Earnhardt plans to live vicariously through Danica (NASCAR.com)
December 18, 2009
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."
Kelley Earnhardt says she is v… NASCAR.com – Dec 18, 5:18 pm EST NASCAR Gallery function prev_photo() { if (YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_current_index > 0) { goto_photo(YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_current_index – 1); } else { goto_photo(YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_last_index); }}function next_photo() { if (YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_current_index 0) { YAHOO.util.Dom.addClass(article_carousel_prev, prev); YAHOO.util.Dom.removeClass(article_carousel_prev, prev_disabled); } else { YAHOO.util.Dom.addClass(article_carousel_prev, prev_disabled); YAHOO.util.Dom.removeClass(article_carousel_prev, prev); } if (YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_current_index < YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_last_index) { YAHOO.util.Dom.addClass(article_carousel_next, next); YAHOO.util.Dom.removeClass(article_carousel_next, next_disabled); } else { YAHOO.util.Dom.addClass(article_carousel_next, next_disabled); YAHOO.util.Dom.removeClass(article_carousel_next, next); }*/}function goto_photo(p) { if (YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_photos) { for(i = 0; i < YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_photos.length; i++) { if (i == p) { YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle(YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_photos[i], display, ); } else { YAHOO.util.Dom.setStyle(YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_photos[i], display, none); } } if (YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_current_page) { YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_current_page.innerHTML =(p + 1); YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_current_index = p; } } update_buttons();}YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_init = function () { YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(article_carousel_prev, click, prev_photo); YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(article_carousel_next, click, next_photo); YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_current_index = 0; YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_current_page = YAHOO.util.Dom.get(carousel_page); YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_photos = YAHOO.util.Dom.getElementsByClassName(item, div, leadphoto); if (YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_photos) { goto_photo(0); }}YAHOO.Sports.article_carousel_init();
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.
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.
