“If Paulie doesn’t make it in racing, he can always run for president of the United States,” team owner Bill McAnally says NASCAR president Mike Helton told him recently.
Paulie Harraka is of the very last minority I expected to find at NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity scouting combine this week. “Harraka” is a Syrian name, but that’s just the technicality that qualified him for the Drive for Diversity.
Paulie really represents America’s tiniest minority: the super-intellectual, overachieving dynamos of energy from the elite universities, the Ivy League schools, M.I. T., Stanford and, in Paulie’s case, Duke, where he’s a freshman.
NASCAR? NASCAR?
“I love this sport,” he says. “I love everything about it. I love engineering. I love the business side of it. I’m double majoring at Duke in mechanical engineering as well as public policy to get some of the business side of it.”
The brightest hope thus far produced by the Drive for Diversity is Marc Davis, the 18-year-old African-American driver at Joe Gibbs Racing who is knocking on the door of the Truck series for next year, and will make his Nationwide Series debut for JGR at Memphis on Oct. 25.
Paulie, of Fair Lawn, N.J., is the second biggest hope out of “D4D,” as NASCAR people call it in their shorthand.
This year Paulie became the first driver in the five-year history of the program to win a track championship, with 11 late-model victories at All-American Speedway in northern California.
While in high school, Paulie worked two summer internships at Evernham Motorsports and a 13-month internship at Joe Gibbs Racing. He was befriended by Benny Parsons, whom he came to call “Uncle Benny.”
“One day before he passed away we were talking and I said, ‘Uncle Benny, if you could only have one, the Daytona 500 or the Cup championship’—he’d won both—‘which would you pick? ’” Paulie says. “And he said, ‘The Daytona 500.’
“So, I guess that’s what my eye’s on right now. And I want to be the first Sprint Cup champion who’s also graduated from Duke.”
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