Author’s Note: As we all know, NASCAR drivers garner more attention than anyone else on their team. However, there are so many people on the teams that all play an important role in the success of the team and the sport we love. I am going to feature a variety of people who have careers in NASCAR, but aren’t normally in the spotlight.
Ashley Parlett is a NASCAR Technical Sales Representative for Performance Friction brakes. She is also someone with a one-of-a-kind racing background. Starting out driving go-karts and sprint cars in the Northeast, Parlett has since moved to Charlotte where she has been a Camping World Truck mechanic, an ARCA driver, a Nationwide car chief, a stunt driver, and is now a technical sales rep.
Here are some of Parlett’s quick facts:
Family: Mom (JoAnn), Dad (Hamilton), Sister (Jaime)
Hobbies: Writing, Skydiving, Fishing, Hiking and Traveling
Favorite sport to watch: Formula One Racing
Favorite type of music: Everything
Most memorable moment of her racing career: There as so many but I would have to say the most memorable was my first ever time I raced on asphalt. It was in an ARCA car at Toledo Speedway.
Most memorable life moment: The day I decided to stop racing sprint cars and packed my car to move to Charlotte, N.C. to build race cars. My decision was made and I was on the road with all of my belongings and my black lab within 24 hours.
As with most race car drivers, Parlett inherited a love of racing from her dad. He raced flat track motorcycles, and loved dirt track racing. Parlett was introduced to racing when she was 11 years old, fell in love, and began racing a go-kart that she built with her dad at age 13. She moved up to 250cc Micro Sprints within a year.
By 15, Parlett had traveled to different tracks in the Northeast, won her first race, grabbed a Rookie of the Year title, and decided to make the next step. She started racing 358 sprint cars, then 360 sprints, running up and down the East Coast until she was 21 years old, and from there, her story goes into warp speed:
“When I turned 21 I felt very frustrated about my future,” said Parlett. “I wanted a career in racing and I didn’t feel like anything was moving forward. Regardless of how well I ran or how many races I won, I always felt like I needed to make a leap. I decided to pack up and move to Charlotte. I moved to “Race City, USA” and began looking for a job.
“Having built every race car and nearly every engine I have ever raced, I was able to land myself a job on a NCWTS team. One day, while I was working for the No. 16 truck of Mike Bliss (Xpress Motorsports), I was approached by a man who also worked for the team. He informed me that he figured out who I was and remembered watching me race my sprint car at Delaware International Raceway. He took me to a dinner and introduced me to a man named Brack Maggard. Brack, owner of BMR Racing (now RAB Racing), gave me my first opportunity to try my hand at asphalt racing.
“Two months later I left my position at Xpress Motorsports to go focus on this opportunity. I raced two ARCA races for Brack. One at Toledo Speedway and another at DuQuoin Fairgrounds. I didn’t set the world on fire. The difference between stock cars and sprint cars is monumental.
“I have since gone on to test cars for several teams at tracks like Talladega, Daytona, Caraway, Hickory and Motor Mile Speedway, but have not raced a stock car since. The only time I spend behind the wheel of a race car these days is when I do stunt work for various companies and TV commercials,” said Parlett. “It fills the void…a little.”
After running the ARCA races, Parlett needed a steady income, so she went to work for Maggard’s team, RAB Racing as a Nationwide Series car chief. She remained in that position for four years.
In 2010, RAB Racing’s sponsorship future was unpredictable, so Parlett was once again facing uncertainty in her racing career.
“Working as a mechanic in NASCAR is a very slippery slope,” she explains. “The effects of the economy have directly affected the sport. As a mechanic, you are often faced with unemployment, pay-cuts and other uncertainties. I had recently bought a home and was looking for a job that was a bit more stable.
“Luckily Performance Friction offered me a position in Motorsports Sales. I have been happily working for the company for over a year,” says Parlett.
At Performance Friction (PFC), Parlett covers the Nationwide and Truck Series teams. She is a sales rep for PFC, but also provides technical support at the track to the teams running PFC brakes. Parlett also helps the teams in their shops, and works with them to develop new products and ensure that they have the correct brake package for every event.
Parlett believes that her past racing experience helps her understand brakes from the driver’s perspective.
“When it comes to brakes it only takes one failure, one spongy pedal, one air bubble in the system to lose the driver’s confidence,” she said. “As a driver I always wanted two things to never change...my brakes and my seatbelts.”
When asked about her favorite and least favorite parts of her job, Parlett responds:
I really enjoy the development of products. Everything we do, engineer and test is all done at our plant in Clover, South Carolina. The owner of PFC is very open to new technology and ideas, which makes my job more technical and educational than I had ever imagined it would be. I would say the hardest part of my job is not actually working on race cars every day. I loved building race cars and watching them race. These days I build spreadsheets and my hands are without calluses. It’s a new life style so needless to say anytime a team asks for some assistance installing a new brake package, I jump all over the opportunity.
However, for this one-of-a-kind racer, her goals extend far beyond her current position. While she wants to be involved in motorsports for the rest of her life, she sees herself extending beyond the NASCAR world, saying “I would like to travel the world and learn more about other forms of motorsports. I love NASCAR but recently I have had the opportunity to spend some time in the GrandAm and ALMS garages. This has sparked my interest and I would like to do some work at our plants in the UK and Japan. My only goal at this point is to make a mark on the sport in some way.”
In my opinion, this will not be a problem for Parlett. For others hoping to pursue a similar goal, Parlett simply advises you to work hard.
“The window of opportunity in the sport gets smaller and smaller every year,” she says. “The only way to make it in the door is to put your head down and work your tail off. If you can do that, one day you will look up and you will be standing on pit road at Daytona.”
In closing, she answers a few additional questions, and shares a bit about her blog:
TD: What makes drivers and teams easy or difficult to work with from your perspective as a brake specialist?
AP: In my experience everyone is easy to work with if you earn their respect. Male, Female, Driver or Mechanic... when you earn the respect of the people around you everything is just easier. As a mechanic, I have found that if I just dove into my job and worked as hard everyone on the team, eventually I would earn the respect of my team and there was little to no issues.
TD: What are the advantages and disadvantages of working with the Nationwide and Truck teams versus the Cup teams?
AP: I felt like I got a lot more experience as a mechanic working in the NNS and NCWTS garages. The teams are smaller and the mechanics have to be well rounded and able to do several different jobs, you could be bolting brakes on a car and then installing a fuel cell in the same day. At a Cup team you have one very specific job, in most cases.
TD: If you could change anything about NASCAR, what would it be?
AP: Just one? Definitely make the races shorter. Recently, I am very concerned with the viewers and why we lose more and more every year. My first answer is always to make the races shorter. It’s cheaper for the teams and I feel like we lose the viewer. We shouldn’t be able to eat lunch, take a nap and eat dinner during a race. If we do it should become endurance racing.
TD: Do you have any funny stories from the road?
AP: I have a ton of stories from the road. In fact my life with the guys, who I call Harrys, inspired me to write a blog. [Author’s note: Check out AP’s blog, “Is That Grease or Mascara?” at http://www.isthatgreaseormascara.com]. The best stories with the Harrys always happened in rental cars. All race teams are very very hard on equipment, especially rented equipment. I remember driving all of the guys back from dinner one night in Phoenix. We were all jammed into a small front wheel drive car, I believe we had 8 people in that thing.
As I was starting to turn to get off the highway onto my exit one of the guys pulled the e-brake. I cranked the wheel and gassed it up we did about 5 360s in the middle of the interstate and carried on off the exit. The funniest part about this event was inside that car no one was alarmed, it was business as usual.
TD: Is there anything else you would like to add?
AP: “Never lose your beginner’s spirit.” –Lance Armstrong. I did this once and it was the biggest mistake I ever made.
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