NASCAR: When will Dale Earnhardt Jr. make his announcement?

Dale Earnhardt Jr. has yet to announce where he will compete in the NASCAR Xfinity Series this year. Could that change in the near future?

Last October, the JR Motorsports NASCAR Xfinity Series team announced that they would be embarking on the 13th consecutive season of their partnership with Unilever, one of the world’s leading suppliers of food, refreshments, home and personal care products.

This announcement carried with it the news that Dale Earnhardt Jr., the 15-time Most Popular Driver Award winner who co-owns the team, would be behind the wheel of the #8 Chevrolet for another one-off event at some point in the 2021 season with primary sponsorship from Hellmann’s, an Unilever brand.

More than six months later, the track at which the 46-year-old Kannapolis, North Carolina native is set to compete has not yet been confirmed.

Earnhardt told Beyond the Flag in November that he knows where he will be competing in the 2021 season, but he wasn’t able to disclose that information.

“Hellmann’s and the guys, they need a little bit of time to sort of activate the sponsorship and get their money’s worth, and we need to allow them to be able to maximize that,” said the driver who has made one Xfinity Series appearance per year since retiring from Cup Series competition after the 2017 season. “For what we ask of them, they deserve that much from us.”

He added that while he wanted to compete at Martinsville Speedway, he wouldn’t be doing so, and that race came and went on the second weekend in April.

“It’s not going to be Martinsville where I wanted to go. … [Hellmann’s] cannot activate in time to be able to run the first Martinsville race, so that knocks that one off the list, because Martinsville is where I wanted to go,” he said.

He won’t compete in the Martinsville Speedway playoff race, either.

“I do not want to run that last Martinsville race because that’s in the middle of the playoffs and I don’t want to be any part of that storyline, so I’m going to completely avoid any of those races in the playoffs next year,” he added.

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As far as other clues, Earnhardt had only this to offer.

“It’s somewhere that I’ve raced before in the last couple of years. I’m sure some of you guys can kind of guess where it might be.”

Since retiring from full-time Cup Series competition, he has competed at three tracks in the Xfinity Series: Richmond Raceway in 2018, Darlington Raceway in 2019 and Homestead-Miami Speedway in 2020.

This year’s Homestead-Miami Speedway race was contested in February. It came and went and was never really an option, considering the Hellman’s sponsorship aspect of the equation.

Richmond Raceway is scheduled to host a non-playoff race in September, as is Darlington Raceway.

But all signs pointed to the latter, given the fact that it is also scheduled to host a race on Mother’s Day weekend — this weekend.

Yet the pieces of the puzzle don’t seem to be coming together, and that ended up being completely incorrect.

Josh Berry, not Earnhardt, is set to be behind the wheel of the #8 Chevrolet at Darlington Raceway this weekend, and Sam Mayer is set to take over the driving duties of the #8 Chevrolet following his 18th birthday at the end of June.

So while it won’t be playoff time by the time the late-season Richmond Raceway and Darlington Raceway races roll around, Mayer is set to be a full-time driver by then.

Until Mayer takes over, Berry is set to run the oval races and Miguel Paludo is set to run the road course races.

So where will Earnhardt end up competing in the 2021 Xfinity Series season? Is it possible that he doesn’t compete at all this year? It remains a mystery at which track he will extend his streak to 26 consecutive seasons of competing in at least one NASCAR race, if he is indeed going to extend said streak.