Dale Earnhardt Jr. explains why he’s so eager to return to Martinsville after last week’s lone 2022 race
Dale Earnhardt Jr. loves racing at Martinsville Speedway, and as he continues to compete in one second-tier Xfinity Series race each season, he’s eager to return to the .526-mile Virginia short track.
In Earnhardt’s lone 2022 Xfinity race, he finished 11th in the Call 811 Before You Dig 250 at Martinsville on Friday after qualifying in 30th. (His annual appearances are always a big deal, but this year’s was overshadowed a bit by a post-race brawl started by Ty Gibbs and Sam Mayer.)
Since he retired from full-time Cup Series racing at the end of the 2017 season, he’s competed in these one-off races for his team, JR Motorsports, at Richmond Raceway (2018, 2021), Darlington Raceway (2019) and Homestead-Miami Speedway (2020) — in addition to Martinsville last weekend. Three of those races resulted in top-5 finishes.
And after his most recent race, he wants more from the paperclip-shaped track.
While appearing on this week’s episode of the Door Bumper Clear podcast — which is produced by Earnhardt’s own Dirty Mo Media — the mostly retired driver was asked what track he’d like to compete at next year for his one-off race. And he didn’t hesitate and explained:
“I really love Martinsville, and I think I didn’t get everything out of that that I wanted in terms of performance. So I’d love to go back and try again to run better knowing what I know now.
“The short runs in that series, the lack of tire wear, the grip, the cooler temperatures, all those things — we weren’t quite prepared balance-wise for how that race was going to play out. And I don’t know that I would’ve been able to prepare any better because I just didn’t know. But going back, I think I could perform better.”
Earnhardt explained that some of his desire to return improve on his latest Martinsville performance stems from the increasing challenges he faces racing just once a year — especially now as a 47-year-old driver. He “needed about 40 laps to really kind of clean up the cobwebs” before he could start evaluating the car and offer feedback to his No. 88 JR Motorsports Chevrolet team.
Up against a talented field in NASCAR’s second-highest level, he said he was “naive” to think he could get behind the wheel and successfully compete against the full-time drivers whenever he wanted, adding that he was “sweating bullets” over qualifying.
“They’re fast, they’re skilled, they’re dialed in, they’re tuned, they’re aggressive,” Dale Jr. noted. “Old men aren’t.”
But he considers Friday’s race a major learning experience and wants to apply that to another race at one of his favorite tracks. Plus, he’s repeated explained in recent years how his one-off races help keep him up to date and make him a better broadcaster for NBC Sports’ NASCAR coverage.
“You gotta have it all lined up all just right for you to be able to go out there and be competitive, and there’s a bunch of pieces missing when that race started. Some of it was the balance of the car, a lot of it was me. As the race went on, we got it balanced better. I felt like I was getting better, but I wanna go do it again, I think, if we go back next year. …
“I definitely want to do it again. I love driving the cars. The thing is like I kind of need to do it more to be better. … It does help because, like you say, it reminded me of how good they are, and I think we take that for granted. Sitting up there in the booth, you’re watching it over and over and over, and you’re talking nuts and bolts or strategy or what a guy’s thinking or feeling. But we sometimes kind of forget that these are the elite; these are the best guys out there.”