Dale Earnhardt Jr. just gave a big update on his racing career. While speaking to Bob Pockrass of Fox Sports, the two-time Daytona 500 champion revealed that his last race could be this year when he competes at the Xfinity Series race at Bristol.
“I want to run my late model for a really long time. I imagine when I get to around 60, I’ll be probably considering that that’s probably too old to be out there battling with some of these younger guys,” Earnhardt said in the one-on-one interview. “So I’ve got about a 10-year runway to do everything I want to do with my late model. The Xfinity car? Every year, I say that — personally but I don’t really share this publicly — but every year, I pretty much feel like it could be my last.
“I’m going into this race at Bristol this year knowing that it might be the last one I run. There’s nothing that really makes that decision. It’s just last year was a lot of fun, led some laps. But it is a big commitment. I just logged in the calendar the sim that I’m going to be doing to try to prepare for that.”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. on the work put into the Bristol race
Earnhardt continued: “And we do a lot of promotion around the partnership with Hellmann’s around that race. And so it’s not just show up and race and, ‘Oh man, that was great. We’ll do it again next year.’ There’s a lot of work that goes into it months ahead of time. But as long as we’re running good like we did — we ran so much better than I thought we would at Bristol last year — and as long as that’s happening, I think I’ll always want to keep coming back. When you go out there and you know the car is good and you just aren’t able to produce the result, then it’s probably time to let somebody else try it.”
In 2023, Earnhardt competed in two Xfinity Series races. He earned a P30 finish at Bristol and followed it up with a P5 finish at Homestead-Miami Speedway a few weeks later. Earnhardt last competed in a Cup Series race in 2017, which was also the last time he competed as a full-time driver.
In his Xfinity Series career, Earnhardt, 49, has competed in 146 races and earned 95 top-10 finishes and 24 wins. In his Cup Series career, Earnhardt claimed 260 top-10 finishes and 26 wins in 631 races.
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