{"id":37465,"date":"2025-07-04T07:21:25","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T07:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/37465\/"},"modified":"2025-07-04T07:21:25","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T07:21:25","slug":"dale-earnhardt-jr-rants-about-how-atlanta-is-viewed-in-nascar-takes-issue-with-lazy-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/37465\/","title":{"rendered":"Dale Earnhardt Jr. rants about how Atlanta is viewed in NASCAR, takes issue with ‘lazy’ approach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dale Earnhardt Jr.<\/strong> has an issue with how the Atlanta track is viewed in NASCAR. On Dale Jr. Download, <\/a>Earnhardt talked about how Atlanta is viewed after its reconfiguration.<\/p>\n

\u201cA long time ago, restrictor plates came into the sport, and we call those tracks where they ran them restrictor plate tracks,\u201d Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. \u201cAtlanta got reconfigured, and we started seeing a similar style of racing there. They don\u2019t have restrictor plates anymore. They have carburetor spaces and different things and different ways to limit the horsepower. We didn\u2019t know what to call Atlanta, because it\u2019s not a restrictor plate track. Those parts and pieces aren\u2019t around anymore.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, we call them drafting tracks, which I hate, but it is what it is. I don\u2019t get to choose. We don\u2019t see the same type of racing at Daytona and Talladega that we see at Atlanta.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dale Earnhardt Jr. says the Atlanta tracks is \u2018it\u2019s own thing\u2019<\/p>\n

Earnhardt continued, \u201cAtlanta is its own thing. It has a little bit to do with the shape of the track and how short it is. It has the dog leg. All those things produce a unique style of racing we see nowhere else. Somebody decided, \u2018Well, what are we going to call this? Drafting tracks. It\u2019s just really low-hanging fruit, lazy way to sort of describe these three tracks together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earnhardt made the comments after <\/strong>Chase Elliott<\/strong> won a wild race<\/a> at the Atlanta track last weekend. Weeks before the race, Speedway Motorsports announced that the track had been renamed from Atlanta Motor Speedway to EchoPark Speedway. It\u2019s a part of a seven-year agreement with EchoPark Automotive. <\/p>\n

EchoPark Speedway opened as Atlanta International Raceway in 1960. The track hosted NASCAR\u2019s final race of the season from 1987 to 2000. In 2021, the track was reconfigured to a 28-degree banked superspeedway-style track, which is why it\u2019s compared to Daytona and Talladega. <\/p>\n

According to NASCAR\u2019s official website<\/a>, Echopark Speedway is the only drafting track. As mentioned earlier, the track is built like a Superspeedway, but it\u2019s significantly smaller as it\u2019s only 1.54 miles. Daytona and Talladega are at least 2.5 miles. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dale Earnhardt Jr. has an issue with how the Atlanta track is viewed in NASCAR. On Dale Jr.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":37466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[4727,1406,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-37465","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-dale-earnhardt-jr","9":"tag-nascar","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114793760905187140","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}