Danielle McDermott is looking forward to the season’s finale in U-Cars this weekend at Old Dominion Speedway. She’s hoping to rack up another top five in the division after collecting three in the last six weeks of racing in both the CC and VLG divisions.

“It’s a 30-lapper, so I’m really excited about this one,” said McDermott, a 15-year-old sophomore at Fauquier High School.

McDermott is hoping to snag a top five after coming in eighth in her last race after missing a shift. But that was a rare slip in what has been a very promising debut in the division.

McDermott has run four races in U-Cars, and she’s had a win, a third, a fourth and an eighth.

In her last race, she shifted into fifth instead of third and drifted back a number of spots from her fourth place position in the race. McDermott, however, had only driven a stick shift in three races. In her first race driving a stick shift, she did something no other female driver has done at ODS: win a U-Car race.

“I was so shocked I won,” she said. “I had no idea I was going to win that race. It was my first time driving a racecar with a stick. I had only practiced with a stick maybe once or twice. So I wasn’t really good at driving a stick, so I figured I was going to stall out and I wouldn’t do that well.”

McDermott impressed her dad, Lance, by winning that race.

“I’ve been impressed since she got in a U-Car,” he said. “She’s aggressive for her gender. If it looks like it’ll fit, she’ll go ahead for it.”

In the contest she won, McDermott had one of the most exciting U-Car races in the last two years at ODS. She and John Butler, who won the Victory Lane Graphix series, ran wheel-to wheel for almost four laps in the race before McDermott pulled ahead on the last lap coming out of four.

After starting fourth, McDermott took over the lead early and led the remainder of the 15-lap race. However, the race seemed longer because there were many cautions.

“That was the most cautions that I’ve ever seen in a race,” she said. “I was up there in first and it felt like forever and I was like getting all nervous. We’d go [green] one or two laps and then they’d have another caution.”

McDermott said U-Cars are difficult to race side-by-side for any length of time. “It was very hard to do,” she said. “It was so hard to keep your car normal. You’d think it was going to spin out.”

Back in August, McDermott caught everyone’s attention with a fourth place run in her first race in U-Cars. She started dead last, in 17th, and worked her way to the front in just 15 laps.
Coming into the race, she hadn’t expected to do well.

“I started in the back on purpose,” she said. “And I figured I’d get by a few cars but I didn’t think I was going to get any further than like four or five cars.”

McDermott entered the U-Car division fresh off winning the BDE Pro Truck Series at ODS. It was the second year in a row that she’d done that. She also won a Saturday night championship at the track.

McDermott started racing go-karts in the Rookie One class when she was five. She fell in love with being around racing after watching the son of one of her dad’s friends race a go-kart.  She then raced karts until she was 12, winning four championships. One year, she won 18 out of 19 races in her series. When she was 12, she ran both karts and Pro Trucks.

“I would jump out of my go-kart and run to my truck to race that,” she said.

In only her third race in Pro Trucks, McDermott was already running speeds up to 95 mph at Jennerstown Speedway.   

Racing, however, has not been without its difficulties for McDermott. She still remembers when she beat a male friend when she was eight or nine years old and the boy’s father yelled at him-not because he lost, but because he lost to a girl. 

“It was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that,” she said.

Even in U-Cars, McDermott has faced some resistance for not only being female but for being the youngest driver in the division.

“[Some people] really put the age [thing] on me,” she said. “They can’t accept the fact that they’re racing against a 15-year old girl.”

But McDermott loves being at the race track. “It’s like a second family,” she said. “A lot of the people there I’ve grown up with. You see those people every week all summer and you only have a couple of months off and even then, you still stay in touch with everybody.”