Dale Earnhardt Jr. hasn’t sat in a Cup car at Daytona since 2017. In fact, he’s barely raced anywhere in the last two years. So when he started talking about Daytona’s racing package on a recent episode of his own podcast, it didn’t take long for the conversation to go somewhere nobody expected.

“It’ll click,” Dale Jr. told Connor Zilisch, who was venting about a string of bad luck at superspeedways. Shane van Gisbergen jumped in, asking if NASCAR’s actually planning to change how drafting works at Daytona, to which Dale Jr confirmed that “we’re going testing to see if we can change it”. This followed Zilisch asking the retired racer if he was excited.

“I am,” Dale Jr. said, leading the Trackhouse Racing star to ask the real question: “You driving?” SVG cut in first, half-joking: “You’re not racing.” Surprisingly, Dale Jr.’s answer wasn’t a flat no. 

“No, but if they change the racing, they might entertain the idea of me going back and running Daytona,” Jr answered. “But I ain’t doing it the way y’all are doing it now. I’m not going out there to ride around 10th in line and not be able to pull out and do anything.”

The 51-year-old brought up the 2001 Daytona race as proof of what he means. 

“I went up to Rick Hendrick and Jeff Gordon and said, ‘We’re going to run wide open’,” he recalled. “If we’re leading and run out of gas with 40 to go, I don’t care how short on fuel we are. We’re just going to go like hell.”

He even pointed to Simon Pagenaud’s Indy 500 win, where Pagenaud ignored his own team’s fuel strategy mid-race. 

“I don’t give a shit,” Pagenaud told them, according to Dale Jr. “The cautions fell perfectly, and he won the race.”

Now, that’s not a small comment from a guy with this much history at the track, with 36 Cup starts at Daytona and two Dayton 500 wins.

It’s worth saying out loud: this isn’t a comeback announcement. Back in February, Dale Jr. mentioned on his own show that his wife Amy had jokingly suggested he run the 2027 Daytona 500. He laughed it off then, too. What’s clear is that he’s only interested if NASCAR actually changes the racing style first, and right now, he’s putting his energy somewhere else entirely.

Dale Jr.’s JR Motorsports is Scaling Up Fast

While Dale Jr. debates whether the racing itself needs fixing, his team is busy building something much bigger behind the scenes.

JR Motorsports just locked in a major multi-year deal with Arby’s, splitting sponsorship across eight races between Carson Kvapil, Sammy Smith, and Justin Allgaier, with Arby’s also running full-season branding on Allgaier’s car. The deal even folds in Dale Jr.’s media company, Dirty Mo Media, bundling sponsor exposure across his podcast network alongside the actual race car.

On the competition side, JRM hired Rodney Childers, a 40-time Cup-winning crew chief, to run its flagship No. 1 car. That car is now split between Kvapil and Zilisch. 

JRM is positioning itself as the fastest pipeline in NASCAR’s garage, and setting up CEO Kelley Earnhardt Miller’s long-term goal of eventually pushing the whole operation into the Cup Series.