Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants to see new dates for both the summer races at Daytona International Speedway and Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Historically, the summer race at Daytona was called the Firecracker 400 and was contested either on Independence Day or the weekend of. Now that race, called the Coke Zero Sugar 400 is the regular season finale and a sort of last chance opportunity for any driver to win their way into the Cup Series playoffs.
The summer race at Atlanta, a track which is now a drafting track race similar in identity to Daytona and Talladega, is usually placed somewhere in the June window even though it was made the playoff opener last year.
Daytona moved off July 4 weekend because the city felt that Daytona Beach already drew tourists that weekend of the holiday. Moving the race to another weekend created a second tourism opportunity for the city to generate revenue through.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a traditionalist and tackled where both of these tracks’ summer races should be on the latest episode of his podcast.
“So, with that all said, do you take Atlanta and put it as the last race of the regular season? I know that, you know, I don’t think that means you take Daytona and put it where Atlanta is,” he said on the Dale Jr. Download. “We’ve already went through this, where the city of Daytona – so the Daytona race was the July 4th event. Once it moved away, the city of Daytona went, ‘Man, we like this, we don’t need it to go back to that, you know, we don’t need it to go back to the way it was ever again. Because now we have two holidays. We have July 4th, when we get a lot of people because it’s July 4th. Then we have the race later when a lot of people come into town. We don’t need them on the same date.’
“So, the city loves how things are now. So, I don’t know that you move Daytona back to July, around the 4th. But could Daytona just move to another part of the year? I think absolutely it could, and having Atlanta as the final race of the regular season, to me, sounds like a no-brainer. What do you think?”
His co-host, best friend, and longtime spotter TJ Majors endorsed Atlanta as the regular season finale because in all candor, it was the more legitimate race.
“Oh, I’m taking Atlanta. Because Atlanta, at least you can, at least you got a chance to really … I mean, I like Atlanta because you’ve got a chance to get away from others a little bit and you can kind of control your own destiny a little bit more at Atlanta, even though I know the end of the race ended up with teammates helping each other,” Majors said. “But it wasn’t like, I don’t know, it’s still really hard for me because if you look at some of the Atlanta races before, like, if that big wreck doesn’t happen, do those Penske cars control those top two lines like they did before?”
Last year, a scheduling quirk due to the Olympics had the summer Daytona race as the penultimate race of the regular season and then the Southern 500 as the finale instead of the playoff opener. Harrison Burton and Chase Briscoe won their way into the playoffs over those final two races, both facing must-win scenarios, providing ample dramatics to the season narrative at large.
