Dale Earnhardt Jr. considering ending retirement early for few special races
Show me a retired athlete and I’ll show you someone who spends the rest of his life looking at people who play his sport and thinking, “I could still whip those guys.”
So it should come as no surprise that Dale Earnhardt Jr., who retired at the close of the 2017 NASCAR season, has found himself with the itch to get back behind the wheel of a race car.
No, he won’t be getting back into the Sprint Cup series and driving full-time. His wife, Amy, just gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Isla Rose Earnhardt, in May, and Dale isn’t about to go back on the implied spend-more-time-with-his-family promise that came with his retirement. Nor is the specter of the concussion that nearly ended his career in 2015 going away any time soon.
But facts are facts, and the guy likes to drive cars real fast against other guys who also drive cars real fast, and if you do that outside of a sanctioned auto racing event, police officers with radar guns tend to see it as a problem.
Earnhardt reportedly plans to hop into the car and drive a couple of second-tier Xfinity Series races, a bit like if Ichiro showed up with a baseball bat in Tacoma to take a few swings with the Rainiers, Seattle’s Triple-A minor league team.
Even better, he’s now considering trading his car for a truck and heading to Virginia for some short-track racing on the .526-mile Martinsville Speedway.
"@MartinsvilleSwy, man. That's where it's at." @DaleJr said on #WednesDale that he'd consider running a @NASCAR Truck Series race at Martinsville, and would like @JeffGordonWeb to join him. pic.twitter.com/bqDd9GWtMz
— NASCAR on NBC (@NASCARonNBC) June 21, 2018
And in a twist you could pitch in Hollywood as “‘Days of Thunder’ meets ‘The Expendables,'” Earnhardt is even inviting Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart to join in the fun.
Earnhardt told NBC Sports, “I’ve always loved Martinsville, and the truck race at Martinsville would probably be the one that I would be most excited about running, if I was to run a truck. No plans to run a truck, but I wouldn’t mind running a truck race once, just to say, ‘Hey, I know what a truck drives like.’
“Martinsville, man, that’s where it’s at. Jeff Gordon loves Martinsville, so I know he’d be in for that.”
Gordon, meanwhile, independent of Earnhardt’s recent comments, said in February that he’d love to run a truck race himself.
“I always thought about maybe looking at an opportunity to drive a truck at Martinsville or a track like that. I like the short tracks,” Gordon said.
No word from Tony Stewart about how he feels about this whole wacky scheme, but Stewart has been known to run smaller races himself. These sorts of deals always seem to be sweetened by enough money going to charity, so if NASCAR wants to throw a few bucks that way to gin up interest in the truck series, it’s not a huge leap of the imagination to see it happening.
The Texas Roadhouse 200 is in October at Martinsville, and that leaves plenty of time to get the race organized.
Furthermore, it also gives Earnhardt and Gordon, should they decide to join forces, some time to possibly pull some other old NASCAR stalwarts out of retirement as well.
Move over Stallone, Lundgren, Schwarzenegger and all the rest.
There’s a new bunch of old-guy action heroes in town.
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