Friday 5: Hailie Deegan's NASCAR journey takes a big step forward
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Hailie Deegan’s laugh explodes into staccato bursts when asked which is more challenging: wedding preparations or preparing for her first Xfinity start at Daytona International Speedway.
The wedding, sometime after this season, is easy. Deegan’s aunt is a wedding planner, and Deegan admits she’s not too particular with what she wants.
Saturday’s Xfinity race — her second career start in the series — continues her path from off-road racing up NASCAR’s ranks. Highlights the past three-plus seasons in the Craftsman Truck Series were limited. She had no wins, no top-fives and five top-10s in 69 series starts.
Those results could weigh on a driver but Deegan is focused ahead, not behind.
“The moment you start questioning stuff is the moment it starts falling apart,” she told NBC Sports earlier this week at the AM Racing shop in Statesville, North Carolina.
It’s easy to forget Deegan is early in her journey. The 22-year-old California native will be younger than many of her competitors this season. She didn’t start driving stock cars until 2017. Yet, it seems as if she has been around much longer because she often has been in the spotlight.
— Deegan became the first woman to win a race in what is now the ARCA Menards West Series in 2018.
— She finished second in an ARCA Menards Series race in 2020, tying the record for best result in that series by a female.
— She scored the best debut by a female driver in both the Truck Series (2020) and Xfinity Series (2022).
Actions, not accolades, will determine what’s next for her. That’s why she does not agonize about her Truck Series record.
“If you’re truly doing everything you think you can do and giving your full effort,” Deegan said, “I feel like your focus will be so much on that and not necessarily just the bad things going on, because you have so much you feel you need to get done to accomplish your goals.”
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Deegan’s main goal this season is consistency, but there are many elements within that. She’s worked on communication with her new team. She wants to improve her restarts. She seeks to be better in superspeedway races.
Deegan gets her first chance to meet those goals at Daytona International Speedway, a track that has provided her with special moments and lessons.
Her family celebrated her runner-up finish in the ARCA Menards Series race in 2020. “Her day will come,” Brian Deegan, the action sports superstar, said on pit road that day about his daughter.
For a while, last year’s Truck race looked as if it could be Deegan’s day. She finished fourth in the opening stage but was collected in a crash early in the second stage. Deegan looks back and knows there was more she could have done to avoid that incident.
“I felt like we should have bailed when we were three-wide,” she said. “I didn’t, and we got into the wreck.”
She admits she was not confident enough to back away. She’s talked to her new crew chief Joe Williams Jr. about how to handle such scenarios.
“If he thinks I should bail, I bail, but if I think I should, he’ll trust me with that,” Deegan said.
That’s a challenge for all drivers. Denny Hamlin is known for sensing trouble in Cup races and falling back in the pack to get away from potential trouble. But there are times later in the race, when that isn’t an option.
“It’s so hard to be able to (determine) that, the right times or the wrong times and be able to trust your gut like when things don’t seem right,” Deegan said.
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Avoid those incidents and then come the restarts. Deegan didn't fare well with them in the Truck Series.
“I struggled with them really bad,” Deegan said of the restarts in the Truck Series. “I feel like in my case, I would be trying to go forward, but I wasn’t worried about what was happening behind me when I should have been worried about what was happening behind me, because of people getting runs and putting you in the middle (lane). Next thing, you’re three wide on a mile-and-a-half (track) and you are done for.”
She’ll learn more lessons Saturday and throughout the season. Her only previous Xfinity start came in 2022 at Las Vegas. She finished 13th.
She says she raced “cautiously aggressive” that day, noting the goal was to run all the laps and get comfortable with the car. She finished all 201 laps that day in a race where three of the top four drivers that day — winner Josh Berry, runner-up Noah Gragson and fourth-place finisher Ty Gibbs — are all in Cup this season.
With her move up to the Xfinity Series, she’ll be competing against reigning series champion Cole Custer, Justin Allgaier, Austin Hill and Sam Mayer — drivers who combined to win 15 of the 33 series races last year.
That’s just among the many challenges Deegan or any other driver face in moving through the sport’s national series.
“I feel like over time, you just have to take it with baby steps and keep learning, keep learning,” she said. “Don’t be content with just where you’re at and learn from others what you can.”
The next part of her journey begins this weekend.
2. Moving on
This week marks Ryan Preece’s first time back at Daytona International Speedway since his savage crash at this track in August.
Preece’s car slid through the backstretch grass and went airborne after it slid over a patched portion. His car rolled more than 10 times before it stopped.
NASCAR and Daytona International Speedway responded by paving a portion of what had been grass before the backstretch chicane and have plans to pave more of the grass beyond the chicane after this weekend.
As for Preece, he’s just ready to race.
“I look at this race or this track no different than I did a year ago,” said Preece, who was bruised and had black eyes from the incident but did not miss a race. “And as I said, I think it did more, I don't want to say harm, but gave people more mixed feelings about this racetrack for my wife and my father than it did me.
“But as a racer I feel like we’re … at least I'll speak for myself, I'm numb to these things and getting in the race car and having that happen. Crappy deal. I was pissed off more that we had such a fast race car and wasn't able to finish the race.”
Asked about what his reaction was to first seeing the incident, Preece noted how often he’s watched the crash.
“I think it's really like you understand the severity of it the more times that you watched it,” Preece said. “So it probably took about 30, 40 times of watching it to understand how bad it really was and obviously things happen really fast. So, for your brain to really interpret everything that happened throughout that wreck. You just remember more and more.”
3. Close encounter
Seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson was asked this week about what it is like inside the NASCAR hauler. He shared a story from early in his career when he was looking for Mike Helton, then the president of NASCAR.
Johnson had an idea of how to better handle things when qualifying was rained out. He admitted he didn’t feel the format had gone in his team’s favor and wanted to offer a suggestion.
When he went to the NASCAR hauler, he was told Helton was in the lounge. Johnson walked up there but only Bill France Jr., whose father started NASCAR, was there.
“Oh sorry, sir, I was looking for Mike,” Johnson told France.
“If you can say it to Mike, you can say it to me," France responded.
“No, no, I’m good.”
“Sit down, tell me.”
Johnson offered his suggestion to France.
“He told me my idea was dumb and get out of the truck,” Johnson said, laughing as he recalled the episode. “It had something to do with this is my sandbox, something in that genre. I left and it took a long time before I went back in the truck.”
4. Awaiting a deal
The Cup season is slated to start Sunday with no deal between NASCAR and teams to extend the charter agreement beyond this season.
Cup team representatives cited a “broken” economic model in October 2022 and sought a greater share of revenue. Talks have progressed and slowed since. NASCAR didn’t complete its media rights deal until late last year. Cup teams let a charter negotiation window expire at the beginning of the month.
A key issue remains how much money teams will receive. Steve Newark, president of RFK Racing, said in October 2022 that sponsorship makes up 60-80% of a team’s revenue.
Jeff Gordon, vice chairman at Hendrick Motorsports and one of the members of the RTA’s negotiating committee, said Thursday at Daytona that talks “are a work in progress, but it has stalled out a little bit. So, there’s some frustrations, but I’m still optimistic at the same time.
“Everything just got delayed, mainly because of the length of time it took to finalize the TV deal, but I do feel like that there was an opportunity for us to get much closer before that. That’s frustrating, but the teams are diligent in getting a deal done. That’s all I can say right now.”
Gordon said that “the biggest challenge” for team owners is revenue.
As for what percentage of the media rights deal would appease teams, Gordon said: “The number is the number. It’s just where it comes from is kind of up to NASCAR. … They primarily want to focus on it coming from the media rights deal.”
As for what gives him optimism of a deal getting done, Gordon said: “The dialogue has been good. I haven’t seen any animosity.”
Car owner Rick Hendrick said he thinks a deal could be done “pretty soon … because it’s too important to everybody, NASCAR, the owners and the tracks. It’s just, we got to get it done.”
5. Learning to win (on a superspeedway)
Tyler Reddick’s victory in the first qualifying race Thursday night continued the progress he’s made at superspeedways since 2022.
In 2022, Reddick completed only 71.4% of the laps run at the races at Daytona, Atlanta and Talladega. He failed to finish three races because of an accident and one due to engine failure.
“I was just so behind on experience the last few years on what this car drafts like and how much it moves around and getting comfortable with that,” Reddick said earlier this week.
Last year, he ran 92.1% of the laps at those tracks. While he had only one top-10 finish in those events, he completed every lap in five of those six laps.
Thursday night, he passed Kyle Larson for the lead on the final lap to win.
“Some of it certainly helped gaining some experience at the tail end finally, running laps, finishing some of those races, but tonight was just kind of we were in the right spot at the right time,” Reddick said after the win. “Like Ricky Stenhouse (in winning last year’s Daytona 500), some of these other drivers that have been able to make hay late. It kind of came to us, to a degree.”
