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Seated among NASCAR’s team owners in a boardroom, JR Motorsports co-owner Kelley Earnhardt Miller finally notices it.
It could be years of being one of the few women on the race track, or it could be Earnhardt Miller’s desire to be seen as equal. But the four enclosing walls of a boardroom do little to disguise the men-to-women ratio.
“I look around and there’s about three women in there – you know, Jill Gregory, myself and maybe Jennifer Jo Cobb,” Earnhardt Miller said. “Then you kind of look and go, ‘This is pretty cool. This is pretty cool to be a woman in the sport.’ “
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The family ties
The daughter of the legendary Dale Earnhardt, Miller grew up in the sport, roaming track infields with her brother, Dale Earnhardt Jr.
They were young children, but they weren’t ordinary children — they were children of the Dale Earnhardt. “The Intimidator.” The famous driver of the black No. 3 Chevrolet.
The Earnhardt name has always been both a blessing and a curse.
“People definitely treat you different — good and bad — with the last name,” Earnhardt Miller said with a chuckle in her office overlooking the JR Motorsports shop. “School — my dad was ‘The Intimidator,’ right? We were either loved or hated, pretty much.
“And the hated part was kind of hard. People automatically thought we were snobby or we had everything that we wanted, and that wasn’t true. My dad made us work for things, and we were definitely not handed things on a silver platter.”
It was during these difficult times that Earnhardt Miller and her brother, Dale, leaned on one another for support.
They were, in a sense, their own team.
“There’s so much more to me that kind of shaped who we are,” Earnhardt Miller said of her brother. “Our parents were divorced early, we lived with our mom early on, we were in a house fire, we went to live with our dad — she felt like that was the best thing for us at the time. At that time, my dad was committed to his own (career) as a driver, we were home with nannies and family and things like that.
“It just really made Dale and I close and want to look after each other because our world, you know, it was different than the typical family.”
“I think it’s hard for a lot of people to understand how close we are,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said at Atlanta Motor Speedway in February. “I look at friends and other family members and their relationships with their brothers and sisters, and they’re good relationships.
“But man, ours is super-close because there’s so much we had to do, and we had to lean on each other and depend on each other. We never stopped.”
On the track
The Kelley-Dale duo became more of a racing team in the early 1990s, as both began racing in the Late Model Stock division on local tracks, along with their half-brother, Kerry Earnhardt.
But despite being the lone female among her brothers, Kelley was no damsel in distress at the race track.
“She was very good at what she did,” Earnhardt Miller’s cousin Tony Eury Jr. told ESPN in a 2010 article. “I raced her several times over at Tri-County (a short track in western North Carolina). We thought she probably had as much or more talent than any of them.”
But talent doesn’t always carve out an easy path for a female driver in a male-dominated sport.
“When I raced, gosh, being a girl was really hard. I raced against, you know, 40- and 50-year-old men,” Earnhardt Miller said. “And some young ones, too, but not quite as young as they race against today in the Late Model Stock Series. But it was difficult.”
Earnhardt Miller brushes off most hardship in the garage with a smile today, always keeping a positive note in her voice. But Earnhardt Jr., who worked on a few of Kelley’s cars during her racing years, saw firsthand his older sister’s struggles.
“Certainly as a driver she got pushed around, had guys wrecking her on purpose,” Earnhardt Jr. recalled. “You know, I think I see the same thing with Danica (Patrick) sometimes. Some of these guys, when Kelley was racing, they were waiting on her to give them the opportunity to rough her up. … Whereas if you’re racing another competitor, you sort of avoid those kind of things at all cost. Yeah, you don’t let someone shove you around, but they kind of might seize the opportunity when she’s just running someone hard and clean.
“She really took it hard when she struggled. She had this huge standard for herself. She could feel that nobody was overly excited to be a part of her career. People didn’t expect her to succeed, but she did, and she wanted to prove them wrong. And any time she had any kind of setback or struggle, she was super, super emotional and really hard on herself.”
From a brother’s perspective, the toll racing took on Kelley was the reason Earnhardt Jr. breathed a measured sigh of relief when she was forced to hang up her fire suit in 1998 due to lack of sponsorship.
But something like sponsorship couldn’t impede Kelley from unearthing success in some facet of racing.
After all, her last name is Earnhardt.
Chase Elliott won the 2014 XFINITY Series championship driving for JR Motorsports.
Moving into the boardroom
Equipped with a degree in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Earnhardt Miller focused her efforts on working full-time at souvenir sales company Action Performance. During her six years with the company, she climbed her way up the ladder to vice president of sales and vice president of procurement.
And after helping brother Dale kick-start his racing career, Earnhardt Miller was hired in 2001 as the general manager of JR Motorsports, a now-XFINITY team owned by Earnhardt Jr.
It was the perfect opportunity because for Earnhardt Miller, racing always has been a family affair.
“Really, what drives me in my position is because it is family and it is personal at the end of the day,” Earnhardt Miller said. “Carrying on the Earnhardt name … this is our family business. This is carrying on the legacy of my dad and what he built, and Dale and I doing that together — that’s what really propels me because it’s family and that’s very important to me.”
With the Earnhardts’ deep racing heritage that extends three generations, it came as little surprise to the industry when Earnhardt Miller’s oldest daughter, Karsyn, began racing go-karts at a young age.
“To be quite honest, as a mom, it’s a little scary to think about my daughter wanting to be a race car driver,” Earnhardt Miller admitted. “Not scary in the fact of getting hurt or anything like that, but it is so hard.
“I kind of want to protect her, I guess, as a mom. On the flip side of that, I want her to chase her dreams.”
If anyone knows something about cheering young female drivers in pursuit of their dreams, it’s Earnhardt Miller.
Just ask Danica Patrick .
In 2010, Earnhardt Miller encouraged Patrick to transition from IndyCar to stock car racing, driving the No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet. For Earnhardt Miller, Patrick was more than just a gifted driver — she was living out a dream that Earnhardt Miller once envisioned for herself.
“The driving force when we were presented the opportunity to potentially work with her was because she was a female and I wanted to be part of that,” Earnhardt Miller said. “Probably living vicariously through her for the dreams that I had and the dreams of Shawna Robinson and people like that that I followed at the time.”
JR Motorsports celebrates Chase Elliott ‘s first win with the team. From left, front row: L.W. Miller, Kelley Earnhardt Miller, Dale Earnhardt Jr. , Elliott.
‘Show ’em what you’re made of’
While Earnhardt Miller’s racing-filled dreams have been laid aside, she has been dominant in her own right in business. In its 15 years of existence, Earnhardt Miller has helped lead JR Motorsports to 26 XFINITY victories and 53 late model wins. The team achieved its first XFINITY championship in 2014 when young star Chase Elliott swept to the series crown, and has also earned late-model track titles in 2012 and 2014.
With the company booming, it seemed as though her Earnhardt toughness on the race track transitioned seamlessly into the corporate side of NASCAR.
“She (is) so amazing at the business side of it, and she’s real tenacious,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “Nobody pushes her around, especially no male in the boardroom pushes her around. All those people at JR Motorsports … she has complete control of everything going on there and everyone gladly and happily answers to her because they have so much respect for her.”
Earnhardt Miller runs her operations the way she would race: Cleanly.
“I’m not really a bully — I wouldn’t consider myself that at all — I just want things to be fair and I fight for things to be fair,” Earnhardt Miller said. “And usually you can see the rhyme and reason to that when you state your case and it’s all put out there.”
Fair is what she looks for with women in NASCAR in the future.
“I think obviously women are much more accepted in the garage (today),” Earnhardt Miller said. “I think it’s societal and generational that have really helped the changes overall, and then that’s carried on in our sport.
“We’re well-received — if you get out there and show ’em what you’re made of, you gain people’s respect and you can sit right alongside the men in our sport.
“For me, I want more doors to open for drivers in the female landscape … I hope the door opens for car owners to believe in women, that they can drive.”
Contributing: Kathy Sheldon