17 years, 32 race wins, six Most Popular Driver awards, and a championship title. What more can a team owner ask for?

After his fourth win of the season yesterday at the Music City, JR Motorsports’ veteran driver Justin Allgaier touched on his retirement topic, and owner Dale Earnhardt Jr. is in full support of his “great friend.”

“If this is the last race we ever ran with Justin, it has been an honor and privilege to work with him. If he runs a couple more years, I’ll be happy about that as well,” said Junior in the Nashville post-race presser on Saturday.

On the contrary, because of how instrumental Allgaier’s contribution has been to the No. 7 JRM team, Junior mentioned light-heartedly that the pressure will actually be on him and his team to deliver to his standards should he choose to race further.

Justin Allgaier didn’t answer the big question exactly, but he did mention “there’s a lot of factors” when deciding about this. One of them is the family life he wants to be there for, for which he recently bought a house in Illinois. And Junior understands this.

“There are priorities in his life that are shifting. Family, his kids, his family business up north. So I want to support him cause he’s been so incredible for me and a great friend. I just want him to be happy,” he added.

In fact, while talking about this yesterday, Allgaier mentioned that he initially planned to quit after last season, but his close ones didn’t let him.

“After I won my third race of the year, I walked in on a Monday morning and LW and Joe pulled me into Joe’s office and they’re like, ‘Why are you quitting? Why are you doing this?’”

Pressure also came from home, as he added, “My wife’s been on me to not quit. She doesn’t want to see me quit.”

As of now, “I don’t know what the future looks like” is Allgaier’s final stance, but should he decide to wait a bit longer, his owner is asking him to “buckle down, try to give you everything we can to make sure it’s a good ride all the way to the finish.”

Allgaier knew about his win before the race

Allgaier had a clean side-by-side battle with Brent Crews at Nashville before passing him late for the win with 20 laps to go. The battle was so good that even Crews mentioned he had “the most fun I’ve had without winning.”

And as every driver winning anywhere right now, the first thing Allgaier did was bow down to pay his respects to Kyle Busch, who tragically passed away on May 21.

“First of all, it’s been a rough couple of weeks, and lots of prayers to Samantha and Brexton and Lennix — it’s been an emotional couple weeks,” said Allgaier.

Then, the confidence of his winning drive was seen in his next words. “I told them before the race that we were going to go to Victory Lane.”

Allgaier, who turns 40 next week on June 6, is at the top of the standings with four wins, 770 points, with a mammoth 422 laps led and an average finish of 7.9. He now sits sixth on the all-time wins list in the O’Reilly Series.

Read more at the RFK Racing Digest!

Written by

Suyashdeep Sason

Edited by

Suyashdeep Sason