weekend with our guys trying to get themselves into the final race at homestead. That's going to be really exciting. It'll be fun to see what four guys make it. And then, you know, we're going to Phoenix for the final race in the nationwide car.

And everybody knows about that relationship and how much that's meant to me. So it's important to me that we have a good finish for them. All right. That's it for this week's show. appreciate everybody listening. We'll be back next week. The Dale Jr. download and all Dirty Mo Radio podcasts are made possible by Exaltta.

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