Rick Hendrick's protege, Corey Day, had a successful outing at Talladega on Saturday, claiming victory in the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series race, the AG-300. It was his first win in the competition and post-race, he credited none other than Dale Earnhardt Jr.

When reporter Steve Taranto asked Day about the conversation he had with Dale Jr. about Superspeedway racing at Daytona and how it impacted his Talladega run, the Hendrick Motorsports driver said:

"Dale just kind of tried to paint the picture for me of what it would look like and what it would feel like. Obviously, he was great at this style of racing. So it was super cool to be able to, you know, sit with him and pick his brain for a good 45 minutes there. And we were able to watch the truck race that night, too, on TV. So, yeah, he honestly just tried to explain to me a lot about how the air moves around the cars."

Corey Day also shared how Dale Jr. explained the intricate details of the aerodynamics, and how it helped him.

"He says, the wind tunnel will tell you that the air follows the body super square, but it actually makes a wake like a boat would. So just things like that where I got out there and I felt that crossing lanes and everything. It was like, 'Oh, man, like he's right.' So, yeah, a lot of things that he told me that I was able to figure out. But there's also a lot of things he told me that it didn't click in my brain, like, 'Oh, he was talking about this,' until it happened."

Day denied Brent Crews and Sheldon Creed to take his first career win on Saturday. Having started the race in third place, the No. 17 driver fell to 15th place in Stage 1. He could not improve much in Stage 2 as 15th place was his final spot.

However, after a brilliant recovery, the Hendrick Motorsports star went three-wide with a few laps remaining and held his nerve to cross the finish line 0.154 seconds ahead of Crews.

Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s words of praise for Corey Day

In March, over a month before Corey Day won the first race of his career, Dale Earnhardt Jr. had lauded him for his racecraft. Speaking about the 20-year-old HMS driver on an episode of "Dale Jr. Download" podcast, he said:

"Corey Day is doing a really great job with very limited experience. A couple of weeks of just getting in there and getting the job done. He’s had a couple of good races to sort of start to build on. Corey listened to everything everybody tried to tell him.”

Thanks to the Talladega victory, Corey Day has cemented his place in fourth in the Drivers' Standings with 399 points. He is only four points behind Jesse Love in third, but a mammoth 145 points behind leader Justin Allgaier.

Read more NASCAR news at the RFK Racing Digest!

Written by

Sabyasachi Biswas

Edited by

Yask Kotak