DeLana and her dad had a deal.

She could be a race car driver — once she graduated from college. She did. She got that car. And she did compete.

But she was trading paint with guys who'd been racing since they were in preschool. She loved racing, and she found her calling in NASCAR first with PR, marketing and writing, and then as co-owner of Kevin Harvick Inc. With more than 30 wins as an owner, she's become one of the most prominent women in NASCAR.

She was thrust into the spotlight this season when a driver on national television, upset with her husband, driver Kevin Harvick, said, “His wife wears the firesuit in the family and tells him what to do.” What she calmly did next made her a hero to many. Here's a story of one woman's life at the tracks — and why women from Bristol to Indy to Talladega are proudly wearing the T-shirt that says “I wear the firesuit in this family!”

Her first time at the track, DeLana Linville Harvick '96 was three weeks old. It could have been much sooner.

“I was almost born at a race track.” Caraway Speedway, near Asheboro, a not-quite-half-mile track known for its family-friendly grassy hill overlooking the action, where you can forego the grandstands and spread out blankets and chairs and watch the action.

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DeLana Harvick meets with sponsors in Texas.

“There was a feature race my dad was running, my mom went into labor, and he asked her if she could wait a few minutes. She said ‘I can't. I'm going to go on to the hospital.’ He said, ‘I'll meet you there.’ He won the feature, got to the hospital and I was born, and the next night he was racing again.”

Her dad was John Paul Linville. At the height of his racing career in the mid-'80s, he was competing fulltime in the Busch Series [now Nationwide], one step below NASCAR's top series, the Sprint Cup. He never won a Busch race, but he scored three top-10 finishes in his 136 races at that level. Earlier in his career, he raced as more of a hobby at local tracks, where he did often win.

And DeLana, an only child, was a race track kid.

She never did typical girl things as she was growing up, she explained in an August interview at KHI headquarters. “I was always at the race track with my dad.”

It often involved some travel. “We'd pack up and leave on a Thursday or Friday and go race and come back. So I had to be pretty diligent about school, and study while I was on the road.”

As she grew older, she even scheduled her college classes on Tuesdays through Thursdays, so she could be at the weekend races.

And she wanted to race. “My dad was your quintessential Southern man. ‘Women don't do those things.’ He had a big surprise when I was born because I was not the quintessential Southern lady.”

She had big opinions and an independent streak. They butted heads. But they struck a deal: “Our deal was, if I graduated from college, he would get me a race car.”

She went to NC State to become an engineer, but quickly found that wasn't right for her.

While she was there, her dad got sick with cancer, and she wanted to be closer, to help care for him.

She enrolled at UNCG, “the perfect fit for me,” she says. She considered becoming an English teacher, and ultimately majored in English. Her favorite professor was Dr. Charles Tisdale.

“I did graduate, I got a race car, and I raced a little bit. But at that point I had met my husband [Kevin Harvick], who had just started to kind of burst onto the NASCAR scene. It just wasn't in the cards for me — timing just wasn't right.”

Plus, she found herself jockeying for position on the track with guys who'd been racing since they could barely reach their go-cart pedals. “I kind of missed out on about 20 years of experience.”