Following the controversy surrounding Corey Day, especially after his incident with Connor Zilisch at Circuit of The Americas, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has opened up about what he described as a “depressing” shift in NASCAR’s young driver culture.
COTA Incident Sparks Honest Reflection From Dale Earnhardt Jr.
The incident, which saw Day sending Zilisch spinning in the closing laps of the race, sparked immediate conversations within the organizations involved. Day drives for Hendrick Motorsports, while Zilisch races for JR Motorsports, a team co-owned by Earnhardt, his sister Kelley Earnhardt Miller, and Hendrick Motorsports owner Rick Hendrick.
In the aftermath of the COTA clash, team leadership quickly organized a meeting with Day and other team figures to address the situation and prevent further friction. Earnhardt revealed that Hendrick personally spoke with Day, stressing that the organization still believes in his potential despite the controversy.
However, the message delivered to the young driver was clear that success cannot come at the expense of teammates and partner organizations.
“We’ve had teammate issues in the past. We will have them in the future,” explained Earnhardt. “When you bring all of these young kids into the same building, they are all on different paths. They are all eager to get that next opportunity. They’re all eager to get that call from Rick or Trackhouse or somebody, any owner, and they aren’t looking at their teammate in the car next to them as a long-term relationship.”
The situation also prompted Earnhardt to reflect on how the mindset of young drivers entering NASCAR has changed compared to previous generations.
According to the former NASCAR star, many modern drivers treat their teams as temporary stepping stones rather than long-term careers.
“They’re thinking in their mind, ‘If everything works out, I’m here for a year or two and I’m gone.’ And this guy that’s my teammate, I won’t be teammates with him ever again. The drivers themselves do not try to nurture or create relationships with their teammates,” he said. “It’s transactional.”
Earnhardt compared that mentality with the culture that existed when he began racing in NASCAR. In that era, drivers were deeply connected to their teams, equipment, and even their race cars.
“They get in the race car and they have no relationship to the car,” he said of today’s young drivers. “They don’t know where the spindles came from. They don’t know the history of the chassis. They don’t know where it raced last.”
“Twenty years ago we knew all that. Hell, we named our damn race cars. They had personalities.”
Instead, he believes many drivers today focus purely on their own opportunities, sometimes with little consideration for the equipment or the people responsible for preparing it.
“They go out there and rip the sides off of them and run into things,” Earnhardt said. “And then they come back to the shop and all our guys unload them out of the hauler. And it’s just depressing.”
While Day’s repeated incidents remain under scrutiny after COTA, Earnhardt made it clear that the broader issue extends beyond a single driver. “Corey Day isn’t the only one on the racetrack in our group making bad decisions,” he admitted.
For now, the hope within the organization is that those conversations will mark a new beginning, one that could help restore trust and accountability among their young drivers.
