Roll Model

Fox Sports' Vincie hopes her career inspires her daughter and others

Lake Norman Currents | June 2020

By Aaron Garcia

There have been moments over the past few months when Kaitlyn Vincie's goals, hopes and accomplishments have intersected right in front of her eyes, but perhaps none have been more obvious than when her 2-year-old daughter, Kadence, stops toddling for a beat to watch her mommy on the television.

Thanks to this spring's stay-at-home orders, Vincie, a member of Fox Sports' on-air racing coverage, would tape her programming each morning at 7:45 from a spare-bedroom-turned-studio in the home she shares with husband Blake Harris, an accomplished car chief for NASCAR driver Martin Truex, Jr. With several races postponed or cancelled throughout April, the family was typically together when Vincie's face would pop up on the screen during the popular NASCAR Race Hub broadcast each evening.

And in those moments, Kaitlyn Vincie was accomplishing exactly what she set out to do.

A race to the start

Vincie, now a Denver resident, had already decided to break into sports journalism when she first saw the pit area at the Richmond International Speedway as a college student. Visiting as a fan, she recalls being "fascinated" at watching the road crews behind the scenes.

"I thought to myself, if I could become a journalist in that sport, I'll feel like I've accomplished something because I didn't grow up around racing," says Vincie. "I didn't work on cars. My dad wasn't a crew chief. I would have to learn everything from the ground up. So that's what I started doing."

Vincie dove in with a NASCAR column in her school newspaper and landed a summer internship in Charlotte with what is now the CARS Tour, a lower-level racing circuit. She also noticed a relative dearth of female racing journalists, especially in comparison to stick-and-ball sports like basketball and football, a fact that helped motivate her while she was making just $100 per week in her first real job as a reporter and host of a racing show covering lower-tier racing at 9,000-seat Langley Speedway, just east of Newport News.

"I still had to waitress and work at a tanning salon to pay my bills," recalls Vincie. "But I knew in the end it was going to pay off doing the local level because it was still going to get me the experience I needed."

The rest of the story

Her star began to rise in earnest, though, when she started producing her own NASCAR-focused content on the side. Before long, NASCAR Illustrated magazine began sharing some of her YouTube videos on its SceneDaily web page, which introduced her to a much larger audience. From there she accepted an off-air position with the television channel SPEED, now known as Fox Sports 1. Within a few months, Vincie transitioned into an on-air role in 2012. In the time since, Vincie has become a mainstay of Fox's racing coverage. This season she added host of NASCAR Race Hub Weekend Edition to a workload that already included hosting the pre-race show for the NASCAR Gander RV and Outdoors Truck Series, as well as reporting for RACE HUB and NASCAR RACEDAY.

"I'm very fortunate that there are people at Fox Sports that believed in me, even when I probably didn't deserve it," says Vincie. "I think they knew how dedicated I was to it and how much I loved racing and how much I would put into this sport to really learn it, to really make the connections in the garage area and to be the best storyteller possible."

As Kadence gets older, Vincie says she hopes her daughter notices not just her image on the screen, but the opportunities it represents. She'll hear about the hours spent waiting tables, cleaning tanning booths and making her own way. Most importantly, she'll see the result.

"I want to be one of those stories for her," says Vincie.