The 2020 NASCAR Drive for Diversity class features six promising drivers. For all their talent, though, ultimate success is unlikely. Photo : Tyler Strong ( NASCAR Digital Media )

We are the bridge.﻿


That’s how NASCAR’s then-spokesperson Ramsey Poston described Drive for Diversity (“D4D”) to ESPN.

In the academic literature, it’s referred to as a pipeline program. Such initiatives have been generally successful, with specific examples in STEM, health care, and K–12 education.




But D4D is unique. Participation is selective, yet public—usually dichotomous in pipeline programs. Moreover, D4D relies on independent team owners and sponsors to pick up its graduates after their time in the NASCAR-owned Rev Racing, whereas most diversity initiatives are funded by the same entity that can hire or promote. In NASCAR, there is not just a gap between the starting point and the top, but equally a gap between who pays for the program and who the program relies on.



NASCAR only tries to bridge one. Sometimes, that works.



Three of the eight non-White winners in NASCAR’s national series are program alumni, with three more winning during the D4D era, perhaps indirectly benefiting from NASCAR’s efforts to improve its climate toward inclusivity. Only Frank Mundy (born Francisco Menendez) and Wendell Scott’s wins predate the initiative.




In 2016, D4D grad Daniel Suárez claimed the season-long NXS championship, becoming both the first Latino racer and first driver born outside the United States to achieve this feat. Kyle Larson has made the Cup Series playoffs four times in his thus-far-six-season career.

Several D4D drivers are also race winners at the regional East and West Series level—including Hailie Deegan, the first woman to ever claim victory at this tier—either while in the program or after their tenure (as in Deegan’s case), an important accomplishment regardless of their overall national series outcomes. Others (and some overlapping) have at least been promoted to the East and West tours from local, weekly racing in the D4D program.




While these absolute results do not isolate D4D, and therefore cannot project what any individual’s end result might have been without the program, that there are highly visible examples of successful drivers from underrepresented backgrounds is marked progress. This, in turn, may expand the pool of possible D4D drivers in the future; at the 2019 Combine, one participant, Lavar Scott, cited program graduates as clearing a path and providing inspiration.

Equally, D4D’s positive effect goes beyond drivers, with the program expanding diversity in other positions on teams—including some held by former D4D racers. This segment of the program has also been effective at reaching women of color in ways the driving program has not. On the corporate side, D4D internships have led to increased representation in NASCAR’s higher ranks.


The rest of the time, though, it’s as if NASCAR has never seen a bridge before.

Many participants have lamented the lack of a path out of NASCAR’s regional series and into the national tours. Most racers point to a lack of assistance with sponsorship as the leading contributor to D4D’s lack of upward progress, resulting from NASCAR’s strict policy against helping D4D drivers in its national ranks.


In the most extreme case, a D4D driver’s father accused the program of being “a sham” and “smoke and mirrors” for providing zero financial opportunity to advance and for not providing competitive equipment.

Other accounts have scrutinized not the bridge itself, but the selection process of who gets to try to cross. While Suárez credited D4D for giving him the chance he needed to establish himself in the United States, he expressed hope his experience would be more widely available, encouraging NASCAR to invest more time in international drivers and suggesting that ignoring this talent pool has reduced D4D’s effectiveness. Another driver, Preston Tutt, stated to Racin’ Today that “[his driving CV] was head and shoulders above [the drivers NASCAR chose for D4D], but [he] got a letter from NASCAR saying [he] didn’t fit their criteria.”


Tutt’s frustration was especially pronounced with the attention given to fellow black drivers Bobby and Tia Norfleet, whose résumés both proved fraudulent. Though neither Norfleet ever participated in D4D, Bobby received NASCAR’s support a few years before the D4D program was conceived, clouding evaluations of NASCAR’s seriousness in vetting talent as Brian France connected Norfleet to funding and NASCAR Online gave a platform to his dishonest tales, all culminating in his first Truck Series practice also being his first time ever in a race car.

Paired with the program’s controversial start as a response to pressure from Rev. Jesse Jackson, some critics have doubted NASCAR’s intentions, and therefore D4D’s ability to help drivers, entirely.


That leaves two D4Ds: the one lauded in MBA textbooks as a groundbreaking commitment to an overdue value and the one criticized by its own beneficiaries for under-delivering on its promises.

Maybe the bridge is useful. Maybe the bridge is so ineffective no one would even notice if Chris Christie were causing traffic jams on it for political gain.


Until now, it’s been easy to dismiss one argument or the other. The D4D that works is just PR hype. The D4D that doesn’t is just bitterness from drivers who couldn’t cut it.

Enter this intervention (a bridge over the gap in our understanding, if you will): a statistical analysis of D4D’s targeted outcome—racing at the national series level.




Presented here is a maximum-likelihood logistic regression model intended to reconcile the mixed reviews of D4D. Chiefly, the model measures the odds that a D4D participant will make seven starts at the national level, controlling for other important variables, to compare participants’ opportunity against two groups of otherwise equivalent drivers: White, male racers and those eligible for D4D on race/ethnicity and/or gender criteria, but racing outside the program.


Logistic regression provides the best way to evaluate D4D because, as a bridge, the program is encased in a philosophy of opportunity. NASCAR helps drivers through its local and regional series to try to create potential candidates for independent teams and sponsors to sign. The goal is simply to put new faces in the same pool as White, male ones.



In other words, the program succeeds, in NASCAR’s own terms, when D4D drivers have an equal chance to graduate from the regional series as anyone else.


This is not to say other measures would not be insightful. Difference in differences, for example, would show if D4D has improved outcomes over time, even if not equalizing them. Yet this would not track with reality, as drivers would have to be randomly assigned to simulate a “treatment,” given that not all eligible drivers actually participate in D4D.

Moreover, it would be less helpful: a bridge that’s better to cross than before is not NASCAR’s intention if that bridge is either harder or easier to cross than any other driver’s.


Here, all drivers who debuted in the East or West Series from the 2004 season through 2019, aged 15­-29 at the time of their debut, are included. No drivers in the model had any national series starts prior to their first East/West Series race, and anyone still actively pursuing the seven start mark was dropped.

The dependent variable in this model is making seven total starts across NASCAR’s national series. Nothing that findings are robust between three and nine starts, seven has been chosen due to having some substantive value as the long-time rookie standard. Intuitively, the first start or two of a driver’s career is much harder to pinpoint, given some of the unique situations that can arise, including unplanned substitutions or road course and dirt track “ringing.” Equally so, this is less useful to understanding the program, as no one would consider one or two starts a reasonable opportunity for a driver to break into national-level racing. After nine, starts begin to depend more on performance in the sample of national races already accumulated.




Independent variables include D4D status (in the program, eligible for but not in the program, or ineligible for the program), whether a driver won at least one race in the East or West Series, whether the driver was related to an existing national series figure (such as a driver, team owner, sponsor, or official), whether the driver participated in an official development program for a team or manufacturer, sponsorship level while racing in the East or West Series (national/international brand, local/regional brand, or no sponsor at all), and the natural log of age on debut.

A continuous variable for wins, standing in for the binary winner variable, was rejected both due to the distribution (most drivers do not win, and those who do usually win few races—yet some win into the dozens) and because of a nonlinear relationship (e.g., that having too many wins likely indicates someone is an East or West Series lifer). Transformations on this variable were not helpful, while other measures of performance beyond race wins provided no predictive value.



Crucially, there is evidence that otherwise equivalent drivers in the D4D program are nearly four times less likely (.266 times as likely) to make seven or more national series starts (p = 0.041; 95% CI = 0.075, 0.944) as a White, male driver. That these groups are not equal, despite D4D’s existence, is an important finding for evaluating the program, which ultimately intends to give D4D drivers the same chance of graduating as their White, male counterparts.

Plainly, the bridge is inferior to what it attempts to replicate.



D4D participants and eligible, non-participating drivers are unable to be meaningfully compared due to lack of statistical significance. Importantly, this limits the ability to assess the program fully, but this comparison is not as central to evaluating D4D, as the initial justification for D4D was that outcomes for demographically diverse drivers were unfair to begin with. Restated, D4D is focused on how racers from underrepresented racial, ethnic, and/or gender backgrounds fare against White, male drivers, and while certainly useful to know if D4D status is associated with better, worse, or similar odds of making seven national starts as racing outside of D4D is, the key finding is enough to believe D4D has not succeeded at its goal, even if D4D is a superior alternative to nothing or let alone if D4D is an even worse path than before.




Meanwhile, East and West Series winners, all else held constant, are five times as likely to make seven national series starts (p < 0.001; 95% CI = 2.265, 11.302) as those who race in East or West, but never win a race. Relatives of national series figures are nearly six times as likely to achieve this outcome (p < 0.001; 95% CI = 3.026, 11.644) as those who are not related to anyone in NASCAR’s highest divisions. Development drivers see a similar result (OR = 6.176; p < 0.001; 95% CI = 2.617, 14.578).

National or international sponsorship leads to higher odds of making seven national series starts, too—about two times as probable compared to those who have local or regional brands on their East or West Series cars (p = 0.026, 95% CI = 0.248, 0.914). With so few observations of drivers who were totally unsponsored, no comparison is able to be made there.


Finally, younger drivers fare better than otherwise identically situated older drivers in this model (OR = 0.058; p = 0.002; 95% CI = 0.010, 0.338), though this serves only as a necessary control and provides no insight on D4D.

The results aren’t ideal for D4D. A bridge cannot be four times harder to cross than the one for White men if a diversity initiative were to be considered successful.


The results don’t, however, explain why D4D has produced this alarming result.

One theory may come from the program’s foundations. The seriousness of D4D has been doubted—both in one of the most in-depth books on Black participation in American motorsports and in sociological work that went as far as to suggest D4D exists only to help NASCAR “rest easy at night.”




These ideas invoke institutional theory, which would offer that NASCAR’s creation of D4D was an attempt to achieve legitimacy by responding to coercive, mimetic, and normative environmental pressures. These responses are not purely deterministic, and can be motivated by the possibility of material gain resulting from legitimacy, but voluntariness of action is not as strong in institutional theory as in other conceptualizations of organizational behavior. In the diversity context, legitimacy in the eyes of external stakeholders can be achieved by compliance with outside pressure. Accordingly, institutional theory provides one lens as to why organizations pursue diversity initiatives.

Coercive pressures are often conceptualized in the form of government regulation. However, non-governmental actors may still exert strong enough influence, even if compliance is not mandatory. When Rev. Jesse Jackson became involved in a program, not connected to NASCAR, to develop Black drivers, he undertook outspoken, public criticism of the sanctioning body. Though Jackson held no legal power over NASCAR, attacks on the lack of diversity—and lack of action—in auto racing are sometimes suggested to have catalyzed NASCAR’s leap into D4D, which Jackson had an early involvement in. The notion that NASCAR was coerced into D4D by Jackson could be supported by the financial relationship that NASCAR began with Jackson one year prior to D4D, with some $250,000 donated to a branch of Jackson’s coalition of organizations. If an answer to coercive pressure to act on diversity, D4D would not necessarily be a pursuit of some end, but rather the end itself—that having D4D, rather than having diversity, is the solution.


Jackson’s involvement in D4D’s origins may not have been the only source of coercive pressure, either. NASCAR’s own corporate partners began discussing diversity, framed in the ability of NASCAR being able to reach a larger audience. While acting to be more marketable may not fit into institutional theory in a traditional sense (reiterating, though, that voluntariness of action is no longer a determinant of whether behavior falls within institutional theory’s ideas), acting because of demands from corporate sponsors, whatever their motivations may be, does. More importantly, a disconnect between how corporate sponsors pitch their ideas and what actually motivates corporate sponsors becomes especially pronounced in that NASCAR’s own partners requested diversity, but the sponsors partnering with private teams or individual drivers may have acted differently. Evidence that sponsors hesitate to support racers contributing to diversity because of fear there is no market of fans to respond to non-male and/or non-White faces, fuels suspicion that partners at the organization-wide level are less concerned with growing a market, and more concerned with the illegitimacy or reputational damage of partnering with an organization that has no diversity or no diversity initiative. Regardless, appeasing sponsor demands represents a rich source of hypothesized coercive pressure for NASCAR beyond the perceived political quest against it by Jackson and others.

Mimetic pressures may have bolstered coercive ones in NASCAR’s case. Within the motorsports industry, and even within NASCAR itself, other diversity programs began to take foot in the 1990s and early 2000s. These included the Miller Racing Team program that Jackson initially supported (along with General Motors and Dr. Pepper), a competition among Black racers to win a test session in open-wheel racing’s feeder series, an initiative by Dodge to bring both women and drivers of underrepresented racial/ethnic backgrounds into NASCAR, and a diversity partnership between the Joe Gibbs Racing team and NFL player Reggie White that is often credited as the key predecessor to D4D. That successful programs were occurring in plain view of NASCAR could have been good reason to adopt an initiative of their own; while private development schemes may have benefited NASCAR indirectly if graduates eventually raced in its three national series, the public attention—and therefore the legitimacy associated with committing to diversity—would not go to NASCAR. Other programs prompted copying, again signifying the potential for D4D to be a program that exists to exist, rather than to generate an outcome, which may have otherwise been achieved.




Other sources of potential mimetic pressure existed outside of auto racing during the era of D4D’s formation. NASCAR’s constant comparisons to other sports, including by itself, tie in nicely to the idea that D4D is a copying mechanism. In discussions of D4D, NASCAR representatives and media often spoke of a search for NASCAR’s Tiger Woods. Actors from other sports, which feature more diversity (at least racially or by ethnicity), have been involved with D4D from the start, including NBA player-turned-team owner Brad Daugherty. The aforementioned Joe Gibbs Racing program, formed with the NFL’s White , serves as another example of Black athlete involvement in the roots of D4D. Gibbs himself is a former NFL coach, and one Black driver working both with D4D and Gibbs was, at that time, presented as the could-be Doug Williams of NASCAR. In this analysis, mimetic pressure operates differently; while the prior discussions of coercive and mimetic pressure demonstrate motivations for NASCAR simply to have a diversity initiative, rather than to have diversity, mimetically searching for “Tiger Woods” inspires an actual diversity outcome, albeit a baseline. However, that outcome is still framed in the benefits to NASCAR, and the resulting legitimacy, rather than in terms of the benefits NASCAR’s program can provide to participants, nullifying that distinction with respect to the potential effect on program success.



Normative pressures, at the heart of legitimacy, exist within D4D’s history, as well. Once again, the discussions of diversity with organization-level partners can be classified not only as coercive, depending on the extent to which access to those partnerships depended upon a commitment to diversity, but equally as a source of normative pressure in that conversations with sponsors set a standard to follow: that diversity was to be discussed and valued. Likewise, bringing outside actors like Daugherty and Jackson into the D4D fold creates the potential for normative conformity. Perhaps the largest motivator to respond to normative pressure came from NASCAR’s first centralized media rights deal, signed in 1999 and beginning in 2001, that would lead to a mainstream explosion and a subsequent chasing of “stick-and ball” sports’ legitimacy by adopting some of their practices. On record with ESPN, one NASCAR spokesperson described D4D as “‘the right thing to do,’” embodying conformity with a broader societal norm.


Some work has attempted to link influences on adoption to program outcomes through commitment, finding that organizations that view diversity as compliance (most aligned with institutional ideas of diversity program diffusion) achieve worse results. Likewise, reactive organizations have less success with diversity initiatives than proactive ones; reaction is inherent to conforming to external pressures. In this sense, NASCAR may fail because it lacks commitment: it can placate outside pressure through mere program existence, reducing motivation to invest in program success, and only seeks to satisfy reactionary goals, which are less “felt” by the organization.



Of course, the statistics don’t prove that explanation in this context, but it’s not unreasonable to believe that more glaringly in the way of NASCAR’s legitimacy wasn’t who wasn’t on the other side, but what wasn’t there in the middle.


The bridge may not solve the diversity problem, but it solves the legitimacy one: the simple lack of a NASCAR-owned bridge.



Perhaps even more germane to the model itself—though again not proven by the results—may be the work on stigma toward participants in diversity programs.


Previous theoretical and empirical research on diversity initiatives (primarily affirmative action) suggests that such programs may not achieve their desired results because of negative perceptions about participants. Stigma may arise from fears of reverse discrimination against the majority group, reducing program success through resistance by actors ineligible for participation. The creation of diversity programs may be associated with the belief that standards will be lowered, compounding the potential for negative evaluations against those who participate. Initiatives, and therefore participants, may be seen as running antithetical to American ideals of hard work leading to mobility regardless of one’s background. Consistent with research on non-White applicants, experimental findings have shown reduced competency evaluations and smaller salary increase recommendations for women hired through affirmative action than a control group of female hires when information on performance is not unequivocal. Importantly, this type of observed result occurs most often when a diversity initiative or affirmative action program is perceived as unfair, consistent with later studies challenging the existence of stigma that conducted their work in environments with a favorable view of and understanding about the need for affirmative action.

So established is the line of thought that participation in a diversity program leads to added stigma that a real effect on actual performance can be observed through lowered self-evaluations.


As a hyper-patriotic space sometimes traced to neo-Confederate roots, NASCAR could be especially susceptible to resistance toward diversity initiative participants through belief that D4D is unfair or aiding less-qualified drivers. Likewise, with NASCAR and its participants’ public support of Donald Trump’s political campaigns, NASCAR, as a setting, has tied itself to the rhetoric around working class White people falling behind and the anger at “others” expressed by Trump voters in sociological research. A program parting from strongly held beliefs of hard work being all that matters would lead to less perceived fairness, while that perception would increase stigma.

Given that NASCAR funds D4D, but cannot promote anyone out of D4D—and outwardly wants private team owners and their sponsors to hire and support D4D graduates—stigma’s direct effect would be powerful, because program success relies on actors outside of the program evaluating D4D drivers positively. Plus, performance information is often ambiguous in racing, with the roles equipment, team resources, and strategies can play in end results, on top of how large jumps in competition level reduce the predictive power of results in lower divisions. That means no unequivocal evidence for who has the ability to succeed at higher tiers of auto racing exists to help undo potential stigma.




Fairness—the key to stigma’s effect on program outcomes—has been ever-present in discussions of D4D. Team owners like Joe Gibbs and Brad Daugherty, both supporters of diversity initiatives in NASCAR, have expressed fairness concerns when recommending a limited scope for D4D, particularly in light of the fact some White, male drivers do not progress as far as their talent warrants due to a lack of funding. NASCAR itself has acknowledged fairness as a limiting factor in D4D, setting the boundaries precisely because of fears that the same actors who determine national series outcomes for D4D drivers will not see the program as just.

Drivers who have not participated in D4D can also give insight on how the NASCAR industry views D4D as unfair. Danica Patrick, arguably the most visible woman in NASCAR and motorsports history, claimed that there is no need for a diversity program in NASCAR because she was able to succeed without one. While Patrick was never invited to D4D, as she established herself outside of NASCAR in the IndyCar Series and its open-wheel ladder divisions, Chase Austin, a Black driver, turned D4D down outright. Amidst a strong push from NASCAR to make Austin the central driver of D4D’s early efforts, Austin declined, believing that he would not be respected by others in NASCAR if he were to participate in a program that he himself perceived as an unfair advantage.




Possible stigma would amplify sponsor reluctance already observed outside of D4D, affecting both women and racially/ethnically diverse racers, and unrelenting even when brands owned by or marketed to the same demographic groups are targeted. In a troubling case featured during a 1999 episode of RPM2Night, former racer and current integrator, Chris Miles, tells a story of a company that refused to sponsor him by claiming they did not have a product for black consumers; the company—already an auto racing sponsor—sold motor oil. While Miles predated D4D, and was not a stock car driver, the evidence of bias in sponsor decisions for drivers outside of D4D makes it particularly important to consider how an added stigma from participation would limit outcomes.

Tellingly, three of D4D’s largest successes have some path through Joe Gibbs Racing, a team that ran its own diversity program, with Daniel Suárez and Bubba Wallace having raced directly for JGR, and Kyle Larson having previously been afforded networking opportunities through JGR and Toyota, the manufacturer for which JGR is the de facto works team. J. D. Gibbs, a team executive for JGR before his passing in 2019, echoed some of NASCAR’s sentiments about the normative, moral compulsion to act on diversity, indicating alignment with NASCAR on D4D. Though hardly conclusive, this nudges forward the idea that D4D buy-in by private team owners and sponsors, crucial to the success of the initiative, could be limited by bias against program participants when the largest supporter in this category is the one that independently acknowledged the difficult path for demographically diverse drivers in the first place, and that this team’s support seems to come in the absence of others’.


In fact, team owner participation has been so weak that NASCAR moved D4D from a stipend to an in-house team, in large part because of accusations, like those by Harry Davis, that independent team owners were pocketing too much of the budget for themselves as a result of not holding the diversity initiative in the same regard as their own development schemes—a pattern witnessed by Black driver Bill Lester in Dodge’s efforts before D4D.

Implicit in these stories is the strongest proof of stigma against drivers in diversity programs: their money is taken seriously, but not their driving ambitions.




The results further emphasize how stigma could operate within NASCAR.



25% of D4D drivers in the sample won at the East or West Series level, yet there have been so few successes in the absolute, and comparative odds for D4D drivers are decidedly worse. If D4D drivers are winning regionally, but nowhere near as likely to be racing nationally, the evaluation toward a winning D4D driver seems to be different than the evaluation toward other race winners. Actors outside the program, necessary for program success, may see D4D drivers winning races for a team NASCAR owns and that is only open to participants negatively, compounding perceptions of program unfairness or leaving open the idea that racers in D4D are less competent, succeeding only because of exclusive access to NASCAR’s resources. This then complicates performance data—is it the driver, the team, the equipment, the quality of field?—negating a powerful would-be counter to any stigma.




Likewise, because the “related” variable confirms how insular NASCAR is, being seen as an outsider is unattractive; participating in D4D makes one’s lack of connections outside the program and representation in the sport far more salient. This could further enable stigma in an environment driven by relationships, as well as increase the effects of stigma through lack of access to potentially equivalent networks not evaluated here.



Speculatively, non-participating D4D drivers might be turned away from team- or manufacturer-backed programs, shown here to help, because D4D is already available to them, touching on the stigma and fairness discussions and limiting a proven way of entry because others perceive there is already a path for D4D-eligible racers.




Racing for Rev Racing, rather than an affiliate of a national series team, reduces data quality when compared to prospects on a team’s own development program, once again implicating how unequivocal performance information can force stigma out—and the ways that can’t happen in NASCAR. If no one in the national series works with the drivers in D4D, the factors behind their performance remain too secret to ever combat stigma.



Because D4D pairs drivers only with NASCAR partners that cannot continue into a national series with any program alumni/alumnae, the benefits of national or international sponsorship over local or regional sponsorship are less available to D4D participants, yet with sponsorship’s importance, stigma, to the extent it exists, would block a necessity for graduation. Restated, drivers in D4D look like they are being helped with the logos of Sunoco or Nike on their cars through the years, yet cannot actually partner with the brands they represent, needing new sponsors, but condemned for appearing to have received an advantage in racing with those colors in the first place.




Walking over a different bridge, D4D drivers may never be seen as “otherwise equivalent” even when they truly are.



D4D isn’t damned.

In fact, NASCAR has acted in two positive ways already. Through its Youth Combine, D4D has started to reach the true entry levels of the sport, providing assistance at a key stage when starting at all, let alone getting to weekly or regional racing, has been cited as a major obstacle by drivers from underrepresented demographic backgrounds. In uniting D4D with NASCAR esports, another, lower-cost gateway has been opened. Rajah Caruth is the first crossover; outside of D4D, Black racer Jann Mardenborough moved from PlayStation to Le Mans, providing another example of sim racing’s ability to reach participants priced out of “real” racing, and therefore give better initial opportunities to people not only excluded within motorsports, but equally in all parts of the economy.


A continued investment in youth racing, and an enhanced commitment to esports—perhaps a virtual Combine for a Rev Racing team in one of NASCAR’s affiliated pro leagues—would give D4D access to more drivers, and give D4D more time to focus on development and promotion that might leave racers better-prepared for national racing before reaching the East or West Series. This was the case for Hailie Deegan, who raced with D4D as a kid, but drove independently in the West Series, having already established herself to team owners and sponsors. With lower budgets at the regional level, any stigma that might have been attached to Deegan was less powerful than it would have been for someone looking to move from Rev Racing to the national series—a stigma Deegan will avoid by achieving her successes on independent teams.

But NASCAR may still need to reconsider the financial model of D4D.

In failing to fund drivers beyond regional racing, NASCAR finds itself limiting its program to dissuade concerns about fairness, yet doing so in a way that crucially allows perceived unfairness to halt a driver’s career. Should NASCAR remain uncomfortable providing financial support, a greater emphasis on finding independent partners earlier in a D4D driver’s career would be necessary. While D4D needs NASCAR’s own corporate partners for funding, and therefore has to provide a return to them, doing so at the exclusion of linking drivers with allies who can stay with them into the national ranks largely thwarts the program—reducing the long-run return for program involvement, anyway. Pursuing partnerships with national series teams, or leveraging D4D’s existing relationship with Toyota, could aid in re-imagining D4D along these lines. Some hope for a new model may even be seen in 2020, as program participant Gracie Trotter races in the West Series for an independent team with its own sponsors.


To ease the tension around fairness, NASCAR might opt to collaborate with D4D’s partners to offer a “scholarship” prize, much like open-wheel racing has, wherein any Rev Racing driver can win assistance toward the Xfinity or Truck Series by finishing high enough in the season-long points standings or winning a target number of races. This type of scheme may have helped Chase Cabre, second overall in the East Series last season, or Sergio Peña, who won three of his twelve races in 2011, without being guaranteed assistance to those D4D drivers whose results were less impressive.

With the East and West Series now under the ARCA umbrella, NASCAR is in a new position to field D4D drivers in the top ARCA Menards Series, which features large speedways and several NASCAR companion weekends. Rev Racing could even seek a partnership with fellow Toyota team Venturini Motorsports, which has long fostered diversity in fielding drivers like Kenzie Ruston Hemric, Marc Davis, Taylor Ferns, Leilani Münter, and Daniel Suárez, while Billy Venturini previously served as Chase Austin’s crew chief. This could increase exposure, networking opportunities, and relevant experience, making the connections and strengthening the résumés that might chip away at stigma.




D4D could also expand its eligibility to include disability, sexuality, or other identities that add to NASCAR’s diversity and therefore reinforce outward commitment to the initiative, while simultaneously understanding the unique backgrounds participants may bring, ending its one-size-fits-all approach to developing people with an array of diversity-related experiences that, while at times overlapping, are not interchangeable across or categories or among individuals.



Other solutions could be broadly applicable, retooling the sport beyond D4D and restoring meritocracy even for White, male drivers. It has been theorized that the stronger connections pro racing maintains with its grassroots, the more opportunities exist for racers from underrepresented groups. Not far removed from entrepreneurship literature touting business ownership as a mechanism for avoiding discrimination, the more control a driver can take in determining their own destiny, the less power stereotypes, stigma, and the approval of others have to stifle their ascent.


It’s exactly how Harry and Marc Davis tried to do it in the wake of their concerns about how any money they could receive from initiatives was being spent by team owners potentially biased to see D4D drivers as less qualified or serious.



But high costs take that control away, and even the Davises couldn’t succeed. So do elitist cultures, like the one Chase Austin told the Indy Star he sees developing in racing:

When you watch NASCAR or the Indy 500, all you see on TV is a lot of rich [W]hite people. That doesn’t catch anybody’s eye that’s not of that ethnicity, who might say, ‘Hey, let’s do that.’I fear that eventually organized racing will just be an elitist sport, you know, only for [the very wealthy]. Like horse racing.


Regrounding stock car racing in its underlying essence—racing for the every day person—has the potential to render D4D less necessary by reclaiming power from the types of actors who can let gender, race, ethnicity, and/or program participation stand in the way of a driver’s success and returning it to the drivers themselves. Reopening stock car racing to the innovation—once welcomed and intrinsic to a roots-focused sport—would pave the way for a Janet Guthrie, who established herself by tuning her own engines, or a George Mack, who credits his karting prowess to outsmarting competitors with better suspension geometry, to find the places they deserve.



For now, though, NASCAR’s less the bridge and more a tall stick and a pair of waders.




And if it wants to shed the reputation that made it so easy a target for mockery over a driver’s (a program alumnus, no less) recent use of the a racial slur and prove its commitment not to a diversity program, but to diversity itself, it’s time to stop admiring the bridge it thought it built and take note of why it’s four times harder to cross than the other one—itself already lamented in a world of late model or sprint car heroes who never reach a top level populated by the sons of money.

That’s going to require changes to the supposed bridge: how far it stretches in both directions, who can get aboard it, how diverse identities are conceptualized and valued on it, and what’s provided during it.


It might also require changes to the destination itself—an economically accessible, reoriented NASCAR with the independent, enterprising spirit it used to embrace, and the space for innovation that can vault new faces from the unknown toward irrefutably earned attention.



That’s when you get less talk of bridges. It’s when the metaphors stop entirely.

Indeed, you’d know what D4D is, and what D4D does, by those at the top who were once part of it.




With thanks to several family, friends, and scholars who provided input on the academic version of this work. Their names are withheld so as to not link them to this piece, which none had opportunity to review prior to publication.

