Brehanna Daniels Is the First Black Woman in a NASCAR Pit Crew

Brehanna Daniels has 12 seconds to change a tire. When her driver races off the track at 200 mph, she vaults over the pit wall, sliding in front of the right rear tire. Ten seconds. Uses a power drill to snap off five lug nuts. Eight seconds. Breathes while the 24-pound tire is swapped with a fresh one. Seven seconds. Drills five lug nuts back on. Five seconds. Pops up, sprints around the car, slides into the left tire. Three seconds. Lug nuts off, tire swap, lug nuts on. Time’s up.

“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 dreams of becoming the first Black woman in the pit crew of a NASCAR race—she didn’t even watch 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,” she says. But in college, while grabbing lunch at Chick-fil-A 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 rare. 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.

“I don’t really worry about what people have to say—if anything, I just use it as motivation.”

Daniels was the only girl who showed up to tryouts. She crushed it and was 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 says. “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.”

This is Daniels’s fourth year on Pit Road, and her skill has more than spoken for itself. “I love proving people wrong,” she says. “I'm one of the hardest-working people, and I’m strong. I know what I’m capable of.” 

Her fighter’s mentality is hard-won. 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 says. “So I don't really worry about what people have to say—if anything, I just use it as motivation.”

NASCAR—a sport that has for decades been characterized by stereotypes of beer-drinking, Confederate flag-waving rednecks—is in the midst of a reckoning. In June the organization officially banned the Confederate flag from races after pressure from Bubba Wallace, the sport’s only Black driver. (Following the ban, a rope tied like a noose was found in Wallace’s garage. An FBI investigation determined he was not the victim of a hate crime, but the president of NASCAR responded by releasing a photo of the noose and telling reporters, “As you can see from the photo, the noose was real, as was our concern for Bubba,” per the New York Times.)

The past few weeks have been “multiple strides in the right direction” for NASCAR, Daniels says, which will include sensitivity training for all NASCAR employees. “When Keedron Bryant sang the National Anthem—I don’t remember the last time we had an African American sing the National Anthem,” Daniels says. “To see that diversity, to me that means a lot. It means NASCAR is starting to realize maybe we do need to change some things.”

Daniels has become the perfect poster woman for the future of what the sport could look like. “Before I started NASCAR, I was a little nervous about joining because of how I might be looked at, how I might be judged, because I knew that there weren’t people here that look like me,” Daniels says. “Not only am I a woman, but I’m an African American woman. But you know, I’ve never put myself in a box, and I’ve always given myself the opportunity to be able to try new things. This is one of those new things I wanted to try, and it’s gotten me a long way.”

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 says. 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 says. “I hope I can give motivation to others out there who look like me to step forward.”

Macaela MacKenzie is a senior editor at Glamour, covering wellness and women’s equality in sports. 

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