Dale Earnhardt Jr. Would Ride Again If NASCAR Came to Nashville
Dale Earnhardt, Jr., retired at the end of the 2017 NASCAR season, but he remains open to a future in racing. After single races in the Xfinity series in 2018 and 2019, the current NBC sports broadcaster says he'd be there for a race in Nashville, but track organizers had better hurry.
The idea of bringing NASCAR racing back to Nashville's Fairgrounds picked up momentum in May, when a $60 million proposal was turned in by executives connected to Bristol Motor Speedway. Non-NASCAR racing has taken place on the half-mile track at the fairgrounds for years. The Tennessean points out that NASCAR-sanctioned racing ceased in 1984, after 26 years. The new plans would call for a 30,000 seat structure and improvements aimed at bringing top-level racing back to Music City. Earnhardt is on board for that.
"I think we belong in Nashville," he told the newspaper prior to this week's NASCAR Cup Awards banquet. "If they ever did run an Xfinity race there and it's in the next four or five years, I'd love to put that on my calendar as a race to go run."
The Xfinity series is one level down from the Monster Energy series. Earnhardt raced the series in Darlington, S.C., last August and in Richmond, Va., in 2018. His full-time job is as a broadcaster for races on NBC, but he's also appeared during several other sports, including the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Earnhardt Jr. is the son of the late Dale Earnhardt, one of NASCAR's most popular and successful drivers of all time. He's married with one daughter. Last August a private plane carrying the family crashed at the Elizabethton Municipal Airport in eastern Tennessee. Everyone escaped without serious injury, but the plane quickly went up in flames.
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