Senior Ashlee Keller has spent her whole life at the race track. For the last ten years of her life, Keller has been surrounded by racing, mainly through working for her family-owned racing team, Keller Motorsports. The team competes in sprint car racing all across the West Coast, most notably in World of Outlaws, the highest level of sprint car racing, but additionally in the NARC and High Limit series, which has a 2026 schedule that travels to 33 tracks in 21 different states for 66 nights of racing.
Keller’s role has changed across the decade that the team has progressed; she began with higher responsibility, working with the tires and engines on a consistent basis to assist when the team was still on a small scale. But as the team has expanded and picked up official crew members, she’s started turning to the art of photography, whether it be capturing the race itself or the moments off the track, as a way to still help out. With this new found experience, she is now one of the team’s main photographers, using these skills to help provide media for the team, as well as build her own network with a wide range of teams within the different series’.
“It’s provided me with a bunch of connections with photography. Because, I have guys from other teams ask me, ‘Hey, can you get a picture of the car? I’ll pay you,’” Keller said.
Crew and media work isn’t all that Keller has aspirations for in the racing world, though. She also mentioned that with time and financial backing, she has weighed the thought of being a driver herself.
“When I’m 18, I’m probably going to go find either my own car and build off of that, or find someone who is willing to give me a seat, because some of the teams will ask me, ‘Can you drive our modifieds?’”
However, racing isn’t always perfect and glamorous. It’s not necessarily a straight path for both driver or owner, and success isn’t guaranteed. Keller has acknowledged that there’s both distance and financial issues from what is widely known as one of the most expensive sports in the world. She highlighted the struggle of a pressing schedule that involves around 60 races from March to November.
“Our family’s never really together either, my dad’s rarely home because of racing,” Keller said.
There’s a price to pay for owning a team, both in dollars and in time. Keller finds herself dedicating multiple days after school weekly at times to the shop, just to help keep everything in order. Financially, the price becomes even more apparent.
“We have a lot of money from it, but at the same time it’s very expensive. We just ordered two engines. That’s around $10,000 a piece. We’re constantly having money in, getting money out,” Keller says.
On the other hand, the reward for winning makes racing a sport worth the risk. For a team like Keller Motorsports, a single race win alone at the World of Outlaws level ranges from $25,000 for special events to $12,000 for a standard race win. A singular win can put a team in a much more comfortable financial position, and give a team an upper hand depending on how much they’re willing to reinvest.
And if teams aren’t getting the results they need, they won’t hesitate to move on from their driver in favor of another. Since Keller Motorsports was founded in 2015, Keller remembers at least 5 drivers that have taken a seat in the car.
“2015, we had Eric Rossi, then we had Billy Butler. We had JJ Ringo, Kaleb Montgomery, and Gauge Garcia, (who currently drives for them.) we’ve had five drivers.”
At the end of the day, no matter who’s driving the car, Keller Motorsports is a family business at heart that continues to become a rising part of sprint car racing, and Keller can safely say that she is a part of that team.
Whether Keller decides to pursue racing, photography, or something unrelated, the racetrack will always be a home for her.
