This week Dale Earnhardt Jr. has a conversation with a man he thought he’d never get to interview, longtime NASCAR Race Director David Hoots. In this episode, David opens up about how he made decisions in the booth, his thoughts on current NASCAR officiating, including the Austin Dillon penalty, his toughest calls in the booth, and how things ended at NASCAR.

That leads to the reason Dale didn’t think this interview would happen. He assumed David would be working in the control tower booth for many years to come, and that seemed to be the case until a cluster of NASCAR layoffs in January of 2019. After a run of nearly two decades, stretching back to the fall Rockingham event on the 1988 schedule, David’s reign as chief steward for the Cup Series came to an end.

The story of how David came to be in the booth starts in a likely place: Bowman Gray Stadium. David explains that his family began taking him to Saturday night races at the famed bullring when he was young, and he caught the racing bug at an early age. He initially took a position scoring cars in trade for free admission to the races, but his fascination with the race cars pushed him to wander into the world of technical inspection. From Bowman Gray, he began working at NASCAR regional events for the Sportsman and Modified divisions before the series were organized into their respective tours. He would stay on with the NASCAR Busch Grand National and the Winston Modified Tour before he caught the eyes and ears of Les Richter, who asked if he’d like to give the NASCAR Cup Series a shot.

That day came on October 23, 1988 at Rockingham, where Rusty Wallace brought home his third victory in a row on his way to a second-place points effort. What followed for David Hoots was an illustrious career that saw him become one of the most revered officials in the modern era of NASCAR.

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