Dale Earnhardt Jr. doesn’t want his fans slamming NBC over his exit from the network.
The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand reported last week that Earnhardt Jr. would be leaving NBC’s NASCAR coverage after six years to join Amazon and WBD’s broadcast teams.
According to On3, a rumor made the rounds on Reddit claiming that Earnhardt Jr. was wary of the idea that NBC would make him broadcast races remotely from their Charlotte studio instead of live at the races, and that he had clashes with producers who urged him to analyze races based on what was happening on the monitors as opposed to looking out at the track.
Earnhardt Jr. denied these rumors in a post on X earlier this week.
“This is all untrue,” he tweeted. “NBC is not considering a remote booth and I was never scolded for anything. NBC was amazing and everyone there taught me a ton. I promise that’s the truth. Nothing but respect and love for everyone there that I came in contact with.”
It is possible that this rumor began circulating based on what he said on his own podcast last week.
Earnhardt Jr. spoke for several minutes about how he would have generally preferred TV cameras zoomed out on the races further to show more cars on the screen beyond the top three or four drivers.
He discussed how he disliked the idea, for example, of the seventh driver making a pass into sixth, without it being shown live on TV, or of a wreck around the 10th spot that he would have been better able to see coming if the race was shot on a wider lens.
One of his co-hosts brought up how Kevin Harvick has talked about wanting to watch the race on the track as compared to through the monitors.
“To Harvick’s credit, you see something happen and you react to it a lot of times, not knowing what’s on the screen,” Earnhardt Jr. said.
“But sometimes that’s OK. You know, when I was a kid growing up, they always told me, ‘Don’t react to anything that’s not on the screen. The viewer can’t see it going on. That’s wrong. Don’t do that.’ I don’t believe in that. I think that’s BS. I’m gonna react if I see something happening that’s not on the screen. I don’t think that’s a rule that I’m gonna abide by.”
It is possible that this commentary got interpreted as representing a fractious relationship with NBC, but Earnhardt Jr. was adamant that was not the case.