Dale Earnhardt Jr sends NASCAR dire warning about potential move to electric

Dale Earnhardt Jr. has hit out at suggestions that the NASCAR O'Reilly Series could move toward electric vehicles.

The racing legend and JR Motorsports owner snapped back hard against the idea raised by NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer John Probst in a recent interview, intended to give the series a unique identity.

The idea remains very much just that – an idea – and the fan backlash coupled with team owners like Earnhardt coming out against the concept means that it may never see the light of day.

Earnhardt's JR Motorsports team runs four cars full-time in the series and another on a part-time basis, meaning that his implied threat that the team would pull out of the series if it went electric carry some real weight.

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Dale Jr. warns NASCAR could destroy popular series

Speaking on his podcast this week, he said: “I think making a switch to anything unlike what we have would be a massive, massive mistake.

“I think any kind of change like that, dramatic as that would be, would destroy the series as we know it. I would not be interested in that [and] I don’t think JR Motorsports would be interested in that."

Probst had said in an interview with the Sports Business Journal: “There is certainly a needle to be threaded there along the line of entertainment and sport, and maybe you can even go beyond sport and just say pure engineering.

"I think for us, I feel like we don’t need to be on the absolute bleeding edge of powertrain technology to be relevant to our OEMs and also be entertaining to our fans.”

John Probst: O'Reilly Series has an identity problem

Probst further added: "If you look at the brand identity of those three, the O'Reilly Series struggles a little bit just from the car perspective and you see it a lot because we refer to it often as whoever the entitlement sponsor is."

"Long term, you see it as, we do have that CUV [crossover utility vehicle] body that we developed for our electric vehicle.

"I’m not sitting here saying today we’re breaking news it’s going to CUV, but these are the things that are on the roadmap to consider, so you’d have a Truck, a CUV and a Cup, that’s three very different bodies that are relevant for our OEMs today to create that brand identity for each series."