You could turn Oprah, Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer loose on the Earnhardt family business and there’d still be enough left to blow the Donald Trump-Rosie O’Donnell feud out of the water.

For several weeks, Teresa Earnhardt’s quote in the Wall Street Journal about her stepson’s focus – “Right now the ball’s in his court to decide on whether he wants to be a NASCAR driver or whether he wants to be a public personality” – has been hanging in the air.

Monday, Dale Earnhardt Jr. took his turn.

“I tried and tried not to comment on it,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I was trying not to get involved in it.”

But there’s no way he couldn’t. His contract with Dale Earnhardt Inc. is up after the upcoming season, and until the sport’s most popular driver has a new contract no other story in the sport is bigger.

So out it came. “I really didn’t appreciate it,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I don’t know, she might have just been having a bad day or something when she said that. I really don’t know where that was coming from. I haven’t talked to Teresa about what she said in the paper. I figured if anything needed to be said, she’d call me up and say it.”

Teresa Earnhardt’s comment was first published Dec. 14, and it has been talked about ever since. You’d think if she wanted to temper that remark, she might have expressed it to her stepson over, say, Christmas?

Apparently not. Kelley Earnhardt Elledge, Dale Jr.’s sister and top business adviser, said in a radio interview last week that her brother spent Christmas Eve at her house. Surely their stepmother has that phone number.

In a story in Monday’s USA Today, Earnhardt described his relationship with his stepmother as “cordial.”

“I think everybody has always had this idea that we were very negative to each other,” he added.

Gosh, wonder why?

“I don’t want to really get too personal,” Earnhardt Jr. said Monday. “Mine and Teresa’s relationship has always been very black and white, very strict and in your face. It is what it is … it ain’t a bed of roses … I don’t know how to explain it honestly.

“The relationship that we have today is the same relationship we had when I was 6 years old when I moved into that house with Dad and her. It has always been the same. It hasn’t gotten worse over the last couple years or last couple months. It’s always been the same, the way I felt about her then is the way I feel about her now.”

Richie Gilmore, the highest ranking DEI official who bothers to visit most NASCAR tracks and speak to the racing media, sounded calmly optimistic about the contract talks.

If you listen only to Gilmore, it’s a matter of tidying things up and getting a deal signed so the team can get its mind totally on making the red No. 8 Chevrolets go fast this year.

But life with the Earnhardts is more complicated than algorithms.

“I like driving the red car with the number 8 on it, and to drive that car you have to drive for DEI,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I don’t really know what to tell you other than that. We’re working to get through the contract and finish up a new deal. … There’s just some things involved that I want out of the future involving the company, and it’s very difficult for everybody to see eye to eye there.”

Translated, that means that Earnhardt Jr. and his sister want to be part of the decision-making process in the team their father built, not be treated just as contracted employees.

“It has nothing to do with money,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “It just has a lot to do with the future.

“I don’t want to come here if I can’t compete. I want the best, I want the best cars, I want the best people. Everybody at the company, we want that and we see other companies doing it and you see other teams doing what it takes and making the right moves. I just want to be in the same situation as I see other drivers in.

“I just want to drive races and win championships and hang it up one day. Just give me a good race car and make it run fast and give me guys I can enjoy working with, and I’ll go to the race track and I’ll do whatever you need me to do with the sponsors and everything else. Just don’t make everything a hassle and don’t make everything a pain.

“I know I’m a good enough race-car driver and I deserve it.”