Few sports are as white and male dominated as NASCAR, said to Phil Horton, the pit crew coach for NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity program.
But Brehanna Daniels — the first African American female to work on a NASCAR pit crew — demonstrates that the sport is slowly changing.
Daniels and Horton were at the Children’s Museum of Virginia on Jan. 19, as part of the Portsmouth Museums and the Portsmouth Public Library’s Black History Now 2019 series. A car was on display outside the museum, and a tire changing simulation game was set up inside.
It’s a grueling job that requires tires to be changed in a matter of seconds, as many as a dozen times a race. Daniels, 25, told kids at the Children’s Museum that she has been obsessed with fitness from an early age when she grew up in Virginia Beach. She played basketball from age 4. She ran track and played soccer, basketball and field hockey. She won a basketball scholarship for college and played college basketball for Norfolk State University.
Daniels said the death of her mother when she was a ninth-grader at Salem High School spurred her on to excel.
“I lost my mother to breast cancer when I was in high school,” she said. “I feel like I have grown as a person so much since that happened. Losing a mother teaches you strength even though that’s a really, really hard time. I had to grow up fast.”
Before her tryouts for NASCAR, Daniels watched a YouTube video of a pit stop. “I thought, ‘dang that’s fast,’ ” she said.
Daniels said she uses an impact wrench to take the lug nuts off the wheel in seconds. The entire pit stop takes 12 to 14 seconds, she said. The number of times a tire is changed depends on the level of a race. The top tier Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series entails as much as 11 to 12 tire changes per race.
Daniels is pleased to have made history in 2017 when she became the first African American female on a NASCAR pit team. “I’m just excited to be in a position to break barriers for other women like me, people of color,” she said. “I feel like God called me for a reason so as I could be a part of change.”
“Being an athlete before definitely helped with the process,” she said.
Horton has worked with NASCAR athletes and drivers for 22 years and has run NASCAR’s diversity program for a decade.
NASCAR was about “99 percent” white and “very male” when the program got started, he said.
“It’s still about 97 percent,” he said. “We have a long way to go.”
Portsmouth’s Black History Now series runs through Feb. 28.
“We have a strong program this year,” said Nancy Perry, director of Portsmouth Museums.
Dorothy Steel, a 93-year-old actress from the movie “Black Panther” was lined up to meet kids at the Children’s Museum on Jan. 26.
The program includes historical images from I.C. Norcom High School at the main library on Court Street, an exhibit of the African American social scene from post-World War II at the Portsmouth Colored Community Library Museum, and portraits of African Americans in the military from 1946 to 1967 in the lobby of City Hall.
For more information, visit www.portsmouthva.gov/DocumentCenter/View/6029/Black-History-Now-2019.
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