Happy Hour: We’ll miss you, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.
Throughout the week you can send us your best questions, jokes, rants and just plain miscellaneous thoughts to [email protected] or @NickBromberg. We’ll post them here and have a good time.
The biggest NASCAR news of the week – outside of what NASCAR CEO Brian France said Monday – might have been the announcement that Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. is no longer Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.
We’re glad we wrote this headline when we did.
The band announced they were changing their name to Jr. Jr. on Wednesday and if you haven’t seen their reasoning why, you should. It includes the letter Dale Earnhardt Jr. wrote to the band when he heard of them.
If you haven’t heard of the band, we recommend checking them out on YouTube. They have a distinctive sound and don’t take themselves too seriously. Which is something we all need to do most of the time. Why do we say that? Well, look at this first email we got about Danica Patrick following Saturday night’s race at Kentucky and her incident with Junior.
In my opinion, Danika Patrick needs to do something besides attempt to be a race car driver. She is taking up a space and not doing anything except going around the race track. GET OFF THE RACE TRACK DANIKA!!! – Cheryl
Cheryl likely clicked the email link in the post about Patrick, meaning she had just seen the correct spelling of her first name. Sigh.
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If [Earnhardt’s] damn brakes didn’t work why the hell didn’t he pit and get them fixed! Stupid to endanger himself and others. – Vincent
Junior’s team did fix them and he had been running relatively well since the repair. He just had another issue and hit Patrick. Racing is about risks, and while the points system means Junior could have just packed up and told his team to meet him at the hauler for a beer after the race, the team chose not to do so. And it’s admirable.
When you’re getting paid lots of money to do something you love, you want to persevere through the good times and the bad. Hell, you should want to persevere when you’re not getting paid a ton of money.
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Quote from Junior after hitting Danica: “I know better than to run into her because it gets so much attention.” Clearly this would have been less of a deal if Junior had run into Stenhouse instead. Are drivers extra-careful around Danica so they don’t get negative media attention? Has this helped Danica’s on-track performance, even if just a little? – Craig
Highly doubtful. You’re not doing your job as a driver if you’re taking it easy on certain drivers because of media attention. And given that Patrick has been in a fair amount of incidents in her NASCAR career, it’s tough to say she has been driven delicately by other drivers.
We just loved Junior’s awareness after the crash. You knew he immediately was like “Crap, this is gonna be a headliner” when the incident happened and we give him a lot of credit for that. When you’re in a position of power you can totally lack self-awareness. Or at least pretend that you do. Those two sentences certainly don’t apply to Junior and others in NASCAR can learn from that example.
Saturday night’s race was fun. It’s why it was, uh, interesting to see France list the reasons how it could have been improved. We anticipated muted crowing from NASCAR given the success of the race. And while France did say NASCAR liked the race, his comments about what he wanted to see more were, as we said, head-scratching. Here’s what we wrote Tuesday. Pack racing and drafting and Kentucky don’t make much sense.
The Southern 500 should be a good race too; and that’s imperative for the perceived success of the new rules. It can drag on. It’s just incredibly tough to run side-by-side at Darlington in the corners even if NASCAR has a softer tire for the race. We’re anticipating drivers really getting runs off the corners to either complete passes exiting the turns or set passes up for the entry into the corners. And if Kentucky is any indication, lots of Darlington stripes and cautions.
Brad Keselowski advocated for a mid-week race and we’ve talked about how much we like the idea before. It needs to happen and why not on Wednesday or Thursday night after the All-Star Race? Wednesday’s television competition was either the ESPYs or the Gold Cup and since NASCAR is no longer on ESPN, competing with the worldwide leader isn’t a problem.
Seizing the barren sports landscape should be imperative for a sport that once thought it could take on the NFL. It’s still the top Sunday alternative to the league in the fall and will serve as an important lead-in to Sunday Night Football on NBC. But it’s not pulling NFL TV numbers.
We’re good with either of the first two options. Eldora on Indianapolis week makes too much sense for logistical reasons. It’s about two hours from Indy. And w’re so excited to be there in a week. We’re just disappointed that there’s no sports car racing at Indianapolis this year. Last year we attended the two sports car races, ARCA, Xfinity and the Brickyard. This year we were hoping to make it six races. We’ll have to settle for four.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
