The top two series of NASCAR are called the Monster Energy Cup series and the Xfinity series. (As I would learn, everything in NASCAR is about branding.) The women currently racing in those series number in the single digits. The winner of each of the 2,546 races in the history of the top NASCAR series41 has been a man. Just below that level, trying to break through to the top, is twenty-eight-year-old Julia.

I wanted to see what goes into racing while female, so one day Julia invited me to come watch her as she did her workout—one that would prepare her to wrangle a 3,400-pound machine with, I’m guessing, a size 2 frame.

Julia is brunette and slight, but with squared-off shoulders and sinewy limbs, like a ballerina who could probably kick your ass. I was expecting a tomboy, but she’s more like a cool nerd. She’s exceedingly polite and doesn’t like fighting or roughhousing. She wears makeup, and though she told me she’s not starting a family anytime soon, when she sees babies her ovaries go “into overdrive,” as she puts it. In case you’re wondering, she dates men.

At the gym, she sprang between the elliptical, rowing machine, and sets of planks, push-ups, and what she calls “leopard crawls” across the room on her toes and hands. She grabbed a 15-pound weight and tipped it back and forth like a steering wheel. She laid back on a bench and lifted her head up and down. Racers—including the famed Dale Earnhardt Jr.—get concussions, and this exercise builds neck strength to help protect against them.

Before we left, Julia sat on the edge of a sit-up bench, closed her eyes, and moved her hands through the air like she was turning a wheel—first gently right, then gently left, her feet cocked on invisible pedals. She was visualizing the track, coaxing her muscles to learn its shape. She did this for one dry lap, and, just in case, for one lap in the rain.

Later that day, she stretched out in front of her silver MacBook to study videos of past races. The key was to learn the track, to find out where her car should be, where she should pass, and what she should look out for. On one video, when the camera zoomed in, you could see the drivers shake from the sheer force of the speed, like astronauts during liftoff.

Silently, I worried for them.

“Super slow,” Julia, at one point, muttered.

Julia is a woman of relatively few words, given all she could talk endlessly about if she wanted to. She went to Stanford, gives motivational speeches all around the country, and has been racing cars since she was thirteen years old. When she does speak, it’s in a low patrician rumble, a cross between Jodie Foster and Candice Bergen. Whatever the opposite of “shrill” is, she’s that.