Dale Earnhardt Jr. sounds alarm for NASCAR on possible brake rotor issues at St. Louis

A rash of brake rotor failures with the package the NASCAR Cup Series drivers brought to Nashville has at least one person in the know sounding the alarm. Dale Earnhardt Jr. believes the problems are likely to resurface again later in the season.

And he believes when they do, they could be even worse the second time around. He broke it down on the Dale Jr. Download.

“Mark this down,” Earnhardt said. “St. Louis, we run the same package. St. Louis is harder on brakes than Nashville. St. Louis, you’re going to have some guys that fail.”

As it was, the brake rotors failed for four drivers during the race at Nashville. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and others watched as Connor Zilisch, Ross Chastain, AJ Allmendinger and Chris Buescher all fell victim to blown rotors.

What stood out to Earnhardt was how much variation there was in the car setup for different drivers. He pointed it out on the podcast.

“I was looking at all the teams’ brake ducts, and man, they’re all so different,” he said. “Typically, everybody’s kind of close. Guy might have a little more opening than the others, but not vast differences, right? A lot of Fords were sealed solid, a lot of Chevrolets solid. Seventy-five percent of the garage didn’t have any opening and then I saw the 45, the 23, the 19, maybe one or two other cars wide open on top.”

That had Earnhardt wondering. What were the teams thinking?

“So I start talking to some crew chiefs, and they’re like, ‘Nah man, this is how we’re going to run it. We’ve got this rotor, we’ve got this pad, we’ve got this master cylinder, we’re doing this, we’re doing that, and wide open’s the way we want to be,'” Earnhardt said. “Then there’s other people like, ‘Yeah, we can’t get ’em hot enough. We can’t keep the temperature in the rotor.'”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. broke down what was going on with the brake rotors as drivers made their way around the track at Nashville. In fact, he commented on it during the race, when early on, Carson Hocevar‘s front right rotor was heating up bright orange.

“The rotor blows so much air through it that it spikes up to 1,000, 1,200 degrees or whatever,” Earnhardt said. “You mash the brake, go down in the corner, mash the brake. Temperature goes fast from like 600 to 1,000 degrees. Quick. Then you let off and you go down the next straightaway and it’s so efficient in cooling the thing cools down 400 to 600 degrees on the next straightaway. Up 400, down 400. Up 400, down 400. Every lap. Twice a lap. Not good. That’s why it cracks.”

Will that be a problem again at St. Louis? If NASCAR sticks to the same setup and teams don’t make further adjustments, it absolutely could be, Dale Earnhardt Jr. said.

The race at St. Louis isn’t until Sept 13, so everyone will have a chance to figure out what they need to do to make things work. But it’ll also come as the second race in The Chase, so everything will be on the line for the playoff drivers.