Miss for America Strong 2024 winner Jacklyn Drake competed on high-level race tracks throughout her childhood, though she often felt unwanted and dismissed by her male competitors
Courtesy of Jacklyn Drake; Sean Montgomery Digital Media
Jacklyn Drake.
Jacklyn Drake was only six weeks old when her parents first took her to a race track. Just like Mom and Dad, Drake grew up to fall in love with the driving sport.
She got herself behind a wheel as soon as regulations would allow, racing go-karts at age 6 and eventually revving up to full-sized stock cars.
“I did that full time all through my childhood for 13 years straight,” Drake, now 32, tells PEOPLE. “So we got a lot of laps under our belts.”
She wanted to go pro, but her family didn’t have the funds to finance that next step. In order to stay in the sport she loved, Drake relocated to Charlotte, N.C., where NASCAR has its headquarters. Today, she does media strategy and television broadcast reporting for the professional racing organization.
This year, however, Drake took a sharp turn into new territory. She competed in a forum totally unlike the race track and earned titles her younger, tomboy self wouldn’t have ever expected to hold. Drake won first place in a North Carolina state pageant, then at the national competition in Las Vegas, she beat out dozens of delegates again. In her rookie year as a pageant contestant, Drake was crowned Miss for America Strong 2024.
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Courtesy of Jacklyn Drake
Jacklyn Drake.
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“I went from owning one pair of high heels to now owning 13 pairs of high heels,” she says of her pageant journey, which started when some of her closest friends told Drake she’d be a perfect candidate.
“They were like, ‘You should really think about this. It’s a great once-in-a-lifetime experience. You will learn so much about yourself.’ I actually thought that was so cliche when they would tell me that.”
Never one to turn down a challenge, Drake ultimately decided to follow her friends’ advice and give the pageant world a chance. She started preparing for the North Carolina state pageant with the help of three coaches: a mental coach to train her mind not to crack under pressure, a walking coach to help her handle foreign equipment (high heels) and a third coach to teach Drake how to succeed in the all-important interview portion, which takes place behind closed doors.
“The actual interview portion, where you sit down with each of the judges for four minutes, is the biggest part of pageantry,” Drake explains. “And in order to execute those interviews … you have to understand who you are.”
The Southern contestant underwent serious self-reflection to prepare for the judges’ interrogation, and in turn, she entered a period of self-growth. When she stood on stage with her fellow Miss for America Strong finalists in the final moments of the pageant, Drake remembers feeling a profound sense of courage.
“The judges saw me in the interview process, they really got to know me. They understood who I was in such a short period of time,” she recalls to PEOPLE. “I just felt like, ‘Wow, I feel so brave to be here. It’s vulnerable to be on a stage. Everybody’s staring at me.’ I just felt a lot of gratitude honestly.”
Courtesy of Jacklyn Drake
Jacklyn Drake after winning Miss for America Strong 2024.
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The pageant world guided Drake into a new sense of self, but she made meaningful external connections as well. The winner finished with “great friendships with people all over the country,” she tells PEOPLE. And it was the first time Drake experienced that type of camaraderie in the wake of competition.
“Behind the stage, when people’s stuff is thrown everywhere and we’re trying to find things — there’s five other girls who are supposed to be your competition,” says Drake, but she notes that the contestants behaved much more like teammates: “[They are] all helping you button up, zip up and get back up on the stage because you had 10 seconds.”
Drake continues, “It really is such an uplifting environment. You just become sisters. It’s like a light switch comes on, we’re all in it together. We’re all going to get through this together.”
Growing up on the race track, the young driver never had any “sisters” to cheer her on through the finish line. Drake was the only girl across age divisions at her speedway in Texas, and she often felt excluded by her male peers. Luckily, she could look to her mother, who also raced as a kid in the 1970s.
“I knew as a young girl that it was a challenging environment because my mother had been through it,” Drake tells PEOPLE. “She [was] a really supportive person to lean on when there were weird things that would happen.”
Courtesy of Jacklyn Drake
Jacklyn Drake racing as a child.
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Drake wasn’t just breaking into the male-dominated space of racing — she was speeding through it and claiming trophies. She was such a natural that two years in, when she was 8 years old, her league started entering Drake in races with teenagers double her age.
“They raced me against the older kids for no points, no trophies, no nothing, just so that I could have stiffer competition,” she remembers. But even as early as ages 6 and 7, Drake noticed that her wins came with consequences: “We had a lot of success in it, but it just wasn’t always welcomed.”
She saw how other young, male drivers “had an issue” with her being on the race track. Sometimes, the boys’ family members would get angry if they saw Drake outperform their son.
“I will never forget this,” Drake says, looking back on a specific outburst that occurred when she was 10 or 11. “There was a young boy I raced against … He was in his trailer after the race. He had gotten second behind me, and his family were screaming at him and getting physical with him.”
Philip Goodman Photography
Jacklyn Drake on the race track.
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She continues, “They were like, ‘We can’t believe that you would let a girl beat you.’ It was very weird to me to witness that.”
Drake tried to blend in with the boys. If she couldn’t be their equal on the track, she wanted to partake in their other hobbies and interests.
“I would [ask] my parents, ‘Can you buy me Pokemon cards?’ And they would give them to me so that I could trade them with the boys,” Drake recalls. “They didn’t really want to be friendly … It was interesting to see just how me existing bothered people in motorsports.”
When Drake was 16, she experienced first-hand aggression at her car window. She won a race against a 20-year-old male driver in a less age-derivative division, and he was clearly angered by the loss.
“He came up to my car and started getting physical, and my dad had to get involved because he’s like, ‘She’s a kid, You can’t do that.’ And he got thrown out,” Drake explains. “It’s just some people couldn’t handle it, which is unfortunate.”
Courtesy of Jacklyn Drake
Jacklyn Drake working as a motorsports broadcast journalist.
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With these childhood experiences burned into her memory, the NASCAR enthusiast has the spirit of an underdog, something one might not assume between her pageant crown and confident presence on TV. Drake says she maintained friendships with some of the boys she competed with way back when, but she still knows what it’s like to feel far behind, even when you’re laps ahead.
“As my career and my life in motorsports has evolved, I have really wanted to be that mentor to young girls that are racing or that want to be in sports reporting,” says Drake. “They can talk to me, they message me, they can ask me questions, like, ‘Hey, what do I do in this situation when someone makes this comment about what I’m wearing or someone makes this comment about what I did?'”
With every new step in her career, Drake is carving out space for what she missed out on: “At a young age, I just didn’t have that type of structure,” she says. “But we can create a girlhood inside the motorsports community.”
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