This track would make Dale Earnhardt Jr. consider a (very limited) comeback

You probably know by now that Dale Earnhardt Jr. is headed for the broadcast booth on Sunday, but he does have one track on his wish list that would make him get back behind the wheel.

This should come as no surprise for someone who has racing in his blood the way Dale Earnhardt Jr. does, but he misses being at the track each week. That’s one of the first things he admitted to ESPN’s Bob Pockrass in a wide-ranging Q&A ahead of Junior’s NBC Sports NASCAR broadcasting debut this weekend at Chicagoland.

For the rest of this season, Earnhardt will get to soak up the smells and sounds of racing as NBC covers the remainder of the NASCAR season. He’s also not completely done racing, as he’s set to make at least one more XFINITY Series start at Richmond this fall.

Could he be lured out of retirement for more? It’s pretty clear that due to health considerations, we’ll never see him in a stock car at the superspeedways where he found so much of his success. But Earnhardt Jr. also really loves short tracks, telling Pockrass that if he was suddenly handed full control of NASCAR, he would “add 10 damn short tracks to the schedule.”

Specifically, Junior wants to see racing return to  Nashville Fairgrounds, where Fairgrounds Speedway used to host what is now the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series from 1958 to 1984 and the other two national series even more recently than that. While NASCAR moved on to Nashville Superspeedway, that track has since shut down and the future for any stock car races in Music City appears grim.

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That might not have been the case had Bruton Smith won the battle for what is officially called Fairgrounds Speedway Nashville, but he did not. However, in case anyone wants to guarantee the return of a certain retired NASCAR superstar, it might be a good idea to discuss having an XFINITY or Truck race there, because he just might come out of the broadcast booth to compete in it.

"If it’s an Xfinity race or a Truck race, I might have to get in the car just to run one more time. It’s such an amazing track. I was so heartbroken when [Bruton Smith’s SMI] was bidding for it, and they ended up giving it to the [current] promoter. We got so close. You know we would have been there with an Xfinity race or a Truck race. We would have. That would have been incredible."

File this under “just saying” …