Drag racers don’t head to too many starting lines expecting to see a teenage girl in the opposite lane. But Shelby High School graduate Josie Kirker isn’t a stereotypical teenage girl.
Always a “gearhead,” she said, as a young girl she quickly gravitated to her dad Kyle’s affinity for drag racing. Kyle has been participating in the sport for decades, well before Kyle and Lisa Kirker had daughters Ellie and Josie.
Kyle, 54, made his first pass on a drag strip, he said, back in the late 1980s and made several trips to the Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove, Wisconsin while growing up near Chicago. He still races in the same 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Air that he began his career racing, and he turned his passion into a career; he runs New Era Racecraft, a high-performance auto parts dealer.
Kyle took a couple of racing breaks along the way - one when his car needed extensive repair, and another when his daughters were very young - but jumped back into it around 2010, participating in one of the sport’s biggest events, Hot Rod Drag Week, with his brother and father in honor of his father’s 60th birthday (Kyle’s dad is also a drag racing enthusiast). Kyle has driven in the annual event, which takes place in September, many times.
The 2024 Drag Week marked the first after Josie’s 16th birthday, and as a newly licensed driver, she told her dad she wanted to participate in Drag Week with him, expecting to come as part of her dad’s support team. Kyle turned the request around on her, saying she could come, but only if she drove. At that time, Josie’s only drag racing run had come at the West Michigan Sand Dragway in Mears, and Drag Week, a national showcase event, represented more than a little step up.
The event represents more challenge than just five different races at five tracks, as if that weren’t enough; it also requires participants to drive the car they are racing in the events from one track to the next over five consecutive days (the first track is also the last, enabling participants to pick up their things and head home afterwards). That means the car - which is outfitted with decals in part to let other drivers on the road know what they’re dealing with - has to be tweaked to be street-legal after each race and then has to be prepared for racing the following day upon arrival.
Josie, who had watched her dad participate in Drag Week on YouTube for years, wasn’t deterred. She was going to go all in.
“It’s really difficult to get a spot (at Drag Week),” Josie said. “You’re watching the clock and reloading the page like you’re buying concert tickets. We got a spot and it was like, ‘Now I have to learn to drag race this summer.’ I had my ‘Rocky’ training montage.”
Josie loves the sport for the sport, of course, but a big side benefit for her, especially during Drag Week, was some one-on-one time with Dad. The event has led to some fun stories.
“The quality time I get to spend with my dad is super cool,” Josie said. “For the Drag Week thing, we’re in the car for four hours every day, and even though the car’s super loud and there’s not much room for conversation, it’s nice to have one-on-one time like that.
“When Drag Week is in town, the hotels get booked up, so we’ve been to some sketchy hotels. One hotel had a cigarette burn through the pillowcase and the pillow. We were pretty desperate that night (laughs).”
Josie participated in the Street Machine Eliminator class at that first Drag Week, using a 1957 Bel-Air. That class requires competitors to come as close as they can to finishing in 10 seconds without going under that time. It requires precision tuning, great reaction time at the starting line, and quick thinking on the track.
Josie was a natural; in a tune-up event at the Mid-Michigan Motorplex in Stanton, Josie was immediately competitive with drivers who’d been doing it for years. Competing in the same type of class as she’d face in Drag Week, Josie qualified in the No. 1 spot out of over 20 cars and made it through three rounds of head-to-head competition before bowing out in a very close race.
Drag Week 2024 didn’t get off to as smooth a start, as Josie’s first run resulted in a time of 13.713 seconds - significantly off the 10-second pace needed. However, she came back from that and put together good enough passes to qualify for the “Quick 32” Shootout, a bracket that determines the Drag Week champion.
“We had to run first thing in the morning (for her last attempt) and had to run 10.21 to be No. 32, and we ran that number,” Kyle said. “Then we do the shootout where they take your average time and lower it by 0.10 seconds, making it so you can’t sandbag. That’s the time you have to run. We had a car that was capable of running faster than our average, so them taking that 0.10 away helped us out quite a bit.”
Josie ended up winning two races to advance to the final eight and missed out of going further by under a hundredth of a second - a margin, essentially, of inches.
She returned to Drag Week last September - the biggest Drag Week on record, with over 250 cars in her class alone - and had her car running like a well-oiled machine early on, bouncing between the top two spots during early qualifying runs. Unfortunately for her, the car began running too fast to hit the 10-second time in later runs, and after some changes and a qualifying pass good enough to reach the “Quick 32” Shootout, she lost in the first round, for which Kyle blamed himself, saying his mechanical decisions were incorrect.
Josie won’t be making a third trip to Drag Week this year; as she put it, when you’re paying for your school, as she will at Michigan State University, it’s a tougher sell to take a week off. (She said she peer reviewed a paper while at a hotel during last year’s Drag Week.) However, her racing story is probably far from over. She’s building her own race car.
Kyle made Josie a deal; he’d buy a car (in this case, a 2005 Corvette with a blown motor) if she did all the work to make it race-ready. It’s been the biggest use of her free time this summer in between preparing for college and her work as a host at Farmhouse Kitchen and Market at Stony Lake.
“I’m learning a lot,” Josie said. “I’m very mechanically inclined. How everything works, I think, is really interesting. I’m learning and having a lot of fun. It’s satisfying knowing it’s me doing it. It’s a little funny, because I get it and I understand the concepts. I do need to work on my vocabulary, though. I know what everything does, but I can’t always tell you what it’s called.”
If that’s an area of struggle for Josie, it’s one of very few. Kyle, with obvious pride, said Josie graduated among the top of her class with a grade point average of nearly 4.0. She was the class’ commencement speaker, a member of National Honor Society, and a color guard captain.
“She’s not just a hoodlum street racer,” Kyle said with a chuckle. “A lot of people think that’s what drag racing is, but it’s not. She’s a good kid, and that’s why she gets the opportunity to do this.”
How far Josie will go in the racing world is unknown, though it sounds like she’ll definitely be participating. In the meantime, she’s planning to enter the Army ROTC at MSU and major in criminal justice, with the goal of going into law enforcement in some capacity.
“It could be CIA, FBI or city cop,” Kyle said. “Who knows where she’ll end up, but she has big dreams, and everything she’s set her mind to, she accomplishes. She’s always been like that. Everything she does, she does to perfection.”
