Dale Earnhardt Jr. will donate brain for research

Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants to donate his brain to science.

NASCAR's most popular driver revealed his intention Saturday night during a casual Twitter chat, saying he hoped to donate his brain in order to help concussion research.

His tweet came after he tweeted a link to an article on three former Oakland Raiders who also said they were donating in honor of teammate Ken Stabler. Stabler, who died last July, was found to have CTE, a degenerative brain disease that has been tied to multiple blows to the head.

Earnhardt Jr. suffered a pair of concussions in 2012 that caused him to miss two races. The first came during a late August test at Kansas Speedway, where he blew a tire and slammed the wall. But he did not report the incident, hiding for weeks that he wasn't in top shape.

A second concussion then occurred when he spun in a race at Talladega Superspeedway that October.

Concerned about consecutive concussions in a short amount of time, he went to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's concussion program and missed the next two races.

NASCAR instituted mandatory baseline concussion testing for its drivers in 2014.

PHOTOS: Dale Earnhardt Jr. through the years