Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s post-driver career in NASCAR might even be busier than his time behind the wheel of a car. Heading an Xfinity Series team while looking over the CARS Tour series and broadcasting on various platforms in various capacities keeps the former Hendrick Motorsports man busy.
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Junior’s broadcasting career kicked off with NBC Sports after his official retirement from the Cup Series in 2017. He called races from the booth while giving fans some of NASCAR’s most iconic calls of all time, such as the ‘Slide Job!’ call at Chicagoland in 2018.
Come the 2025 season of racing, with NASCAR armed with a new TV Deal for the season that includes several broadcasting partners ranging from Fox Sports to Amazon Prime, Junior will also be seen transitioning from his time at NBC to Amazon Prime this year.
The two-time Daytona 500 winner recently talked about this switch. He elaborated on how his time off broadcasting for a major network was. While he did continue to scratch the itch to some extent on his Dirty Mo Media productions, mainly with podcasts surrounding the sport, a full-time gig on live TV was missing.
Despite the extended break, Junior did not seem to enjoy his time off and was raring to go again, as evidenced by his words on Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast, “I didn’t want to take a year off, but it just didn’t work out, and so I’ve missed it. I’ve missed it a lot.”
Junior also elaborated on how not being in the broadcast booth for the past season meant he felt rusty going into rehearsals at Kansas this past weekend. “We were at the NASCAR building using your (Fox Sports’) feed to do rehearsal of sorts, just practice and play… I was really nervous.”
“If you don’t do it every day, and you’re not in there in the grind, you can kind of, it’s like golf, if you don’t swing a club all the time, you might not be as good the next time you try to go out and do it. But we had a little practice run, felt awesome. It reminded me how fun it is. My excitement level is through the roof,” he added.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. will return to the broadcast booth on Memorial Day weekend — just in time for the Coca-Cola 600. It’s the perfect venue to welcome Junior back into the swing of things.
With the added excitement from his side on how Amazon Prime has “a lot of fresh ideas” on how to broadcast stock car racing, the upcoming season seems full of promise for the viewers.
