Kelley Earnhardt Miller leads JR Motorsports with passion
Seated among NASCAR’s team owners in a boardroom, JR Motorsports co-owner Kelley Earnhardt Miller finally notices it.
It could be years of being one of the few women on the race track, or it could be Earnhardt Miller’s desire to be seen as equal. But the four enclosing walls of a boardroom do little to disguise the men-to-women ratio.
“I look around and there’s about three women in there – you know, Jill Gregory, myself and maybe Jennifer Jo Cobb,” Earnhardt Miller said. “Then you kind of look and go, ‘This is pretty cool. This is pretty cool to be a woman in the sport.’ “
The daughter of the legendary Dale Earnhardt, Miller grew up in the sport, roaming track infields with her brother, Dale Earnhardt Jr.
They were young children, but they weren’t ordinary children — they were children of the Dale Earnhardt. “The Intimidator.” The famous driver of the black No. 3 Chevrolet.
The Earnhardt name has always been both a blessing and a curse.
“People definitely treat you different — good and bad — with the last name,” Earnhardt Miller said with a chuckle in her office overlooking the JR Motorsports shop. “School — my dad was ‘The Intimidator,’ right? We were either loved or hated, pretty much.
“And the hated part was kind of hard. People automatically thought we were snobby or we had everything that we wanted, and that wasn’t true. My dad made us work for things, and we were definitely not handed things on a silver platter.”
It was during these difficult times that Earnhardt Miller and her brother, Dale, leaned on one another for support.
They were, in a sense, their own team.
“There’s so much more to me that kind of shaped who we are,” Earnhardt Miller said of her brother. “Our parents were divorced early, we lived with our mom early on, we were in a house fire, we went to live with our dad — she felt like that was the best thing for us at the time. At that time, my dad was committed to his own (career) as a driver, we were home with nannies and family and things like that.
“It just really made Dale and I close and want to look after each other because our world, you know, it was different than the typical family.”
“I think it’s hard for a lot of people to understand how close we are,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said at Atlanta Motor Speedway in February. “I look at friends and other family members and their relationships with their brothers and sisters, and they’re good relationships.
“But man, ours is super-close because there’s so much we had to do, and we had to lean on each other and depend on each other. We never stopped.”
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