Without these sponsors, drivers can’t race. One team, Furniture Row Racing, which won the NASCAR Cup championship in 2017, decided to close down the following year when one of its key sponsors pulled out. One journalist, Bob Pockrass,42 compared this to the “Philadelphia Eagles shutting down a year after winning the Super Bowl.”

It’s easier to get into good races and win often when you have a consistent sponsor, or when your family runs a business or knows someone who does, or when your parents are willing to pay millions for you to race, or when you’re otherwise financially blessed in a way Julia, for the most part, hasn’t been so far. I, personally, found it ironic that a sport so synonymous with the blue-collar average joe is so reliant on deep-pocketed relatives and corporations.

Fewer people watch NASCAR on TV these days,43 so companies are less willing to buy what Julia calls the 200-mile-an-hour billboard—their logo on the car itself. Besides, if they do, there’s always the chance the car will crash, and “Allstate” will end up scrawled on a hunk of crumpled-up metal, which would be even worse optics than not sponsoring anything in the first place. The thinking among would-be sponsors seems to be, why pay to attach your name to a driver with unknown prospects when you could just throw a few grand at a Kardashian to make an Instagram post that will be seen by millions?

People tell Julia that if she had gotten into NASCAR a decade earlier, before the bottom fell out of the business model, she’d be wildly successful. “Yep,” she quips. “And if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.”

These financial struggles may be hitting female drivers especially hard. Because it’s so expensive, families might devote their racing resources to only one child—typically a boy, since boys are also more likely to be nudged toward masculine and aggressive sports like racing. Because there are fewer younger women in the NASCAR pipeline, there are then fewer women in the sport’s professional ranks. Jeff Pappone, a Canada-based motorsport journalist, told me that it’s getting harder to sell “being a woman” to prospective racing sponsors. The first woman to show real marketing savvy, Danica Patrick, was buzzy and new. Now, female drivers are still extremely rare, but sponsors see each new one as less of a marvel.

And even if a female driver can woo sponsors, as Pappone recalls hearing from one female racer, “You have to decide if you want to be a racer or a woman racer. Do you want to be a girly-girl or one of the guys?” In other words, do you want to be seductively eating a cheeseburger in an ad, or racing cars? Sex still sells, and it’s not something female racers are always comfortable selling.