much to Earnhardt Jr.’s delight<\/a>. As a result of the switch to straight points qualification for the postseason, every race matters now, a fact which not lost on Earnhardt Jr.<\/p>\nRecently, the Hall of Famer spoke on his podcast, Dale Jr. Download, where he outlined just how delighted he is at the steps NASCAR has taken this offseason, echoing comments recently made by Hamlin about how, following the settlement of the antitrust lawsuit, there appears to be a much more collaborative approach between teams and the organization about the future of the sport.<\/p>\n
“I feel like NASCAR is on the right track as an industry … I am very, very happy today with the direction we’re going,” said a delighted Earnhardt Jr.<\/p>\n
“I’m learning that no badly I want it to be a certain thing, it’s never going to be perfect, and I’m never going to get everything I want, but I’m getting a lot of what I want and I see an industry that’s trying to find the answers.<\/p>\n
“I’m more interested in what happens this year in terms of how our season develops, how drivers gather points throughout the year and I’m more interested in that week to week than I’ve been in over a decade.<\/p>\n
Earnhardt Jr. also called the Daytona 500 “a lot of fun” and that recent conversations he has had with NASCAR are promising, something which Hamlin agreed with following the 2026 Cup Series opener.<\/p>\n
Speaking after the Daytona 500, Hamlin said: “We have to now figure out how we can get the sport back where it was decades ago. In order to do that, the only way we can do it is we\u2019re all going to have to pull the rope in the same direction.<\/p>\n
“Even conversations that I\u2019ve had with NASCAR executives as late as a couple days ago, sitting in a bus talking about what do we need to be five years from now, two years from now, ten years from now. What does the sport need to look like. Those were all really good conversations, and they were very open to suggestions.<\/p>\n
He added: “It seems like there\u2019s more of a collaborative pull of the rope than what I\u2019ve \u2014 even since December. The team owner meetings were much more productive than what they\u2019ve been really since I\u2019ve been an owner.<\/p>\n
“So it seems like they\u2019re willing to make the changes that it needs to to make the sport grow because we\u2019re all going to be better when the sport grows. We\u2019ve got to work really, really hard at it, but I think we can get there.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Denny Hamlin agree that NASCAR’s future appears bright following an offseason of change. NASCAR…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,14056,3932,2332,634,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-485725","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-dale-earnhardt-jr","11":"tag-denny-hamlin","12":"tag-motorsport-section","13":"tag-nascar","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}