NASCAR news as Stephen A.Smith challenged and Dale – Sports News
Stephen A. Smith’s latest feedback sparked outrage (Image: Getty)
It has been a busy week in NASCAR off the monitor, with two important storylines producing appreciable noise.
The first controversy arrived Tuesday when ESPN character Stephen A. Smith was requested on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Sports Radio about the place LeBron James ranks among the many best athletes of all time.
A caller steered NASCAR legend Richard Petty deserved a place in that dialog. Smith was having none of it. “Come on, man. That don’t count. You driving a car!” he stated. “I’m being honest, it’s a great sport. But come on, bro. Getting behind the wheel of a car is not the same.” One NASCAR driver responded with the proper rebuttal to Smith’s assertion.
“You can be behind the wheel of a car in your 60s and 70s for crying out loud,” Smith stated. “A golfer is not an athlete. A NASCAR driver is not an athlete. Just because you’ve got to walk the course for 18 holes for four days, that don’t make you an athlete.”
The NASCAR group responded shortly, and Front Row Motorsports led the charge. The group, which fields Cup Series entries for Noah Gragson, Todd Gilliland and Zane Smith, despatched a message to Smith’s Instagram account that leaned immediately into his signature broadcast type.
“Stephen A., what’s going on, my man?” the message learn. “We heard that ABSOLUTELY PREPOSTEROUS take of yours claiming NASCAR drivers aren’t athletes, and quite frankly, we were stunned. Stunned!”
Earnhardt pushed back on a NASCAR proposal (Image: Getty)
“So here’s what we’re gonna do; we’re inviting you to step out of that studio, come down here, and hop in for a ride-along with one of our three Cup Series drivers. Then you can tell the world how ‘not athletic’ it feels going 180 miles per hour, pulling G-forces, and fighting that wheel for three straight hours. We’ll be waiting,” the message read.
Meanwhile, Dale Earnhardt Jr. was dealing with a separate but equally heated NASCAR debate on his Dale Jr. Download podcast.
The topic was a potential proposal to shift the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series toward a CUV-style body inspired by its electric vehicle, an idea floated by NASCAR VP John Probst, who had said the CUV electric platform represented something “on the roadmap to think about.”
Probst acknowledged that the O’Reilly Series “struggles a little bit simply from the car perspective” in terms of brand identity and suggested a CUV format could eventually address that.
Earnhardt Jr., who owns JR Motorsports which competes in the series, did not hold back in his opposition. “I feel making a swap to something not like what we have now could be a huge, huge mistake,” he said.
He credited the current version of the series with real momentum and argued that upending the formula would throw all of that away. “I feel any sort of change like that, dramatic as that will be, would destroy the sequence as we all know it,” he said. “I’d not be excited about that, and I do not suppose JR Motorsports could be excited about that.”
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