In the years leading up to his retirement, and certainly in the months afterward, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has become something of an advocate for better understanding concussions for athletes.

The 43-year-old has already pledged to donate his brain to science after his death and has been very candid about his experiences dealing with head trauma throughout his career.

So it comes to no surprise that NASCAR’s most popular modern driver would address the topic in his upcoming biography and the media blitz that accompanied it.

In a series of YouTube interviews with sports reporter Graham Bensinger, Earnhardt speculated that he kept at least 20 concussions from NASCAR over his 20-year career and simply drove through them. Earnhardt was first sidelined due to concussions in 2012, following a 25-car crash at Talladega Superspeedway.

He missed the second half of the 2016 season with another bout.

But this was far from the first two times that Earnhardt believes he likely should have been sat down and prevented from turning laps on the track.

"Your brain is your computer, and people don’t have the faith in it healing like a broken bone," Earnhardt said in the interview conducted at his North Carolina home. "This is in the past where guys have had head injuries, and visually, you can see that it’s affected them permanently. So if you go to somebody and go, 'Man, you know I rung my bell, and I’m real messed up, and I’m gonna take a break and I’m gonna come back 100 percent,' you know that person's always gonna have that in the back of their mind.

"And when you don’t run a good race, are they gonna go, 'Hmm, I wonder if he’s just not the same anymore'? You know? I’ve heard that talk about other drivers. Even guys that don’t have any history of concussions, I’ve heard people say, 'You know he did have a lot of hard wrecks.'"

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WATCH THE FULL EARNHARDT INTERVIEW HERE

And through it all, Earnhardt had a fear of dying, secretly recording his symptoms on his phone -- wanting a public record to be available just in case something happened to him.

"I felt compromised in my head," he said. "I felt delicate. And if I was to have another random, rare, high-impact crash that could injure me severely -- so severely that I wouldn’t be able to communicate properly … I wanted there to be some sort of documentation of what had been happening to me and what I’d been going through."

Even though Earnhardt believes he suffered over 20 concussions during his career, he pinpoints just one that he fully suspects ended his career.

He suffered through a testing crash at Kansas Speedway in 2012. He believes the impact from hitting the wall made him more susceptible to further damage after that incident.

"I remember thinking as I was heading toward that fence, 'This is going to be an insane, insane impact,'" Earnhardt recalled. "And I hit the wall at 190 miles an hour and my head is right against that headrest and it’s as stiff as a roll bar, and so my head didn’t go anywhere and everything inside of it went into high-speed movement, and my brain just compacts against the inside of my skull at an incredible force …

"There’s not any situation that I can think of that would result in a harder impact in racing. And if it doesn’t happen to me, I probably don’t cut my career short. I’m probably still driving race cars today. But that wreck made it easier, I think, for me to get concussions beyond that instance."

Earnhardt will return to NASCAR in an Xfinity Series one-off later this month at Richmond Raceway in Virginia, his only planned stock car race since his retirement. He hasn’t decided if he will make additional appearances next season.

He is a full-time color analyst with NBC Sports, taking up the majority of his professional time. He and wife, Amy, welcomed their first child, daughter Isla Rose Earnhardt back in May.

"Every time I look at Isla, I want to cry," he said days after her birth. "Every time I look at Amy and her together -- when Amy’s holding her or feeding her -- I just can’t believe this is in my life."

The book was co-written by Ryan McGee and titled “Racing to The Finish: My Story,” and will be released on Oct. 6. The full interview with Bensinger will air this weekend in syndication.

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