Daniels makes history with NASCAR’s “Drive for Diversity”
At first, Brehanna Daniels thought her friend was kidding when she told her to try out for NASCAR. It was 2016, and Daniels was wrapping up her senior year at Norfolk State University in Virginia, where she played point guard on the women’s basketball team. “I was sitting in the cafeteria, mid-bite of my Chick-fil-A sandwich, when my friend from the school’s athletic department, Tiffany, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, NASCAR is holding tryouts for their pit crews on Wednesday, you should go,” Daniels, now 27, tells PEOPLE. “I looked at her like, ‘Girl, I don’t even watch NASCAR.”
Still, a voice in the back of Daniels’ head — she thinks it was God — urged her to attend the tryout. “I don’t question that, man,” she says, joking, Daniels was the only woman in a group of men trying out for one of the coveted spots on a NASCAR pit crew team as part of the organization’s “Drive for Diversity” program, which aims to recruit and train minority and female racecar drivers as well as pit crew members. The program started in 2004, and there are more than 50 graduates of the pit crew member division now working for the organization.
At the tryout, Daniels says she fell in love with the competitiveness and delicate hand-eye coordination needed to be a tire changer. A few weeks later, she was invited to join NASCAR’S pit crew member program following graduation, and the rest is history (actual history). In 2019, Daniels became the first Black woman to pit in NASCAR’s historic Daytona 500 race. She is continuing to break barriers in the historically white, male-dominated sport as a tire changer on the No. 51 Chevrolet for Rick Ware Racing in the NASCAR Cup Series.
“It’s always nice seeing other women reach out to me and say, ‘You’re living my dream, how can I get involved?'” she says. “More people are seeing me do this and they want to do it, too … so one day, I hope there’s a lot of women in this sport.” Reflecting on being the first Black woman, specifically, to pit in a NASCAR crew, Daniels notes, “God couldn’t have picked anybody else better to do the job. It takes a strong person to be able to make that change … knowing the history of NASCAR and the faces people are used to seeing on the track. Even though I was a little nervous at first, because I did not know how I would be judged or looked at, I am like, ‘You know what? Somebody has to do this, and I guess I’m going to be the one to do this.”
Daniels lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she has been busy preparing for the Daytona 500, practicing with her pit crew team at a local track and strength training at a gym nearly every day. In her free time, she relaxes by journaling, skating and spending time with friends. “People were saying, ‘She’s not going to last long, she’ll probably be here for a couple of months, if that,'” she recalls. “There’s going to be those people out there, not everybody’s going to be happy that I’m in the position that I’m in, but it just gives me the motivation to do more of what I’m already doing.”
