Dale Earnhardt Jr. makes major prediction for the future of Chase Elliott's hometrack

Dale Earnhardt Jr. recently shared his thoughts on what the future could be for Atlanta, which is the home track of Georgia native, Chase Elliott. After undergoing major reconfiguration between 2021 and 2022, it hosted the first playoff race last weekend.

However, after the recent playoff race, many drivers noted that the racing was different and more challenging this time around, something which Dale Earnhardt Jr. also acknowledged on his podcast "Dale Jr. Download".

"Atlanta has changed and will contiunue to change drastically. Listening to Denny Hamlin talk about Atlanta on his show, he talks about how slick the track was, how much of a handful the car was, the pace was down almost half a second from last year, Chase Elliott said during the race that the cars are so loose, nobody can go at the top and do anything... It's heading towards that old wore-out slick Atlanta that we had before. And we'll get there very quickly," Junior said [at 7:30].

Dale Earnhardt Jr. likened the track to being on the coast and discussed the environmental factors that could've contributed to the track's nature, where the sandy texture of the ground near the track, combined with the windy conditions "sandblast" the surfaces near it, including the track.

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Dale Earnhardt Jr. isn't a fan of Atlanta being called a superspeedway like Talladega or Daytona

Further sharing his thoughts on Atlanta, Dale Earnhardt Jr. claimed it was neither a speedway nor a mile and a half. While dubbing the racetrack as a 'hybrid', the former NASCAR driver felt that putting it in the category of tracks like Daytona or Talladega isn't fair. He said, during the same episode of "Dale Jr. Download":

"Talladega and Daytona are superspeedways, the rest of the tracks are just speedways. NASCAR and NBC would love to say they are on the same track...What I really get annoyed with is how those terms like a short track, intermediate, one-mile oval, that’s pretty straightforward, superspeedway, those were terms that adhered strictly to a size. They are not just loose terms. It’s not a Superspeedway," Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. [10:55]

While commenting on how the criterion for using terms to categorize tracks has become "loose", Earnhardt claimed that while Daytona and Talladega can be regarded as superspeedways, being 2 miles or larger than it, the rest of the tracks are "simply speedways".

The former Hendrick Motorsports driver further claimed that the term "drafting track" was coined to describe the racing at the repaved Atlanta track. He further commented on how calling Atlanta a drafting track was "annoying" in the context of using driver statistics at Talladega and Daytona to predict their performances in Atlanta.