Overseas Based Guyanese Brehanna Daniels Making NASCAR History
On a Monday afternoon in April 2016, Brehanna Daniels was eating a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich in Norfolk State University’s cafeteria in Virginia when she felt a strong tap on her shoulder. The senior shooting guard on the women’s basketball team turned around to find Tiffani-Dawn Sykes, the university’s former NCAA eligibility specialist, presenting her with a life-changing opportunity.
She just didn’t know it yet.
“Girl, NASCAR?” Daniels, 27, remembered asking. “I don’t even watch NASCAR. What are you telling me this for?” she continued. “That shows you how much I wasn’t in tune with NASCAR.”
But after watching a video of a pit stop during a race, Daniels was in awe. She had just two days to make a decision: either attend pit crew tryouts or videotape a six-hour baseball game for her campus internship. Almost five years later, Daniels, who is of Guyanese and African American descent, is now the first Black woman pit crew member in NASCAR.
“Wednesday morning, I woke up,” Daniels told TODAY via phone. “God told me, ‘Brehanna, you have to go to this NASCAR tryout.’ I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t question that man upstairs.’”
In a matter of months, the Virginia Beach native went from dribbling a basketball to holding an impact wrench. Daniels’ new role entails, in her words, “controlled chaos” and a lot of responsibility, like changing tires and more in under 13 seconds as well as changing the face of the racing industry.
The feeling of being “the first” or “the only one” isn’t new to Daniels. Growing up, she played on all-boys basketball teams, and when NASCAR hosted tryouts at Norfolk State, out of four students, she was the only woman. After a series of physical battery tests, she attended NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity National Combine in May.
“I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It’s always rewarding to see your hard work pay off when you’re working toward something,” Daniels said. “That was my goal, to be one of the ones selected. I even had more motivation because during the national combine, one of the guys came up to me…and he was like, ‘Yeah, they say there’s no women that really make it in this.’”
It was during the six-month Pit Crew Development Program that she learned of her groundbreaking role.
“It means a lot to me to be in this position to be able to make a difference, to be able to make change,” Daniels said.