Dale Earnhardt Jr. was on the broadcast call for NBC like he normally is during Saturday's Xfinity Series race at Martinsville. All he could do was sit and watch as Richard Childress Racing's Austin Hill and Sheldon Creed had issues on the final restart, with both costing each other a chance at the Championship Four at Phoenix and following it up with mutual venom after the race. Even the normally even-tempered RCR team owner, Richard Childress, let the emotions of the moment spill into his own post-race interview, calling Creed "stupid."
Earnhardt's driver, Justin Allgaier, won the race, and Earnhardt had a busy evening celebrating the victory and doing his own post-race interviews and shared his thoughts about what went down with RCR's drivers.
Being a car owner and former driver, he had a very unique take on the incident after being asked how he would've handled the situation by Fox Sport's Bob Pockrass.
During the winning team news conference, I was curious on what Dale Earnhardt Jr. thought of the finish in regards to the RCR teammate dynamic both from a driver and owner perspective. He didn?t see anything out of line but understands the frustrations: pic.twitter.com/FatNPqjAj0
— Bob Pockrass (@bobpockrass) October 29, 2023
"I don't know what you do. I was sitting there, thinking about that, talking about that, in those final handful of laps. You've got two sets of teammates, in there with Gibbs and RCR. You've got arguably two or three of those guys out of that group that have to win. What do you expect them to do? I can understand Richard or Austin or Creed's frustration, but I mean, they were doing what they have to do to win. It's tough," Earnhardt said. "The playoffs and the elimination races and everything, it puts us in those situations that we've never been in before, with teammates. You've got a car capable of winning the race, but your teammate needs this, and another one needs that, and you can't really go out and have an objective of your own. An agenda of your own. It puts us in unique situations now that we've never really watched people experience or been a part of before."
Luckily for Creed, this weekend's championship race at Phoenix is his final race behind the wheel of the No. 2 as he moves on for the 2024 Xfinity season.
