How Dale Earnhardt Jr. kickstarted NASCAR career | Sports News

“I can’t remember exactly how it all started, but I know Dale was asking me about my past, my history, what I raced and what I did, and I remember sending him some videos of me racing all of this stuff, and he was like, ‘What do you want to do?’.

“I was like, ‘You know man, I’d just love to race a late-model or something one time,’ because at that time, there was no plan or path for me to race anything other than what I was doing. I really couldn’t even afford what we were doing there.

“He asked me if I was interested in testing his late-model at Motor Mile, and of course I was like, ‘Holy —— , yeah.’ So, came out, met with them, and then we went to a test, I want to say it was like, January, February, this was 2010, at Motor Mile, with those guys,

“The test went good. You know, I ran pretty good, and then he said, ‘Alright, well you can run the first two races, and then we’ll see from there.’ So, I was still living in Tennessee at the time, we’re driving back and forth. Went, ran the first few races and Motor Mile that year, they went fairly decent.

““I can’t remember exactly where I finished, I think just outside the top ten in the first one, and maybe inside the top ten in the second one. There was about 30 cars, I think. After that, he was like, ‘Hey, we’ll figure out a plan, we’ll figure out something’. 

“So, I went back to Tennessee for a couple months, and then he eventually, they offered me a job at JR Motorsports.”