Let Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Mark Martin Run NASCAR, Plus Other Musings

My day job provides me ample time (and a window) in which to gaze out of and ruminate, particularly regarding the comings and goings of the racing world. I don’t want to alarm anyone, but a few of these things have been on my mind …

Joey Logano is NOT Doing Great

In fact, it’s an unmitigated disaster at this stage of the season. There have been a couple of flashes of past champion brilliance: third in the Daytona 500, third again at Martinsville and a seventh at Bristol. But that is where it ends. Six finishes of 30th or worse, including four in a row. Those are start and park numbers, not The Captain’s flagship Cup team. We are only 12 races into the season and the trend line is not going in the right direction.

To put things into perspective, he’s essentially one full race of points away from the cut line behind our most recent winner, Shane van Gisbergen, but also one full points race away from battling Todd Gilliland for 26th. There is no more “win and you’re in” for the playoffs. The driver ahead of him, Chase Briscoe, has had equally poor luck, but has also been just as fast as his Toyota teammates as of late. I’m not saying he has no chance, but right now the No. 22 team just seems lost and in desperate need of something other than a fifth straight 30th-place finish.

Let Dale & Mark Run Things

While the racing at Dover Motor Speedway was legitimately good, the general indifference to the All-Star event is unsustainable. This used to be a marquee event with hours of coverage dedicated to it. The pre-amble to the Coca-Cola 600 run the week prior at Charlotte Motor Speedway was something special.

Over the years it created some of the most iconic images in our sport’s history: The Pass in the Grass (1987), Rusty Wallace dumping Darrell Waltrip (1989), One Hot Night: Kyle Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Davey Allison on the last lap (1992), Dale wrecks DW (1995), Kyle wrecks Kurt (2007). The list goes on. Even on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio this week, multiple shows were talking about how we should just scrap the All-Star race and move on.

This is not the answer.

On the Dale Jr. Download this week, Dale Earnhardt Jr. gave his prescription for how to salvage the All-Star Race. Make it a simple, short race limited to winners of the prior or current year, or cap it at a certain number and have an Open event like we’ve had in the past with one transfer spot. That’s it. Run it on Wednesday the week leading up to the Coca-Cola 600 and keep it simple. It doesn’t need to drag out for three hours or have some calculus to figure out starting positions. We’ve had a pretty good intermediate car here the last couple of seasons, so let’s take advantage of it — and not rob Dover of a much deserved date for the northeast.

Between his ideas for the All-Star Race and Clash (which I have echoed), coupled with his push for a change to the championship points format along with Mark Martin … Can we just defer to these two guys and let them run things? In the span of a year, they’ve addressed the floundering championship format, pulled the reins in on NASCAR’s broadcast partners and communicated it to their audience to gather feedback and amplify the opinion of the fans. THIS is what leadership looks like, and the more involved they become, the better the odds that we can correct some of the obstacles that NASCAR has created for itself over the past decade.

2026 Hall of Fame Class on Target

Speaking of getting things right, this year’s Hall of Fame class seems to have the least amount of controversy that I can recall in recent years. Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton, Larry Phillips and Lisa France-Kennedy with the Landmark Award will be this year’s inductees, with Neil Bonnett and Greg Biffle falling short in the voting.

Harvick was a shoe-in. I feel it’s lost on some of the newer followers of NASCAR just how important he was during NASCAR’s ascendance into a network broadcast phenomenon in 2001, taking over the controls of what was the most important car in the sport. With that came intense scrutiny and polarizing moments, but he also performed what was an impossible task at the time. Not just winning in only his third race following the passing of Dale Earnhardt Sr., but managing everything else that came with it. A championship in 2014, a pair of Daytona 500s, Southern 500 and Coca-Cola 600 wins, and three Brickyard 400s, he really left no box unchecked.

Larry Phillips is Midwest short track royalty, dominating the weekly series championships in the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, and prior to that helped fellow NASCAR stars Rusty Wallace, Kenny Wallace, Martin and Ken Scharder as they started their respective careers. Jeff Burton may not have the raw stats one would align with a Hall of Fame driver, but his contributions within safety, media, and as an intermediary between the drivers, teams and sanctioning body was important as NASCAR evolved over the last 30 years.

That brings me to one of the omissions: Biffle.

The events of December 2025 were an incomprehensible tragedy, and the continued fallout of the criminal case against those who appear to have known him continue to make headlines. One of Biffle’s personal projects was the development of his friend Garrett Mitchell (a.k.a. Cleetus McFarland) as a racecar driver. While he has made his own headlines this year, nearly pulling off an ARCA win at Talladega in the process, it was perhaps fitting that Biffle did not receive the nod this year. I feel it’d be fitting for Mitchell to get his feet under him a bit and see things through with an ARCA win and some O’Reilly’s Series starts and allow him the honor of inducting his friend into the Hall of Fame should he earn the vote next year.

It would be a full circle moment for sure, and one that would make his late friends Biffle and Kyle Loftus smile.