Bill Lester and One Man's Drive for NASCAR Diversity

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• Bill Lester was the first Black driver to start an Xfinity Series race and the first to win poles in the Craftsman Truck Series.

• He became the first Black driver to qualify for a Cup Series race in 20 years when he made the field at the Atlanta Motor Speedway in 2006.

• Lester served on NASCAR’s Diversity Council that was launched in 2000 by CEO and chairman Brian France.

After watching a Can-Am race at Laguna Seca with his father at the age of seven, Bill Lester decided he wanted to be a race car driver. He eventually became a one-man drive for diversity in NASCAR.

While NASCAR was canoodling in the early 2000s on how to diversify its participants and fan base, Lester was breaking barriers as the first Black driver to start an Xfinity Series race and the first to win poles in the Craftsman Truck Series. He became the first Black driver to qualify for a Cup Series race in 20 years when he made the field at the Atlanta Motor Speedway in 2006.

By hiring Lester to drive their trucks, Dodge and Toyota helped force NASCAR’s hand when it came to establishing a better path for Blacks to advance to the top in a sport where Blacks were conspicuously absent.

“There was no Drive for Diversity for me,” said Lester. “NASCAR realized they needed to expand their reach a bit, but I had already arrived before that took place.”

Winning three poles, Lester was consistently competitive in the Truck Series despite no prior oval racing or short track experience, completing 21,228 laps as a factory driver and leading 92. Lester also served on NASCAR’s Diversity Council that was launched in 2000 by CEO and chairman Brian France, but that only convinced him that the sanctioning body was dragging its feet when it came to making the sport more diverse.

There were other forms of resistance. Speedway Motorsports owner Bruton Smith suggested NASCAR’s fans were not ready for black fans in the grandstands. When Lester drove a factory-backed Dodge for the Truck Series team of Bobby Hamilton, crew members used the n-word around the driver, who had to remind them the word was offensive to him; when he left the team after his factory contract ended, the crew burned a lawn jockey painted with his number 8 to protest Dodge’s diversity effort; Confederate flags, now outlawed, flew at many of the tracks; Lester was roundly booed at Martinsville and heard the n-word directed at him by fans at several tracks.

“It was hard” said Lester, who grew up in Oakland and had an electrical engineering and computer science degrees from the University of California-Berkeley. “You go to the track and don’t see anybody that looks like you. I knew the majority of people were not pulling for me—some were. I’m sure they looked at it like this Dodge diversity program, why are you taking opportunities away from us?”

Lester’s remarkable late start as a pro driver began after initial success in SCCA, IMSA and the Trans-Am. Frustrated by not finding a path forward, Lester quit his job at Hewlett Packard to pursue racing full time at age 37. He was the winner of a tryout hosted by CART for black drivers, but it had a catch—he needed to bring $2 million in sponsorship to compete in Indy Lights. That turned him toward NASCAR.

Following a gong show tryout, in 2001 Lester earned a spot alongside Willy T. Ribbs for five races as a factory Truck Series driver for Dodge on Hamilton’s team and replaced Ribbs the following two seasons in 2002 and 2003. Lester then raced for three years as a factory driver for Toyota at Bill Davis Racing followed by a partial season in the Chevy trucks of Billy Ballew.

When it came to diversity, NASCAR chose gradualism, establishing its grass roots D4D program directed by Max Siegel in 2008 that eventually helped bring Japanese-American Kyle Larson, Mexican Daniel Suarez and African-American Bubba Wallace to the Cup Series with partially funded rides in the K&N Pro Series. Following four seasons in K&N, Wallace moved up to the Truck Series in 2013, arriving 12 years after Lester first raced there for Dodge.

The door did not remain open long for Lester in the Cup series. Despite millions of dollars of publicity surrounding his three-race Cup effort with Bill Davis’s team in 2006, calls placed by potential sponsors to the NASCAR offices about backing Lester in the Cup Series fell on deaf ears. George Pyne, who directed the steering committee of NASCAR’s diversity effort, told Lester’s agent Ardy Arani of Championship Group that the driver should forget about the Cup Series and concentrate on racing trucks.

Lester elected to return to his first love of road racing. He competed for five seasons in the Grand-Am series, co-driving a Camaro to a victory with Jordan Taylor in 2011 and finishing second in the GT class championship at age 49.