She was raised by a lawyer mother and an anesthesiologist father on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Julia and her two siblings all raced go-karts, and they were roughly evenly skilled, but Julia was the one who most wanted to go pro. Strangers began coming up at the go-kart races and telling Julia’s father, Steve, how good she was. At first, she was intimidated at the track, casting her gaze downward, but her father and her coach, Glenn, reminded her that she had just as much a right to be out there as anyone.

From there, her career resembles a typical wunderkind montage of “firsts” and “onlys.” At fourteen, she became the youngest female champion of a racing series called the Skip Barber. She was the first female champion of a 2015 NASCAR racing series in Virginia. The following year, she placed fourth at K&N, another racing series, which was the highest finish ever for a woman. In 2016 she became the only woman in her class of NASCAR Next, a program meant to develop young drivers. Overall, she has won 27 of the 150-some car races she’s entered.

This success has come despite the fact that people at the track have called her a bitch. They have called her the next Danica Patrick, the one famous female NASCAR driver, when she’d rather be the next Jimmie Johnson. One time a racing official said “good luck” to every contestant, then came up to Julia and just asked if she had her safety equipment. Some men race her harder because she’s a woman: they block her or push her to the side. “Emotionally,” her father explained to me, “they can’t be beaten by a woman.”

The winner of the race we watched on Julia’s laptop was a driver with the consummate French-Canadian name of Kevin Lacroix. His car bears the logo of Bumper to Bumper, an auto-parts company of which his family owns a franchise. A few people I spoke with enviously speculated that because of this sponsorship, when someone like Kevin blows a $40,000 engine, his sponsors can just write a check for another one. (Kevin, in an email, told me his budget is fixed, so it wouldn’t exactly work that way.)

Perhaps more so than in many sports, money and sponsors are the lifeblood of NASCAR, covering the car’s absurdly expensive “heart”—its drivetrain, engine, transmission, and chassis. The seatbelts alone can cost $500. Sponsors pay for the cars’ shops and the men (it’s mostly men) who staff them. They pay for the racing suits and the gas and the giant trailers that drag the cars from the shops to the tracks and back again. They cover travel, repairs, tires, backup equipment, and entry fees.