The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Landauer driven to smash barriers in NASCAR
WEST HAVEN — The daughter of a doctor and a lawyer who grew up in New York City and earned a degree in science, technology and society from Stanford?
Of course Julia Landauer is a stock car racer.
“It’s funny,” Landauer said. “My senior year people at Stanford were like, ‘What are you going to do with your degree?’ I’d go, ‘Move to North Carolina and go NASCAR racing.’
“And they’re like, ‘So, really, what are you doing with your degree?’ ”
The fourth annual Women’s Leadership Conference at the University of New Haven was not lacking for provocative discussion Friday. Operating on this year’s theme, “The Winning Edge: Women in Competition in Sports and Beyond,” there were workshops on equal pay and successful communication in a maledominated landscape and well-known speakers from the athletic world.
“Competitive or Aggressive? Assertive or Pushy?” That was an issue discussed in the day-long event that explored gendered expectations.
“Being aggressive and balancing, it is a huge part of what I discuss,” said Landauer, the keynote speaker. “There are assumptions about women that I think harm us. You’re given such a small window of what you can do. Yet if you don’t go after something passionately, there’s no way you’re going to get it.
“Women have this societal expectation of how they’re supposed to behave and it’s not conducive to being successful. Whether it’s always putting other people’s needs first, being polite, making sure you keep people happy — those are some of the societal obligations that I think we’re starting to break. That’s great. I learned it at a young age through racing go-karts and going head to head with boys, assuming I deserved to be the best and proving it.”
Auto racing is one of the few sports where males and females compete on equal footing. That’s one of the reasons Landauer’s father got her into the sport. Yet it also is a business where lining up sponsors, getting the best equipment, sometimes is not based on that meritocracy.
“Racing’s not just a performance-based sport, it’s a financial-based sport,” Landauer said. “It’s a unique and bizarre business to try to get into.”
Landauer became the first female champion in the Skip Barber Racing Series. In 2016, she finished
fourth in the K&N Pro Series West, highest ever for a woman. Racing a couple of rungs below the Monster Energy Cup Series, Landauer, at 26, is among the best female stock car racers.
That’s only part of it. Racing is an elaborate game of pay-to-play. It takes millions.
“Because I’m so different, I’m able to attract a lot of different companies not already in the sport,” said Landauer, pointing to the fact that nearly 40 percent of NASCAR fans are women. “But that makes my job of selling NASCAR harder because they’re not familiar with the sport.
“It would be inauthentic for one of the male racers to have makeup or feminine hygiene or products, and the fact that we can, why aren’t we tapping into this? I think it takes that first big company to take the risk.”
Landauer said last year she wanted to have a tampon advertisement on the side of her race car. On Friday, she said she’s working on it.
“Not everyone is going to have the audacity to do it,” Landauer said. “I do. For someone who has dealt with their period since she was 14, I know what it’s like to have people belittle your emotions or blame performance on biology.
“There are some people who have really big side effects from their periods. I don’t. Middle school and high school are hard enough for everyone; girls have the extra burden with dealing with their period. There’s so much taboo. For me, normalizing it is like a societal obligation; I’m comfortable talking about it. At the end of the day, without it, none of us would be here.
“Of course, there’s a lot of earned media value from having a tampon on a race car. But I think it would be great. There’s Viagra on Mark Martin’s car. I’m sorry. You’re comfortable with that on a family show and not a tampon?”
After racing full-time the past three years, Landauer needs a far bigger budget for the next step. That process is going slower than she’d like.
“I’m hoping to get back for the second half of the season in the ARCA Series and NASCAR Trucks,” she said. “We’re getting close.”
During her speeches, Landauer refers to research that shows parents will underestimate their daughters’ abilities and overestimate their sons’ abilities. They’ll subconsciously hold girls back from taking risks. Landauer, once a contestant on “Survivor,” loves risks. She loves speed.
“When the equipment is equal, the stopwatch doesn’t lie. I like that objectivity,” Landauer said. “I started racing when I was 10 and it was instilled in me very early on that my job is to be the best. The expectation should be through hard work, teamwork, good equipment, practice, luck, I should be as good as anyone. That has shaped my mindset in other aspects of my life. It’s powerful.”
Landauer has no interest in being called the Next Danica. Patrick said the 2018 Daytona 500 was her last NASCAR race.
“I would not want to be the first woman in modern times to be in the top series,” Landauer said. “It’s a tough role to play. I have a total appreciation for that. I would have liked to have heard from her a little more about her experiences as a woman. She had this huge platform where she could point out some of the unfairness women do face. She only started talking about some of those things in the last year. I think that’s helpful for the industry as whole.
“I think at the end of the day it’s disappointing she didn’t have better results as the one representative for women in NASCAR at the top. She also got much more attention as a woman for not performing as well as guys who finish 18th to 28th.”
“I plan on doing my career a little different.” How?
“Talking about being a woman, I think that’s so important,” Landauer said. “I feel we have to talk about what differences we face, make people aware of what we go through. I think there’s a social responsibility there.
“I hope to do better from a performance standpoint. There was one interview (Patrick) had the last few months where she said she didn’t prepare for races and didn’t do much mental prep beside working out. That’s disheartening. You want to see people who you idolize and look up to, who have this incredible opportunity, to give it their all.” Next Danica?
“I’d much rather be the First Julia,” Landauer said. “I’d rather be the next Jimmie Johnson and win a lot of championships.”