Dale Earnhardt Jr. 1-on-1: On future racing plans, Cup ownership possibilities

Fans are used to seeing Dale Earnhardt Jr. as part of the NBC telecasts, which begin this weekend at Iowa Speedway.

But Earnhardt — by far NASCAR’s most popular driver during his years in the sport — is not returning to the NBC booth this year. He returns next season for 10 races (points races 13-22 on the Cup schedule), five on Amazon Prime Video and five on TNT.

So how is Earnhardt spending his time this summer? FOX Sports caught up with Earnhardt — media personality, businessman, and co-owner of JR Motorsports — at JRM’s fan day last month to find out what he is doing, what he thinks of the short-track package (the next two races are at the 0.875-mile Iowa and 1-mile New Hampshire), how much longer he will do a race or two in the Xfinity Series and whether JR Motorsports will ever go Cup racing.

I figure people are wondering what in the world is Dale Earnhardt Jr. doing since he’s not in the booth this year. So what are you doing?

What am I doing? Well, this year I turn 50 in October, so I've been traveling a lot. I went to Europe to hang out with Jimmie Johnson and Casey Mears and Matt Kenseth and all our wives. We had a good little trip. We’re probably going to go back to Europe later in the year. We’ve got a few trips planned. We're tuning in — we're watching all the races trying to stay on top of what's going on in the sport. We're still doing all of our Dirty Mo’ Media podcasting. And we're here at JR Motorsports every week creating all our content for that. I’m racing our little late model car here and there. I'm going to run the Xfinity car at Bristol again this year, just like we did last year with Hellmann’s, and then I'm running three-to-five late model stock races in the CARS Tour and the Advanced Auto