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Dale Earnhardt Jr. called on NASCAR to rethink its yellow-line rule at Talladega Superspeedway and Daytona after Kyle Larson‘s last-lap win Sunday, saying NASCAR should loosen the rule or “do away with it entirely” so it stops deciding races.
Earnhardt made the comments on his podcast, in a clip posted by his Dirty Mo Media. He had already said Larson’s move “looks fine to me” in a post on X Sunday night, as Pit This Time reported.
Dale Jr.: ‘Time to sort of revisit this’
Earnhardt said he first suggested getting rid of the rule while calling a Talladega race from the booth in Charlotte during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“And I said then, I think we should get rid of the rule,” he said. “We’re not going to tear up less race cars or more race cars, and I do think that it might be time for them to revisit the spirit of the rule.”
He used Austin Hill‘s dip below the line on the last lap as an example. “Do I have a problem with the 33 going below half a car right there? Does that give him some massive unfair advantage to the rest of the field? No,” Earnhardt said. “He didn’t even try to do it. He didn’t. He overreacted. Just like Larson.”
“I’m not sure that right here at this table, I know exactly everything that we should do, but I do feel like that we could certainly loosen it up a little bit, do away with it entirely. I’m not sure.”
‘This stinky funk over the whole sport’
Earnhardt said he does not want a rule like this to take a win away.
“I just wish we could figure out how to do it differently to where those situations aren’t determining the outcomes of the race. I hate to think that if Austin Hill dips below the line there and he goes on and wins the race, he won the race,” he said.
“But since we have this rule, it’s likely that they would have taken that win away. And now we’ve got this stinky funk over the whole sport for the week.”
What NASCAR said
NASCAR’s Mike Forde said on the Hauler Talk podcast Tuesday that Hill went below the line on his own and likely would have been black-flagged had he won, but that he had already fallen to the last car on the lead lap. NASCAR said Larson’s tire never went fully below the line, so his pass was legal.
What’s next
Larson’s win gave him a 73-point lead over Denny Hamlin with two races left. The Cup Series races next at Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Virginia, on Sunday, November 1, at 2 p.m. ET on NBC.
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