Dale Earnhardt Jr believes NASCAR drivers keep | Sports News

Dale Earnhardt Jr. believes the present era of NASCAR drivers for repeatedly breaking an “unwritten code.”

On Lap 75 of final weekend’s NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race at Talladega Superspeedway, Carson Kvapil and Justin Allgaier — who lately suffered a scary blown tire — have been every issued rarely-seen penalties. Upon exiting pit highway on the ultimate inexperienced flag pit stop, the pair of JR Motorsports drivers pulled up in entrance of the pack on the back straightaway, inflicting Jesse Love to swing extensive.

Three laps later, NASCAR handed Kvapil and Allgaier two drive-through penalties for making an attempt to impede the progress of oncoming visitors. Earnhardt applauded the sanctioning physique for penalizing the maneuver, which he insisted would by no means fly during his racing days.

“I was in practice — I can’t remember if this was an Xfinity race or another rally race or a Cup race — but this was probably 2003,” Earnhardt mentioned on the most recent episode of his podcast.

“We’re out there practicing on the racetrack and we’ve got about a 10-car pack. Kenny Wallace pulls out on the racetrack, and there’s a handful of cars down on the bottom going down the back straight away that are going to blend up into the pack. And they’re going quite a bit slower.

“So as we’re going down the back straight away I kind of start feeding the pack high because I figure these guys in the bottom are going to stay low. And so we ease off into turn three and we’re going up toward the wall, well Kenny Wallace just drives up the racetrack to jump in front of us.

“And I was like, ‘Damn, that’s crazy.’ It’s practice and we’re trying to jump in front of a pack that’s going maybe 15 miles an hour faster because you want to be the leader of that pack?”

While Earnhardt acknowledged that the on-track habits was frowned upon during his profession, the 51-year-old believes that it’s since develop into normalized on this present day and age. “Anytime that ever happened, everyone thought, ‘Man you just don’t do that,” he added.

“That’s against the code. You just don’t do it. You don’t pull up in front of people in practice. You don’t get in front of guys that are making mock runs. I know this is a race and this is competition, and … there’s an effort by them to try to impede the pack so they don’t lose all these positions.

“But it’s always kind of been an unwritten code that you just don’t pull up in front of a pack of cars that are coming 10, 20 mile an hour faster than you. And it’s become normalized, which it shouldn’t be. NASCAR is right to to try to get a hold of it before it becomes a problem [and] somebody gets turned over.”