Five tracks where Dale Earnhardt Jr. has the best chances of winning

Dale Earnhardt Jr. used the hashtag #FinishStrong on Twitter Tuesday morning, shortly after announcing he’d retire at the end of this season:

https://twitter.com/DaleJr/status/856882329800888321

Even though Earnhardt will be leaving the cockpit of the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet at the end of the season, he still has a lot to race for this year, including a spot in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.

So #FinishStrong is an appropriate theme for the final 28 races of the year.

Earnhardt has had a difficult season so far, and following Monday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway, he’s ranked a disappointing 24^th in points. But he still will have plenty of opportunities to win between now and the end of the season. 

Here are the five tracks where Earnhardt is most likely to win:

Earnhardt will get two more cracks at the Tricky Triangle — June 11 and July 30 — where he has two career victories, 11 top fives and 15 top 10s. Those are all solid number for the 14-time NASCAR Most Popular Driver.

In the fall of 2014, Earnhardt was able to score his breakthrough first victory at Martinsville. And he’s had a lot of strong runs at the Virginia short track, where he posted 13 top-five finishes, tying him with Daytona for the most top fives at a single track.

Earnhardt has won the Daytona 500 twice and the July 4^th weekend Daytona race twice as well. He’ll get one more attempt at the venerable 2.5-mile superspeedway on July 1.

Earnhardt has three victories at the 1-mile desert oval, most recently in November 2015. And he has five top fives and six top 10s in the last eight races at Phoenix. The penultimate race of the year could be a good one for him to win.

Always a threat to win at restrictor-plate tracks, Earnhardt has six wins at Talladega, the most of any track in his career. And he’ll have two chances in which to do it, with the Talladega races set for May 7 and Oct. 15.