Can Hailie Deegan Turn It Around? (2024)

In the NASCAR Xfinity Series points, rookie Hailie Deegan is last among all drivers who have run all the races. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Deegan never really reached expectations in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, where she raced full-time from 2021-2023, but her results so far at the next level have reached a new low.

Some followers of the sport will say they saw this coming a mile away. Usually, a driver doesn’t get promoted to a higher series unless they are successful enough to warrant it. Deegan’s five top 10s in 69 Truck starts don’t exactly scream success.

At the lower levels, the Temecula, Calif. native showed real promise as a true talent. She ran full-time in the ARCA Menards Series West back in 2018 and 2019. During those two seasons, she won three races and finished in nearly half of her starts in the top five.

She also brought a different image and attitude than many of her female predecessors in NASCAR. The daughter of X Games star Brian Deegan, she was edgy and had a toughness about her that seemed like it would translate nicely to NASCAR. She has an obvious advantage in marketability. As of today, she has 1.6 million Instagram followers. That is more than triple what NASCAR’s perennial most popular driver Chase Elliott has.

A huge percentage of NASCAR fans are men, most of whom surely don’t mind seeing Deegan on their TV screen, in or out of her driver’s suit. Easy, I’m talking about advertisem*nts.

But female drivers haven’t found much on-track success in NASCAR’s highest levels since the turn of the century. Danica Patrick remains the most known and accomplished. She showed some flashes of competitiveness but never became a regular contender. Her 10th place in the 2012 Xfinity standings remains a high watermark.

Deegan’s three seasons in Trucks were marred by misfortune, bad luck, disrespect, errors and frustration. The results weren’t what she or her fans hoped for, despite driving for solid teams. But she wasn’t an embarrassment either. As a 19-year-old rookie, Deegan was running at the finish in 19 of 22 races. She wound up 17th in points that season. Unfortunately, in the two seasons to follow, she wasn’t able to match that with subsequent results of 21st and 19th.

In 2022, Deegan seized an opportunity to make her debut start in the Xfinity Series, and if hope was waning at that time, it got a big boost. Then 20 years old, Deegan ran a clean race and came home 13th at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. In doing so, she beat established names like John Hunter Nemechek, Riley Herbst and AJ Allmendinger.

A pro-Xfinity theory was born: the Truck Series was just full of reckless boneheads who always managed to catch Deegan up in their mess, sometimes intentionally. Deegan would be better off in the Xfinity Series where the driving was somewhat cleaner and more professional. The cars were a better fit for her driving style too, is what we heard.

Fast forward to today and those theories are looking like wishful thinking.

Deegan is driving full-time for AM Racing, still a pretty new team in the series. After several mediocre years in the Trucks, AM moved to Xfinity in 2023 with Brett Moffitt. The team made a real effort to be competitive right away, securing an alliance with Stewart-Haas Racing to provide competitive cars. Moffitt and AM did well together and ran on the fringes of the playoff bubble, ultimately missing out but still finishing a respectable 15th in the standings with nine top 10s.

Despite the solid series debut with Moffitt, AM Racing opted to bring in Deegan for 2024 and through the first half of the season, her results have been night and day compared to Moffitt’s. She has yet to finish in the top 10 or lead a single lap. She is 27th in points. Half of her 16 starts have yielded finishes of 30th or worse. You get the point; the results haven’t been good.

Comparing a 22-year-old series rookie like Deegan to Moffitt may not be an equal or fair comparison, but her results likely have her under more pressure to perform now than she ever has been before in her racing career.

A better comparison for Deegan at this stage in her career might be Blaine Perkins. The 24-year-old from Bakersfield, Calif., is just above Deegan in the standings, a margin of 12 points that could easily be erased any given Saturday. Both Deegan and Perkins drive cars that have some level of technical alliance with SHR. Perkins has kept his career going while enduring struggles of his own. He has 59 Xfinity starts but only one top 10.

If we give Deegan the benefit of comparison with Perkins instead of someone like Moffitt or fellow rookie Leland Honeyman, who is far above Deegan in the standings, how much longer will that benchmark be acceptable? Being just good enough to hang with Perkins isn’t sustainable.

We should also acknowledge the fact that Ford is struggling. After Cole Custer, Herbst and Ryan Sieg, you won’t find another Ford driver in the standings until you get to Kyle Sieg in 25th, just two positions and 30 points above Deegan.

There are 17 races left on the schedule, and seven will be at tracks Deegan has run before in Xfinity. She is going to have to step it up the rest of the way, and expectations should be higher when we go to those tracks she’s raced at earlier this year. Is there any reason to believe improvement will come?

Following a 20th-place result at Charlotte Motor Speedway, the only crew chief Deegan had ever known in Xfinity, including her 2022 series debut, was released by AM Racing. Joe Williams worked with Moffitt in 2023 but lasted only 12 races this season. Competition director Matthew Lucas was named interim crew chief and since the change, the results have gone in the wrong direction. None of Deegan’s four races with Lucas have yielded anything better than 25th. Lucas’s interim tag means AM intends to hire someone else, and that decision could make or break the rest of the season. Who wants to be a hero?

There is an interesting dynamic with a lot of variables when we look at what Deegan’s future might hold. The relationship between Deegan and AM is in year one of an announced multi-year deal, but with the unknowns that come with SHR shutting down, and Haas Factory Team rising from its ashes, we don’t know where AM’s technical alliance might come from. Deegan is tied to Ford Performance, and it remains unclear who will carry the banner for Ford in the series post-SHR.

If you were AM and Ford Performance, would you want Deegan back in 2025? Marketability matters, but you can ask Patrick what happens if results don’t eventually follow. Sponsorship dries up and doors close.

If the second half of this season isn’t measurably better than the first, another question might be, would Deegan even want to be back? With her background and family connections, if she ever decides – or if it’s decided for her – that NASCAR just isn’t for her anymore, she could seemingly find something to drive in the off-road or dirt-track sphere.

If you look at her results in the Trucks, you will find that two of her best five tracks in average finish were the Bristol Motor Speedway dirt track and Knoxville Raceway. In the Camping World SRX Series, Deegan finished second in the 2023 Eldora Speedway race, beating names like Ryan Newman, Chase Briscoe, Brad Keselowski, Matt Kenseth and Ken Schrader. Maybe her talents are just a better fit for dirt.

Deegan can keep her NASCAR career growing and thriving if she can show some improvement and flashes of speed before this season is done. She needs something to build on and right now she has very little. She will probably get a longer leash than some of her male competitors. There is little doubt the sport would benefit overall from having a successful female driver. Right now, Deegan remains the closest prospect for making this happen.

You have to wonder where her confidence is, with the dismal results since the crew chief change. Deegan didn’t respond to our inquiry for this story, but one thing that should help with confidence is the opportunity to go back to racetracks she’s seen before in Xfinity. Those opportunities are coming.

To find the best opportunities, take Talladega Superspeedway for example. Deegan was content to ride in the back of the pack throughout the spring race, looking to survive the big wrecks and be a factor at the end. That plan worked. On the second-to-last lap, Deegan ran as high as second. When her fellow Ford driver Herbst approached her back bumper, what could’ve led to the biggest story in motorsports this year (a Deegan win), instead saw Herbst swerve high and hang Deegan out to dry. Without drafting help, she ultimately sunk to 12th, which remains her best finish of the year. Talladega was home to Deegan’s highest average finish in Trucks, with two top 10s in her three starts and a solid average finish of 12.7.

Two weeks after Talladega will be Las Vegas, the only track where Deegan will make her third start in the series. Her finishes there so far have been 13th and 15th, and right now a top 15 is what the doctor orders. A top 10 would be like a win.

Daytona International Speedway, Darlington Raceway, Atlanta Motor Speedway, Talladega, Martinsville Raceway and Phoenix Raceway will all be chances to see what she learned last time, and whether improvement will follow.

There are more questions than answers on what the future holds. Perhaps expectations were too high coming into the season. Improved performance can help answer some of the questions. Who doesn’t love a good comeback story? It’s easy to be negative, but with the start she’s had the only way to go is up, and the opportunity still exists to turn it all around.