Kelley Earnhardt takes the lead

In the course of her career, Kelley Earnhardt has moved from being a racer to bringing one of the most anticipated NASCAR competitors into the sport.

She has stepped from the shadows cast by being the daughter of Dale Earnhardt and sister and confidant of Dale Earnhardt Jr. to emerge as a savvy businesswoman who knows the racing business from all sides — driving to marketing to licensing to contracts. These days, as she grows into her role as co-owner of the JR Motorsports team she helped found and develop, Kelley Earnhardt is also adjusting to a heightened public presence.

She’s doing so in style.

Earnhardt deftly cruises past questions digging for insight into her popular and successful brother, the man who is also a co-owner of JR Motorsports and with whom she has worked in an official capacity since 2001. She appears to seamlessly navigate the waters of negotiating contracts with sponsors and others and has played roles in both the high-profile move of Earnhardt Jr. to Hendrick Motorsports and landing the coveted Danica Patrick, who will drive part-time for the JR Motorsports Nationwide Series team this season.

Earnhardt handles her role like a seasoned professional.

In many ways, that is exactly what she is.

After all, she essentially has been trained for this position her entire adult life. Now, she’s just willing to take a more public role as part of her move into co-ownership.

“We’ve been in front of the camera and the TV with our dad, being involved,” she says. “I’ve not chosen to be out front. As a team owner, I think that’s part of my role for the series. ... I enjoy it.”

Earnhardt obviously knows the sport from all sides.

Not only did she grow up watching her dad race in NASCAR, but she also competed and raced well in Late Models at places such as North Carolina’s Tri County Speedway and Hickory Motor Speedway. Although she hasn't raced in years, she says she sometimes wishes she had continued along that path.

“There are lots of days that I wish I had done that,” she says. “It was different then; it was just a different ballgame. I was working and fresh out of college."

She earned a business degree from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, then worked in licensing before joining forces, in an official working capacity, with her brother.

“Kelley’s pretty much handled the daily activities here over the last several years anyway. … I can really involve myself basically as much as I feel like it, which makes it a lot easier for me to focus on my real job,” Earnhardt Jr. says.

Since then, she has orchestrated and seen numerous changes to the career and business of her brother, from the way things are managed to his landmark move from Dale Earnhardt Inc., the team his father founded, to his current driving role at Hendrick Motorsports.

Kelley Earnhardt can remember how different things were just 10 years ago. At that time, the sport’s most popular driver had six employees, including someone who paid the bills, a motor-home driver and “a couple of guys that mowed the grass and ran around for him.”

DEI handled Earnhardt Jr.’s marketing, Web site and licensing. First, she worked with the personal side of the driver’s business. As she became more involved with DEI, she slowly became more entrenched in the marketing and licensing side of Earnhardt Jr.

“As we obviously started our own Nationwide team, we had to do a lot of that stuff in-house for ourselves, hired different people to handle it and now we have 85 or so employees,” she says. “Then when we left DEI and moved to Hendrick Motorsports, we brought all our own licensing inside, marketing, all that kind of stuff, so now all that is within JR Motorsports. So it’s changed a lot and evolved a lot.”

Kelley Earnhardt says it hasn’t always been an easy transition to make.

She has delved into the world of contracts and now team ownership.

These days, she deals in high-power negotiations and works with corporations as she tries to bring continued sponsorship to JR Motorsports.

At times, she says, dealing with executives she hasn’t met can be difficult at first. She has learned, though, that the feeling can actually go both ways. People can feel intimidated to talk with her and Earnhardt Jr. as well.

“We’re both very really normal people, and I think it’s just as intimidating for people to work with us as it is for us to work with people, honestly. … People don’t know what to expect until they meet you, and they have this stereotype of what you may be,” she says. “I hear people all the time say I’m just really normal.”

Yet she can calmly and courteously handle a series of questions concerning her team, her high-profile brother and her high-profile new driver.

And she can still find a little time to have some fun.

Earnhardt tells a story of working with her brother at the shop. She says he came into her office and she ended up raising her voice and yelling over the course of their conversation. When he left her office, she assumed he was gone for the day.

Not so.

“About 45 minutes later, he came back with a slip of paper and he had went to the [human resources] office and he had me wrote up,” she says. “He said, ‘HR is scared to come in here and give you this, and so I need you to sign this piece of paper.’”

She says she quickly pointed out to him their conversation had been of a sibling nature and, therefore, he couldn’t write her up, and they laughed about the incident.

While balancing the family side of working together with the business aspects might be difficult for some, Kelley Earnhardt says that is not the case for her and her family. After all, they had a good example to follow for that -- one that has made her current role easier.

“I think we’ve all done good with it because of my dad,” she says. “Tony (Eury) Sr. worked with my dad, we grew up under my dad and dad always had a way of teaching you how to keep things separate. … We had a good teacher from that standpoint.”