The 2024 racing season begins a few days earlier for Dale Earnhardt Jr. than it does for the NASCAR grid. The racing icon said on his podcast on Tuesday that he was planning to run races in late models and the Xfinity Series among other venues this year. The first box on his checklist will be ticked off as soon as February 10, at Florence.
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Junior’s first race of 2024 will be the 9th Annual IceBreaker 150 at the Florence Motor Speedway. The 125-lap event will be held over the coming Saturday and is set to attract some of the biggest names in racing. The weekend will mark Junior’s second consecutive year of participation in the IceBreaker and his fifth race at Florence. He finished 16th in last year’s race.
He further said of his plans, “I’ll run my late-model car probably three or four times this year. It does not look like I’m going to be able to race at the Wilkesboro race, the All-Star week.” Though the All-Star race is out of the books due to business that he has in New York City, Junior is hoping to run at the venue later in the year.
He continued about wanting to run a couple of more late-model races at Florence again and in Darlington. He is positive that the South Carolina 400 will be on his list too. Back on the grounds of NASCAR, he has put Bristol back on his radar. He said, “We haven’t made an announcement. That’s not something Hellmann has agreed to. That’s not something that Junior Motorsports has agreed to. It’s what I want.”
Where do fans want their favorite driver Dale Jr. to race?
In the Dale Jr. Download episode holding one of the “Ask Jr.” sessions, fans were questioned about where they’d like to see him run. Most of the responses surrounded the Charlotte Motor Speedway and the new-in-town, Iowa Speedway. Martinsville made a sporadic appearance, but Junior explained how he didn’t enjoy it the last time he drove there.
He reasoned his opinion on stages being too short in the Xfinity race at Martinsville and on the cars being underpowered to get any spin on the wheels. He said, “The stages, they’re like 40 laps! They are really, really short. In the Martinsville races that I always ran, I needed that 80 or 100-lap run in the middle of that race.”
Junior continued how they used to have long green flag runs in the Cup Series, which helped make the cars last throughout the race. “None of that happens in the Xfinity race. The stages are just too short for that to really play in,” he said. He concluded his explanation for not favoring Martinsville by noting that he wouldn’t be fond of the race-end chaos that plagued the fastest drivers there.
