A field near Jordaine Penick‘s Virginia home served as her first race track when she was 13 years old.
That‘s the year she got her first race car, but since she was still too young to really compete, she took the car around a homemade dirt-track. It was there where she earned the nickname “Peach Picker.”
“I had told dad to video me as I went around my little track in the field, and next thing I knew I was in a tree,” Penick said. “It was a peach tree. All the peaches were in my car because there was no windshield in it, so that’s how I got the nickname Peach Picker.”
You would think that would be a scary experience for a young girl.
“No, it didn’t scare me,” Penick said. “It was more of, I blinked and it was there, so I wasn’t really reacting about it. I was more scared about the fact that my dad was going to be mad at me.”
Three years later, the now 16-year-old Penick is still racing that fearlessly.
As one of the youngest competitors and the only girl in the Hornets Division at South Boston Speedway, Penick didn‘t show any fear this season racing against veterans. She finished in the top five in nine of 10 races on the way to her first track championship.
Penick became the second woman to win a championship at the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series track in South Boston, Virginia, and the first since Terri Marks won a Grand Stock division championship in 2004.
“It’s really awesome being one of the first girls in 20 years and the second girl out of the whole life of South Boston Speedway to ever win a championship,” Penick said.
Penick finished fifth on championship night to lock up the title by 13 points. Marks was in attendance at the race that night to congratulate her, and Penick later got to meet former NASCAR Cup Series driver and South Boston native Ward Burton, who signed her race car.
“I don’t really think it really hit me,” she said of the championship. “Sitting back and actually realizing I got it. I mean, it was nice coming up there and seeing how proud my family was of me and everything.”
Penick is a third generation driver, beginning with her grandfather who raced in the 1960s and ‘70s. He passed the tradition on to his daughter — Penick‘s aunt, Cheryl — who competed around Eastern Virginia.
Cheryl taught the sport to Penick.
“She really tries to help me out, giving me pointers, but it’s a whole lot different somebody sitting there trying to tell you how to drive the car versus you actually being behind the steering wheel and driving the car,” Penick said.
Penick‘s brothers all also are in racing, though they‘re all in different rides. Her two oldest brothers drive mud trucks and compete in mud bogging races, and the one closest to her in age drag races.
Penick was the only one in her immediate family that gravitated towards circle tracks. She and her dad always liked going to watch races at South Boston, and she wanted to do the compete in the same style of races as her grandfather and aunt.
“I just told dad, I want to get into racing, and he was like, ‘OK, well, if that’s what you want, then that’s what we’ll do,‘” she said.
“My brothers and I, we’ve always been tight. We’ve always had four wheelers growing up, so we always raced or whatever, so speed has always been something I love.”
Penick has grown as a driver since she began racing competitively three seasons ago. When she began she admits she was a “bad competitor,” she said, never really racing near the front.
“I was just trying to get used to the track, and I wasn’t driving the fastest car out there,” she said. “It was just a car I could race with and say I was getting experience.”
The second year she started getting more competitive, and by the end of the season she was pretty consistently finishing third and fourth every race.
By her third year, she had gotten the hang of how to get around South Boston, and was now figuring out how to pick up speed.
The improvements stemmed from Penick, “realizing that it doesn’t really matter if I tear my car up, and to just push as hard as I could to get where I was,” she said.
“Learning when I needed to let off the gas and when to accelerate back after I got out the curves, because I’ve always raced four wheelers and stuff like that around the fields,” she added.
Being in a race car as an early teenager had its advantages when it came to getting her real driver‘s license, which Penick got during the summer. But she hasn‘t quite been able to take the race car driver out of her system when it comes to the road.
“It was pretty easy, but Dad, when he first got in the vehicle with me, he said I held the curves way too fast,” she said with a laugh.
“I honestly love racing, like just being out there and being able to go fast without getting a ticket.”
Penick said she isn‘t ready to move up out of South Boston‘s hornets division quite yet, because she still wants to learn a little more about how to be the best racer she can be, and get to victory lane.
She‘s spending this offseason continuing to work on her craft, while also taking pride in what she accomplished during the 2024 season.
“I’m really proud of myself,” Penick said. “I’ve come a long way thanks to my father, my aunt Cheryl, and all the sponsors.
“It’s awesome. It’s a big honor for me. Being a champion, that’s an honor. There’s four champions at South Boston, so to be one of those four, you‘ve got to be really, really good, and it’s nice.”
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