CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Hailie Deegan isn’t giving up on the quest of having a successful NASCAR career.
With three victories in the NASCAR West Series in 2018-19 and then a third-place finish in the 2020 ARCA national series standings, the expectations and buzz on the daughter of internationally known extreme sports athlete Brian Deegan was on the rise.
The last three years have provided some promising moments, but also frustration as she has five top-10s in the Craftsman Truck Series. She hasn’t made the playoffs and is averaging a finish of 21st.
She did finish 13th in her lone Xfinity Series start in 2022 at Las Vegas, and the Ford Performance development driver will head to that series full-time in 2024 as part of a multi-year deal with AM Racing. The 22-year-old feels the time is right to make the move and said she never had any thoughts about not continuing to focus on NASCAR.
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Deegan is the only full-time female driver in NASCAR’s three national series.
“Racing is the only thing I know,” Deegan said Thursday. “If it was easy, everybody would do it. It’s definitely not easy. There’s not many girls a part of it – being a girl has its pros and cons.
“I’m just trying to take advantage of every opportunity that I get and make the best of it and go from there, just constantly be growing and developing and working on my skill sets as a driver, never just settling and being OK with where you’re at.”
Deegan boasts one of the biggest social-media followings in NASCAR with 3.2 million followers on TikTok, 1.4 million followers on Instagram and 566,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel.
That has helped her acquire some sponsorship but also has increased the spotlight for her on the track, where she has fought through disappointments.
“It’s that self-motivation you have within you and that hard work aspect — you have to have that,” Deegan said. “It’s not something you can learn. You have got to have that yourself. And I wouldn’t give this opportunity up for anything.
“No matter what, if I get to keep racing, that’s all that I care about. So that’s what honestly keeps me going, a love for the sport and the motivation that I have to succeed in it.”
After three years in trucks, Deegan – and many in the industry – felt that if there was time to move to the Xfinity Series. That now was the time, that she has learned what she’s going to learn in trucks and it was time to try moving up the NASCAR ladder. Ford Performance has paired her with a team that only recently began racing full-time in the Xfinity Series after several years in trucks.
“Their vision of growth and what they were trying to accomplish, it kind of aligned exactly with what I was trying to do,” Deegan said. “And we both have the same mindset, same goals of what we wanted to accomplish. It was honestly such a natural fit.”
AM Racing will expand to two Xfinity cars next season and would like to keep current driver Brett Moffitt, who is 15th in the standings and won the truck race Saturday at Talladega Superspeedway driving a Front Row Motorsports car. But any decision on Moffitt’s future depends on sponsorship, and Moffitt said last weekend he is looking for a 2024 ride.
Deegan has the backing of Ford as well as new sponsors Airbox and Viva Tequilla Seltzer.
“Obviously she has such a brand of following, but I don’t think that really tells the whole story of who she is until you really get to spend that time with her,” AM Racing President Wade Moore said. “We found out really quickly that she is just a very driven and passionate person.
“And it doesn’t just pertain to driving race cars. Everything that she approaches in her life, she’s typically very emotionally invested, … so when you have someone that cares about things as much as she does, we can figure the rest out.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including the past 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass, and sign up for the FOX Sports NASCAR Newsletter with Bob Pockrass.
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