Motoring
NASCAR legend turned broadcaster Dale Earnhardt Jr. takes his talents in a zany new direction—as commentator on Red Bull Soapbox Race.
Over the course of his hall of fame racing career, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has steered all kinds of speedy contraptions—70 mph go-karts, 500 horsepower dirt flickers and some of the fastest NASCAR machines you can imagine. The son of the seven-time NASCAR Cup champion Dale Earnhardt Sr., Dale Jr. cruised to consecutive titles in the mid-tier Busch (now Xfinity) Series in the late ’90s before grabbing the checkered flag at the vaunted Daytona 500 in 2004 and 2014.
NASCAR’s most popular driver for 15 years running, Earnhardt raced in the Cup series full-time for 18 years before retiring in 2017. Perhaps it was all just a primer for his next big drive: a Red Bull box-cart race. “I would absolutely be down for entering a race,” the 50-year-old racing legend says. “One of the things I think would be cool is walking around the paddock. It’d be a lot of fun to see the ingenuity, creativity and just how people interpreted the rules.”
Earnhardt is the new American voice for Red Bull Soapbox Race, a franchise that exists in a curious spot in the national imagination. Even though events are held all over the country and the best snippets are devoured by millions on social media, there has never been a TV show to reach a wider American audience. That’s despite the U.K. having a dedicated TV showcase for the derby for more than a decade. But this year, Earnhardt will bring his humor and NASCAR expertise to a fresh role, co-hosting the first-ever Red Bull Soapbox Race TV show in the U.S. The series, slated for Discovery this spring, will feature 12 hour-long episodes from events around the world.
Producing the series was a race in itself: For one breakneck week in early November, Earnhardt commuted to a studio in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina, to record commentary for each episode, arriving and leaving in darkness. Riding shotgun with him was Mike Bagley, a beloved NASCAR radio voice.
Soapbox racing couldn’t be more different from NASCAR. For the most part, the crafts are handmade and fundamentally basic: four wheels, a steering rack and a frame. Gravity does most of the work of powering the car through the course, which is set at a decline and studded with obstacles. The teams are made up of amateurs who further embellish their crafts with catchy designs and names—and much of the fun is seeing how the whole package holds up against the strain of competition. Entrants are judged on creativity and showmanship and against the stopwatch. A race can have anywhere from 30 to 50 carts—but only a dozen or so might make the cut for the TV show. It’s like America’s Funniest Home Videos on wheels. “You have to be a little batshit to do this stuff,” Bagley quips on set. “I love it.”
The commentary turns to a race in Dallas, featuring a piñata- style cart that appears to be made from different-colored Post-it notes. It’s name is the Spartan de Dulces—and that last word trips Bagley up a few times. (He keeps saying “dull-says” instead of “duel-says.”) There are other moments when Earnhardt’s delivery fights against certain pronunciations. Ultimately, his flinty Carolina twang and slang wins the day.
Overall, Earnhardt and Bagley will remind you of the announcers in the movie Dodgeball as they pivot from deadly serious to tongue-in-cheek. Although the format of the show has been carefully constructed, they’re still seeing and reacting to the races for the first time—and the cameras capture every ad-lib. When a glorified Power Wheel called C’Mon Barbie Let’s Go
I would absolutely be down for entering.
Party tips over a bump and sends its two pilots flopping onto the course, Earnhardt dutifully rattles through the prepared remarks about the racer’s too-high center of gravity and the crew’s health before adjusting his horned-rimmed glasses, Groucho Marx–like, and snarking: “I’m glad everyone’s OK, but that was funny.”
If Earnhardt seems comfortable calling the action, it’s because he has experience. Along with providing color commentary for NASCAR races on TV since his retirement, he hosts a popular weekly podcast called The Dale Jr. Download, which dives even deeper into the biggest stories and trends in the sport. But apart from the podcast, Earnhardt didn’t have much racing to talk about in 2024. His deal with NBC expired at the end of the 2023 season, and his new gigs with Turner Sports and Prime Video don’t start until the spring. “I’ve just been kind of goofing off,” he jokes, “doing everything but broadcasting. So this was nice to kinda get back to work.”
But by far the biggest perk of announcing the Red Bull Soapbox Races for Earnhardt is the prospect of sitting down and enjoying it with his young daughters, Isla and Nicole. “I showed them some of the YouTube stuff from the older races,” he says. “They loved seeing the accidents and the goofy-looking builds. That’s probably personally my favorite thing about this whole deal, showing my girls. When I take ’em to the racetrack when I drive races, they’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on. What are we doing here?’ But I know this will be something they’ll like and laugh at.”
As for his inevitable foray into soapbox racing, Earnhardt is already pondering the possibilities. In addition to his considerable experience behind the wheel, Earnhardt also operates JR (pronounced “junior”) Motorsports, a skunkworks that supports teams in dirt racing and the Xfinity Series. Which is to say he could easily top some of the more ambitious amateur engineers in Red Bull Soapbox Race, who arrive on the starting line with their laser-cut, 3D-printed designs. But winning wouldn’t be his only pursuit. “I wonder what the rest of the event is like,” he says. “There’s 25,000 people there, so you know there has to be some great food trucks, a lot of drinking and hanging out. The racing is probably just a blip. I bet the weekend is fun as hell.”
