The double yellow line debate is still going strong after last weekend’s YellaWood 500 at Talladega, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. is now giving his two cents on Kyle Larson’s somewhat controversial win.
There’s all kinds of conspiracies flying around trying to explain how Larson – the driver of the No. 5 car – made an improbable comeback from 11th place. Some are saying there was a “call from Chevrolet,” since Larson is the only Chevy remaining with a shot at the championship. Then there’s also the discussion around the double yellow line, and whether or not the No. 5 car dipped below to pass in a crucial turn that led to Larson’s victory.
At superspeedways, NASCAR prohibits cars from going bellow the yellow line to make a pass, a rule that’s resulted in penalties in the past (most notably Justin Haley, who was stripped of an Xfinity Series win back in 2018). That’s what Dale Jr. decided to touch on when his podcast – the Dale Jr. Download – honed in on Talladega:
“Nobody got punished for going below the double yellow line. There were how many instances? We could go through all of these individually, but one that got a lot of attention, obviously, was the No. 5 of Larson as they were coming down the front straightaway. There was a widely used image – a still image – of Larson, and social media was going crazy.”
That’s an understatement.
It’s one of those things where everyone sees it differently, and Dale Jr. even pointed that out. There seemingly wasn’t enough there to penalize Larson, but there was certainly enough to start a conversation. What Earnhardt Jr. kept going back to is the rule itself: you can’t go below the yellow line to advance your position.
In Dale Jr.’s opinion, and based on the definition of the rule, Larson wasn’t advancing his position by doing so:
“If he’s ahead of, or if he’s driving around the racetrack by himself, he can go below the line all the f*** he wants. They tell you that you can’t do it in qualifying, but do they say you can’t do it during the race? You can. (And in this case), he’s already passed the car. Advancing your position is changing your name in the lineup. Advancing your position isn’t just traveling feet of the racetrack.”
So a technicality is what saved Larson from being penalized.
Dale Jr. compared the situation to 2004 when he won at Talladega, and he himself went down below the yellow line because he was trying to avoid contact from vehicles higher up on the track, and ended up winning. In his opinion, it all boils down to how the rule is written, and what “advancing your position” actually means:
“I don’t think Larson went below the line. If he was, if the left front tire is below the line, it is after the fact. It is after the act of making that pass. The pass is over. The position has been gained… if he went down below the yellow line and finished the race down there, yeah, I think NASCAR would have had a problem with that.”
Dale Jr. thinks Larson’s win was fairly secured, but he does see this discourse as an opportunity for NASCAR to modify the rule, or at the least the language that’s used in the rulebook.
“Those types of deals to me make me feel like it’s time to sort of revisit this, and see if we can’t do this differently. I’m not sure that right here at this table, I know exactly everything that we should do, but I do feel like that we could certainly loosen it up a little bit, do away with it entirely.
I’m not sure. I just wish we could figure out how to do it differently so that those situations aren’t determining the outcomes of the race.”
You can hear Dale Jr. give more thoughts on the Talladega controversy and the double yellow line debate in the latest episode of the Dale Jr. Download:
