Why Bristol in September might be Dale Jr’s last NASCAR race

There is a lot of movement regarding the NASCAR Xfinity Series driver lineup for JR Motorsports next season but one big change could be that Dale Earnhardt Jr. might run his last race next month at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Connor Zilisch has been signed, on loan from Trackhouse Racing, to drive the No. 88 next season and there will be three other full-time cars too with Justin Allgaier and Sammy Smith expected to return in the No. 7 and 8 respectively.

Earnhardt usually runs one, maybe two races, per season but right now, team co-owner Kelley Earnhardt-Miller said this week on a SiriusXM NASCAR Radio appearance that her brother doesn’t currently have anything on the table for the 2025 season.

“Yeah, I mean, he absolutely loves the racing, and he just ebbs and flows,” Earnhardt-Miller said. “He’s having a ton of fun in the Late Models and trying to run as much as he can. So, he wants to do that kind of four to six times a year or so. I don’t want to say that he is done with Xfinity racing, but we don’t have anything on the map right now for him. And it could just change; we gotta watch.”

Earnhardt usually runs his one race a year as part of a partnership with Unilever- Hellmann’s.

To his sister’s point, however, Earnhardt is also expanding his involvement in Late Model Stock racing and hopes to run these cars for at least another decade to bring his career full circle from where it started to where it is now.

He also co-owns the CARS Tour series alongside fellow NASCAR notables Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton and Justin Marks.

“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 over the summer. “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.”

But in true Earnhardt fashion, if a sponsor wanted to partner with him for a race, JR Motorsports would no doubt entertain the option.

Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter .

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