As the 2009 season draws ever closer, the big-time interviews are starting to appear. And with NASCAR in a more precarious state than it's been in many a decade, it's getting tougher and tougher for drivers to hew to the typical "we're going to have a great year running in the [sponsor] [make] [number] car this year."

Case in point: a brand-new Sports Illustrated Dale Earnhardt Jr. profile. At first, it appears to be the typical journalist-hangs-with-Dale piece, but once the questions turn a little tougher, Dale rises to the challenge. Dale minces no words in this interview, and it's great to see. For instance, his thoughts on not testing:

"You aren't going learn anything in a test that you haven't already learned," Earnhardt said. "We've been testing cars at Daytona for 30 years and they have figured out about everything there is to know. If we quit testing it saves an individual car $1.5 million. That's a lot of money."

But it's Earnhardt's comments about track owners and their demands that drivers do more to help sell tickets that are going to strike a nerve with NASCAR fandom at large:

"The race track owners want drivers to do more? Yeah, right. They need to go back to work," he said. "They forgot what it's like to sell tickets. That's their problem. They ain't had to sell tickets for a long time and none of them remember how or knew how or ever learned how. They need to get back to working hard and doing their promotions and putting packages together for race fans. They don't want to cut the ticket price but they probably should and get these hotels to quit gouging these people. They can dump that responsibility on drivers all they want but the responsibility really lies in their hands to sell race tickets and they have to get creative in doing it. We already do a lot. We do [bleeping] plenty and they are full of [bleep]."

Huh. No gray area in that one. Junior is media-savvy enough to know what he was doing here, and he's one of the few drivers that could get away with calling out track owners that way without fear of recrimination. What are they going to do, NOT promote the fact that Junior's coming to town?

Junior is one of the few athletes in any sport that enjoys almost unconditional support from a huge chunk of fandom, and I've always thought that guys like him and Tiger Woods should use that kind of support as leverage to improve their sport. By putting pressure back on the shoulders of track owners and, in turn, the profiteers down the line, Junior can continue to cement his populist credentials.

The flip side of that is that Junior also has to know what his exact role is in this sport. He says later in the interview, "We do what we do, man. We race as hard as we can race. I don't know what else we can do. I'm not going to be a part of no circus. I'm out there going to race and that is what we do." Well, not quite. By being the most visible face of a multimillion-dollar corporation, he's not just "part of the circus," he's the center-ring attraction.

I can absolutely understand asking more of track owners and those associated with each individual track. But these aren't days for anybody to be closing off doors, and everyone needs to understand how responsibilities and expectations have changed in 2009-era NASCAR.