Few people, if anyone, care about the health of short-track racing more than Dale Earnhardt Jr., who believes it’s part of the fabric that connects the lowest levels of the sport to NASCAR’s premier Cup Series.
In the years since Earnhardt retired as a full-time Cup driver, he’s spent considerable time championing short-track racing, including forming an ownership group in 2023 with former NASCAR drivers Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton and current NASCAR team owner Justin Marks to purchase the CARS Tour, a series that runs races in two divisions across the Southeast.
In an effort to further grow the rapidly expanding series, Earnhardt is partnering with FloRacing to promote what it is touting as the “biggest single night in pavement late model racing history” by offering a record-breaking total payout of more than $200,000 for The Throwback Classic at Hickory Motor Speedway in Newton, N.C., on Aug. 2.
“I’m excited,” Earnhardt said in an interview this week. “It’s got potential to grow into something better. Hickory is a great historic racetrack, and we need it to embrace what this event could become. And hopefully everything goes really well, and when the race is over and everything’s done, everybody’s pleased with the whole thing.”
The winner of the Late Model Stock race will earn $50,000, while the Pro Late Model winner gets $30,000. This is a hefty sum at a level of racing where low-four-figure paydays to win are still commonplace, but that’s the point. The goal, Earnhardt explained, is to raise the floor of grassroots racing by making it more enticing for drivers and teams to compete.
“We have a lot of work still to do to try to continue to create and allow the opportunities to sustain themselves,” Earnhardt said. “We don’t want this race to come and go. We want stuff like this to start becoming the norm, so we have to do some things on our end, change some things about how we were doing things to allow that opportunity.”
With The Throwback Classic, Earnhardt is trying to follow a similar path to how many high-profile dirt track races are promoted, be it the Chili Bowl Nationals for midget cars, the World 100 for late models, or the Knoxville Nationals for sprint cars.
Josh Berry celebrates a 2018 CARS Tour win at Hickory Motor Speedway. Berry now drives in the Cup Series. (David Allio / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Trying to mimic that formula makes sense. Dirt racing features numerous races and series that offer big-money purses — and also often generate a good amount of attention — but this is something that is largely lacking in pavement short-track racing, which is more scattershot, with less uniformity in rules and structure. (Yes, there are some, like the Snowball Derby or the Winchester 400, but nothing to the degree like there is on the dirt side.)
Earnhardt wants to change this. So too does FloSports, a global sports media company that in addition to broadcasting the CARS Tour also shows various forms of motorsports and numerous other professional and collegiate sports.
In deciding how to elevate the CARS Tour, FloSports looked at another one of its properties, the High Limit Racing sprint car series co-owned by NASCAR superstar Kyle Larson, to see how the burgeoning circuit formed in 2023 has quickly established itself. Thus, The Throwback Classic at Hickory, which is nicknamed “The Birthplace of NASCAR Stars,” was born.
“Flo walked up to us and said, ‘We want to do something big. We want to make a lot of noise like we’re seeing on the dirt with High Limit,’” Earnhardt said. “They said they wanted to put all of this effort into one race. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.”
It’s difficult to compare how a dirt sprint car series operates to one in the short-track pavement world, Earnhardt said. Still, there are fundamental tenets of High Limit Racing about which Earnhardt has peppered Larson with questions.
Earnhardt took away how important it is to provide a product that’s friendly to competitors and fans alike — with a streamlined program that concludes at a reasonable time, is affordable for all involved, is accessible to watch for those not at the track, and, yes, features purses that fairly reward teams for participating.
“There is a business model that creates that opportunity, and we’d love to take a look inside that model and see what’s realistic for us,” Earnhardt said. “(High Limit’s) car counts are a little larger. When they have a big-money raise, they may get twice the cars, twice the entries, and that’s a big help for them to be able to pay that purse.
“I’m the kind of person that’s not too proud to look at something that’s working and trying to pull some of the things that I see, for example.”
Last month, CARS Tour alumnus Josh Berry won his first-career Cup Series race, providing proof that the path from the local short track to NASCAR’s top rung still can be traversed by a driver lacking substantial funding. Last week came the announcement that the series would be included as part of NASCAR’s All-Star Race weekend at North Wilkesboro Speedway, with the race broadcast live on FS1. Earnhardt and Harvick will be in the television booth as analysts.
Earnhardt lauds the progress the CARS Tour has made. In the same breath, though, he acknowledges there is still much to do. Short-track racing is important to him, to NASCAR’s future as a whole, and he wants to ensure he’s doing his part to ensure its survival.
“If we can have the perception for the rest of the world to say, ‘Hey, if I put an individual in the CARS Tour, they have a really great opportunity to be recognized because the right people are going to be watching and recognizing their talent and giving him the next opportunity,’ …” Earnhardt said. “We want fans to watch us, but we also need the industry, the Truck Series owners, the Cup Series owners, the broadcasters, the people that are going to be talking about racing, we want them to be looking at the CARS Tour.”
(Top photo of Dale Earnhardt Jr.: Jeff Robinson / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)