Could Kelley Earnhardt have been Danica Patrick?

By Lee Montgomery - Associate Editor

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Danica Patrick (left) and Kelley Earnhardt pose for a photo at JR Motorsports' NASCAR Nationwide Series shop.

David Griffin
NASCAR Scene

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JR Motorsports co-owner Kelley Earnhardt helped bring Danica Patrick to NASCAR, but there’s part of Earnhardt that wishes she could be in Patrick’s shoes.

See, Earnhardt was a driver of note in her younger days, back when she and brothers Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kerry Earnhardt raced Late Models around the Carolinas. Some even said Kelley was the most talented of the bunch.

Kelley, though, ended up in the business of NASCAR and now runs JR Motorsports and handles most of Dale Jr.’s business affairs.

“Would I love to be doing it?” Kelley said recently. “Absolutely. I love NASCAR, I love the fans, I love what we can be, I love the challenge of being the best we can be, so I definitely would love to be in her shoes.

“I love the competitiveness, I love the adrenaline that rushes when you’re in a race car. I know what that feels like, I can speak to that. I’d definitely like it to be me.”

Could Kelley Earnhardt have been Danica Patrick 10 years ago?

“She would’ve had a lot of opportunities had it been a different environment and a different culture, I suppose,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “She would’ve had plenty of opportunities to see what her chances of making it would’ve been.

“I think she would’ve eventually polished her abilities to where she would’ve been a pretty good race car driver, at the highest levels even.”

Earnhardt Jr. said his sister definitely had the aggressiveness it took to be a driver.

“She was hard-headed as hell,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “That old saying, you can’t push a rope – you can’t tell somebody to drive in the corner deeper. But you can tell a driver if they need to back off when they’re overdriving. Well, that was her.”

From the first day she sat in a stock car, Earnhardt Jr. said, Kelley overdrove. She wasn’t afraid of going too hard, which was fine, but eventually she needed to learn to back off just a tad.

“The hard part was to get her to do that,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “She raced a lot and ran really good. … She ran Tri County [Speedway in Hudson, N.C.] a lot, got pushed around a lot. She didn’t take much [stuff] off anybody.

“I’ve got a lot of funny pictures of her with her face red as hell after a couple incidents. She was a trip. She was so, so competitive and so damn upset if things weren’t going the way she thought they should.”

So why didn’t Kelley stick with driving? For one, sponsorship ran out while she was in college. And then after college, she started moving up the management chain at Sports Image, a souvenir company owned by her father, seven-time NASCAR Cup champion Dale Earnhardt Sr.

“I didn’t really think about what it could become and what I could become, so I wouldn’t say it was hard to stop racing,” Earnhardt said. “I was excelling in what I was doing, I was being promoted. My dad was very proud of what I was doing. I can’t say it was hard to quit. It’s harder now to think about quitting than it was to quit then. I kick myself more in the butt now for doing it.”

The climate of NASCAR was different in those days, she said. Now, it’s easier for women to rise through the ranks, whether it be in business or competition.

“I joke with [Patrick] and tell her I’m going to live vicariously through her because this would be my dream,” Earnhardt said. “I wanted to drive race cars. I drove race cars. At the time I did it, I was still going to college, I was working for Sports Image. The sport in the mid-’90s wasn’t welcoming to women. The Patty Moises, the Shawna Robinsons got in there and tried it. …

“Does the thought cross my mind to get in there? [Hendrick Motorsports General Manager] Marshall Carlson e-mailed me the other day … about me driving, and he said, ‘You so totally should do this. We’re going to get you out there and test.’ So I might have some backers.”