Dale Earnhardt Jr’s Employee Claims Joining NASCAR is a “Bad Financial Decision”

Recently, JR Motorsports’ senior race engineer Aedan McHugh made a startling revelation on social media. According to him, motorsport is not exactly financially sustainable for a team member. McHugh revealed that it took him six years and three promotions to finally earn a reasonably high wage. Sure, the drivers are often highly paid, since they are the ones doing the donkey work by driving the car.

His observation was a response to a report from journalist Pete Pistone on X. According to Pistone, many Cup and Xfinity teams are having difficulty with team recruitment. He revealed that one of the biggest factors in making people want to leave is, burnout, owing to the length of a season. Some even suspect that this burnout has reached a stage where even drivers are not open to committing to a full season.

Is there any truth to such a claim in the NASCAR scene?

Pistone backed up his observation with some research into the various sporting schedules. His findings revealed that the average NASCAR season lasts around 283 days, which is just around 40 weeks.

On the other hand, this is longer than the NHL, which lasts around 252 days, or 36 weeks. The NBA lasts around 235 days or nearly 33 weeks, followed by MLS with 218 days or roughly 31 weeks. Major League Baseball is just two days shorter than the soccer season. IndyCar has an average season of 199 days or 28 weeks, and the NFL season lasts around 21 weeks.

This explains why McHugh declared that being in the motorsports field is a bad financial decision. Though by his own admission, he loved his job and recently inked a two-year contract extension with JR Motorsports.

However, he did declare that speaking generally, pursuing a motorsport career is not a good idea. Especially considering that drivers and personnel spend long hours on the road and away from home.

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There is a big disparity between big teams and smaller teams

McHugh even confessed that when he worked in the Cup Series division, he earned less. He wrote in a separate tweet, “My first year of cup racing I worked over 5 months (850 hours) of over time and made less than $65k”.

What makes this worse is that the less funded teams are forced to pay their employees less money compared to their bigger counterparts. So a team like Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, or even JR Motorsports, won’t be badly affected. However, teams like Live Fast Motorsports, Beard Motorsports, and others, definitely will.

It is little wonder that so many smaller teams have no choice but to pull out of NASCAR. The lucky ones may probably last the entire season, but the unlucky small ones don’t last until the middle of the season. Even though there is a charter system in place, buying those charters costs a fair amount of money. In addition to that, existing teams also need to be willing to sell their charter to the prospective buyer.

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