It was certainly cause for celebration.
This weekend, Dale Earnhardt Jr. won big as a team owner, as his team, JR Motorsports, secured the 2026 NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway. His driver Justin Allgaier finished 7th in the season finale, giving him enough points to secure his second career series title and the fifth driver’s championship overall for JR Motorsports.
Of course, Jr. and his family were in attendance at the race, and they were rightfully ready to celebrate after the race finished.
Now retired and a very successful team owner, Jr. is best known for the #8 Budweiser Chevy that he drove for DEI when he first entered NASCAR, and during his prime years driving that iconic red car, Jr. was known as a party boy who definitely enjoyed getting rowdy when he wasn’t on the track.
In fact, on an episode of his podcast, The Dale Jr. Download a while back, Earnhardt sat down with Ty Norris, the former Vice President of Motorsports for DEI, the team that was founded by Dale Earnhardt and that Dale Jr. drove for during the early years of his career.
Jr. told an insane story about a New Year’s Eve party at a shop behind his house, when Junior says that they must have gone through “100, 150 cases” of beer in a single night. It was during this time that Jr. was having so much beer delivered to his house that distributors thought he was selling it… so yeah, Jr. knows how to drink some beer.
But these days, he’s a family man, and is a dad to two young daughters, so I imagine he’s not drinking anywhere close to the amount of beer he used to, but when your team wins a huge championship, you have to celebrate, and Jr. did just that.
There’s a viral video going around of Jr. after the win, where he shotguns a beer in Victory Lane, and there was definitely some running down his face, but there was a lot going on and it was all in good fun:
The fans had a lot to say about it too, with many of them noting that Jr. looked a little bit out of practice while shotgunning in the viral video, and they certainly let it be known in the comments section:
“Dale Yeah!!!! he had another one in his hand less than a second after the first one hit the ground. Believe they are going to turn it up a little bit tonight. Congrats.”
“I wonder how much beer Jr has drank in his life. Being sponsored by Budweiser probably has its perks.”
“Embarrassing shotgun Dale.”
“Haha, hell yeah Dale!!”
“Old dogs still got it.”
“Katelyn Larson does it better. Dude, have of it was down the front of your shirt.”
“And he calls himself a beer drinker!! Embarrassing Jr.”
“Interesting way to shot gun a beer, Dale.”
“Good thing it’s cheap beer, just wasting it on the ground.”
“You can tell Dale retired from ‘that life.'”
On Twitter, one fan was not too impressed by it either, saying:
“Ugh Dale, come on man.”
Jr. replied to the fan, saying that
“What would we do without the shotgunning beer critics?”
He added that he made up for it over the course of the night:
Amen to that… he looked like the old Jr. to me.
