Hailie Deegan’s NASCAR career screeched to a halt — temporarily or otherwise — this past summer when she and her Xfinity Series team “parted ways,” as the old saying goes.
She’s kept a fairly low profile since then, but returns to her racing roots this weekend with some off-road action before really changing gears in a few weeks with some open-wheel action.
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The Formula Regional Americas Championship features single-seater spec cars whose appearances are familiar to followers of IndyCar racing. It’s been a feeder series for some IndyCar racers, including current drivers Kyle Kirkwood and Linus Lundqvist.
If this becomes a career move for Deegan, she’ll be taking the Danica Patrick playbook and reading it backwards. Danica came up in open-wheel racing and ran IndyCar full time from 2005-11. She began her transition to NASCAR and stock-car racing in 2010, and in 2013, at age 31, started a five-year Cup Series run that never found a full stride.
Deegan, at just 23, may have gotten her NASCAR struggles out of the way early before moving on. In 17 Xfnity Series starts this year, she had just three top-20 finishes. That was after three mid-pack seasons in the Truck Series.
In 2020, Deegan lone full season in ARCA’s top-tier series, she had no wins in 20 starts but posted 17 top-10 finishes and placed third in the season-long points standings before moving to the Truck Series and stalling.
The open-wheel move might come with a steep learning curve, given that her racing youth was spent in off-road racing. Her original move to full-bodied stock cars found early success. She had three wins and 23 top-10s in 28 ARCA West starts in 2018-19, when she was just 16 and 17 years old.
Before tackling the single-seater, open-wheel world, Deegan leaves the pavement this weekend to race with the Nitrocross series in Salt Lake City.
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