NASCAR will reportedly be doubling practice time, starting at New Hampshire. It would now be a singular 50-minute session for the whole field on track together, with two sets of tires allotted. It’s a simple enough change. But the moment it was announced, one concern kept circling back.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
If the biggest teams already have every advantage, are you not just handing them more rope? Dale Jr. heard the argument. His response was not exactly diplomatic.
“Who the **** cares, who the **** cares anyway?” he said on his podcast when asked about whether bigwigs like JGR and Hendrick get more advantage.
Dale Jr. then cited Connor Zilisch as an example. Last year, he won ten Xfinity races. He came into Cup this season as one of the most talked-about rookies in years. And through the summer, by Dale Jr.’s count, the kid had barely scraped together 400 total laps. It wasn’t because he was slow.
In the practice for North Wilkesboro, Zilisch finished 13th overall. But bad things seem to have gripped his young career as of late; wrecks and mechanical failures have become recurrent. Zilisch also faced a strange pit road issue just last Sunday.
“A driver like that, coming into his rookie season after winning 10 Xfinity races last year, needs practice,” Dale Jr. added. “Guys like him need practice. I can’t stress that enough.”
Zilisch is the example, but the argument is bigger than one driver. Think about what 25 minutes actually meant for a team without resources. You roll off the hauler; the car feels wrong, and you spend the whole session just trying to figure out what is wrong. Then, it is over.
You qualify and race with a broken car simply because there was no time to fix it and check if the fix worked. That was the reality every week for teams like Front Row Motorsports.
They do not have the same simulator access as Hendrick or Gibbs. They cannot build a perfect car in a virtual environment before leaving the shop. For them, the racetrack was the only place to find speed, and 25 minutes was not enough of it.
Fifty minutes with two tire sets changes that math entirely. Run the first set, find the problem, make the adjustments on pit road, run the second set, and see if it worked. That cycle of test, adjust, confirm can become a lifesaver for teams like these.
“Teams like Front Row and others finally get the chance to experiment,” Dale Jr. said. “Instead of just showing up with one setup and hoping it works, they can actually try things, learn from the session, and dial in their cars.”
Hendrick and Gibbs will indeed get better too. More time means more data, and nobody processes data faster than the sport’s biggest operations. But those teams were already fast.
Extra practice raises their ceiling by a fraction. For a mid-tier team, it raises their floor enough to be competitive on Sunday.
“It helps everybody,” Dale Jr. said, “even if it helps some teams more than others.”
That is the whole point. Some teams are getting better. Others are getting saved.