The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At 60, Black driver Lester back 14 years after last start
CHARLOTTE, N. C. — Bill Lester, one of only a handful of Black drivers to ever race fulltime in NASCAR, will return to competition 14 years after his last start.
Lester will drive for David Gilliland Racing on Saturday in the Truck Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway. It will be the first NASCAR start for the 60- yearold since 2007.
The one- race return comes as Lester is promoting his book “Winning in Reverse: Defying the Odds and Achieving Dreams — the Bill Lester Story.” Lester was an engineer at Hewlett- Packard when he quit his job at age 40 to pursue a racing career.
“I had not been l ooking to get back involved in the sport. I’ve been very content just watching,” Lester said Tuesday. “But I wrote this motivational memoir — it is not an autobiography, I want to make that very clear — it is a motivational story with a motor sports backdrop and my story of how I was able to live my dream.
“I talk about getting out of your comfort zone and this will truly be an example of me getting out of my comfort zone.”
Lester made 145 career NASCAR starts, primarily in the third- tier Truck Series from 2002 through 2007. He was the first Black driver to compete in an Xfinity Series race in 1999, and his 2006 start in the Cup race at Atlanta made him the first Black driver to race at NASCAR’S top level since Willy T. Ribbs nearly 20 years earlier.
Lester returns to a far more progressive sport that in the last year has confronted its checkered racial history. Bubba Wallace i s the only current full- time Black driver in NASCAR and is one of only eight Black drivers in history to compete at the Cup level.
Wallace last year successfully pushed NASCAR to ban from its events the Confederate Flag, a Southern symbol of the Civil War often displayed by fans at racetracks. Lester pointed to the national racial reckoning last summer that presented Wallace the opportunity to push for change in a sport dominated by white men since its 1948 formation. When the flag was banned, Lester said he wrote a letter to NASCAR President Steve Phelps thanking him for the gesture.
“When I was racing in the mid- 2000s, ears were not ready to hear it. There was no platform that I had to say the things that Bubba did and gain traction. It sunk in this time,” Lester said.
Lester said the movement toward racial equality sparked by Wallace is just “a foundation that’s being laid for more change, more equality and more of everybody enjoying the sport of NASCAR.”