MOORESVILLE, N.C. -- Had life taken a
few different turns some years ago, the person who just
spearheaded the hiring of Danica Patrick might have preceded
Patrick as NASCAR's most famous female driver.
And yes, Kelley Earnhardt is more than
a little jealous of the woman she just hired to drive a
part-time Nationwide Series schedule for JR Motorsports.
"Oh, gosh. I joke with her and tell her
I'm going to live vicariously through her -- because this would
be my dream," said Earnhardt, who is a decade older than the
27-year-old Patrick. "I wanted to drive race cars."
The fact is, Kelley Earnhardt did drive
race cars. Drove 'em pretty well, too. She ended up being good
enough in Late Models that she beat her younger brother,
Dale Earnhardt Jr.,
and her cousin, Tony Eury Jr. Not often and not regularly, but
both men admit it happened and don't do so sheepishly.
“
This is a
championship-caliber team. We compete week in and
week out for the win. So for her to be in the
position she's in, she's got the best opportunity
any female has ever gotten in our sport.
”
- KELLEY EARNHARDT
That's because Kelley Earnhardt used to
drive well enough that losing to her was no embarrassment. Well,
Eury Jr. did have a little problem with his dad, Tony Eury Sr.,
after the fact. Both the younger and older Eury since have gone
on to have success as NASCAR crew chiefs, and Tony Jr. will
serve as Patrick's Nationwide crew chief.
"She beat me. Once. Pops let me have it
so bad afterward that I tried real hard not to let it ever
happen again," Eury Jr. said of Kelley.
"I raced with her several times over at
Tri-County [Racetrack in Brasstown, N.C.] She was a very good
race-car driver. We thought she probably had as much or more
talent than any of them. She was just so aggressive."
The operative word in Eury's statement
is "we." He was referring to the Earnhardt family, and that
included Dale's legendary father, the seven-time NASCAR Cup
champion. He used to tell folks that Kelley had all the skills
to make it as a top-notch driver.
"We all thought that," Eury Jr. said.
Life happened
What happened to Kelley's budding
driving career, then?
Life got in the way. Throughout her
formative years as a driver, she was busy off the track -- going
to college, getting her start in the business world. As time
went on, she was doing well enough at work away from the track
that leaving the office early every Friday afternoon to go racin'
suddenly seemed counterproductive.
So she eventually gave it up when
sponsorship for her car ran out following the 1996 season. She
said she figures her career path might have been different if
she had come along later.
"The sport in the mid-1990s, it wasn't
welcoming to women," she said.
Now she's helping run her more famous
brother's Nationwide racing operation. She was the driving force
behind signing Patrick, one of the most popular drivers in the
IndyCar Series, to a two-year contract to drive part-time for JR
Motorsports -- and she figures Patrick has several advantages to
making it to the top in NASCAR, over time, that she herself
lacked years ago.
"This really is the first female
competitor to be backed with the right stuff," Earnhardt said.
"This is a championship-caliber team. We compete week in and
week out for the win. So for her to be in the position she's in,
she's got the best opportunity any female has ever gotten in our
sport.
"Would I love to be doing it?
Absolutely. I love NASCAR, I love the fans, I love what we can
be ... I love the challenge. So I definitely would love to be in
her shoes. I love the competitiveness, I love the adrenalin rush
that you feel when you get in a race car. I know what that feels
like and can speak to that. I'd definitely like it to be me.
"But I'm very comfortable in my
position. I've been helping Dale run JR Motorsports for eight
years now. Like Dale has said, that he feels like he was born to
drive. I feel like this is what I was born to do. I was always
good in school, very academically gifted, and very smart with
the business mind. I feel like I'm well-rounded. I'm still very
competitive -- but I'm comfortable and I'm happy."
Brother's thoughts
Dale Jr. remembers watching Kelley
drive and marveling at her guts. No one in the family or outside
of the family that he remembers from that time drove it harder
into the corner of a race track.
"She was hard-headed as hell," Junior
said. "You know that old saying that you can't push a rope? You
can't tell somebody to drive into a corner deeper -- but you can
tell a driver to back off and not overdrive it. Well, that was
her.
"You always wonder about someone when
they get into a race car for the first time. She was one of them
people who started overdriving the car from Day One. And that's
good. You can slow that down. You can't force somebody into
something that they're not comfortable with -- but you can slow
down somebody who is overdoing it. The hard part was just
getting her to do that, but she wasn't scared. Not one bit."
There also was the matter of a young
woman with the last name of Earnhardt running hard and trying to
beat a bunch of men. Most didn't take kindly to that.
"She ran a lot at Tri-County and got
pushed around quite a bit -- but she didn't take much [crap] off
anybody. And I got a lot of funny pictures of her with her face
red as hell after a couple of little incidents," Junior said.
"She was a trip. She was so, so damn
competitive and would get so upset if things didn't go the way
she thought they should. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed when we were
racing together. We didn't race at the same track a whole lot --
but I enjoyed that period when Kelley and [brother] Kerry and I
were all racing. We'd take off in three different directions on
a Friday afternoon, and then we'd come back on Sunday and be
looking at everybody's stuff and everything, wondering how each
of us did, comparing notes. It was eventful."
Could his sister have become Danica
before Danica?
"It's hard to say. I think she would
have had a lot of opportunities, if it had been a different
environment and a different culture, I suppose," Earnhardt Jr.
said of Kelley. "She would have had plenty of opportunities to
see what her chances of making it would have been.
"She was hard-headed and tough and
drove hard. I think she eventually would have polished her
skills to where she would have been a pretty good race-car
driver -- at the higher levels, even."
Kelley appreciates all the compliments,
but said she knows her place now. And it's behind a desk at JR
Motorsports, not behind the wheel of one of their race cars.
Still, there are days when her mind
wanders -- and she wonders what might have been.
"It wasn't hard then [to give it up]. I
liked doing it but didn't think then about what it could become,
and what I could become," Kelley said. "So I wouldn't say it was
hard to stop racing. I was excelling in what I was doing in the
business world. I was getting promoted, my dad was very proud of
what I was doing, that I had gone to college and that kind of
thing.
"So I can't say it was hard to quit.
It's harder now to think about quitting than it was to actually
do it back then. I kick myself more in the butt now for quitting
than I did then, if that makes any sense."
The opinions expressed are solely
those of the writer.
