BROOKLYN, Mich. -- As a young girl, Angela Ashmore was different than most girls her age.
"Yeah, I didn't really have any friends with the same interest as me," Ashmore said. "I wasn't really about going to the mall and shopping and doing the traditional girly things."
Instead, Angela was a huge NASCAR fan. Angela turned her childhood dreams into a rarity in NASCAR, as she is just one of two female lead engineers in the Cup Series, and she is the lead engineer for Front Row Motorsports driver David Ragan.
"Me and my dad and my brother were all in to NASCAR, and we'd go to Berlin Raceway on the weekends and as often as we could," Ashmore added. "I just grew up with a real passion for it. I loved going to the track, I just knew I wanted to be involved somehow."
"This is definitely a guy's sport," Ragan said. "We've had very little women involved, from driving race cars to working on them to race team. That's changed a lot, and certainly, in this day and age, to have a lady like Angela come in and have some authority, who is pretty smart and knows what's going on and, yeah, it breaks barriers."
A dream, two decades in the making, accomplished and barriers broken: Angela is still focused on what is ahead of her.
"What you've been thinking about for 20 years and had a goal to get to, it's strange to finally get there and you're like, 'Wow, what's next?'" Ashmore said. "What am I trying to work on now and for me that's being a crew chief. That's the next thing down the road, and I'd like to accomplish that next."
Ragan finished 38th in the Firekeepers Casino 400 on Sunday.
