Meet Brehanna Daniels, the first African American woman in a NASCAR Pit Crew.
Imagine only having twelve seconds to do the most critical task on your to-do list. Go ahead, imagine away. Almost there… Times up. Not that easy, huh? This twelve-second frame is precisely how much time Brehanna Daniels has to use a power drill to snap off five lug nuts, replace both the rear left and right tire, and then drills five lug nuts back on.
“Dang, that was fast,” Daniels said the first time she watched a video of a pit crew — the eight-person team responsible for refueling a race car and installing fresh tires mid-race. “I was amazed by how fast they did their jobs.”
Daniels had no intention of becoming the first African American woman in a NASCAR race’s pit crew- she actually never watched the sport. “The only time NASCAR came across my TV was by accident when I was looking for a basketball game or a football game to watch. My mindset was, Wow people must really enjoy driving in circles,” Daniels said. But in college, while grabbing lunch between classes, a woman from the athletics department pulled her aside to let her know that NASCAR was coming to campus to hold pit crew tryouts. She thought Daniels should go for it.
Although the sport’s fan base is 36% women, actually seeing a woman on the track is uncommon. There have been nearly 3,000 NASCAR drivers who’ve raced at the Cup level since the sport was created — only 16 have been women. Spotting women in the pit crew is even more infrequent. The first female driver appeared in 1946, but it wasn’t until 2013 that the sport saw its first woman in the pit.
Daniels was the only girl who showed up to tryouts, and she rocked it, landing her a spot be one of 10 selected from around the country to join the NASCAR Drive for Diversity Crew Member Development Program. “I remember one of the first times I reported over to a team, I went over to the crew chief, and I said, ‘Hey, my name is Brehanna Daniels and I’ll be your rear changer for the day.’ And he was like ‘You’re changing my tires?’ It was really, really tough in the beginning,” she said. “At first I think a lot of people were like, She’s not doing it for real; she’s just here for show. But obviously, I got sent to the track to do my job, and I can do it well; otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten here.”
Her fighter’s mentality is unmatched. Daniels lost her mother to breast cancer when she was in high school. “Whenever I’m going through something, and I think about giving up, I always think about her. She fought hard. I can do that too,” Daniels said. “So I don’t really worry about what people have to say — if anything, I just use it as motivation.”
This is Daniels’s fourth year on Pit Road, and her skill has more than spoken for itself. “I love proving people wrong,” she said. “I’m one of the hardest-working people, and I’m strong. I know what I’m capable of.”
When Daniels became the first Black woman in history to work the pit crew for a NASCAR race, it was 2017. The moment was bittersweet, she said. She’d just made actual history, but why had it taken that long? “Whenever I think about giving up, I just keep going that much harder,” she said. “I hope I can give motivation to others out there who look like me to step forward.
