Dale Earnhardt Jr. proved he could drive fast in the front seat of his father’s stock car on short tracks through the Carolinas. Jeff Gordon traded paint in Northern California eleven years before he was old enough to have a driver’s license.
Most NASCAR drivers started out in similar ways.
Not Caruth diagram. He learned how to handle a race car by playing video games and he says many Generation Z drivers are ready to follow him.
“I feel like this is just the wave of the future,” said 20-year-old Caruth, who will race in the second tier Xfinity Series at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana on Saturday. “It’s big, right? Because that is the only way I could make my start.”
Caruth always needed speed. A high school 400-meter runner, he was 13 when he attended his first NASCAR event and quickly fell in love with the sport. But unlike Earnhardt, who was born into a family of racing drivers, Caruth, born in Atlanta to parents from the Caribbean, was unlikely to one day walk to the garage and find a race car.
The family did have a computer and Wi-Fi, so Caruth had access to it eNASCAR’s Ignite Seriesa virtual esports competition that uses ultra-realistic software to mimic real-life racing without having to put on a fireman’s suit.
Caruth, then 16, didn’t win a race in the inaugural season of the Ignite Series in 2018, but performed well enough to catch the attention of executives with NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity program. They put him in a real car a year later at the Bojangles Summer Shootout at Charlotte Motor Speedway and Caruth won two heat races and finished 10th overall.
While there were some bumps in the road during the transition from virtual reality to… well, real reality… Caruth says the transition from steering on a computer screen to piloting a 3,400-pound race car was smoother than he expected.
His first stop was the ARCA Series, driving for Rev Racing, finishing in the top 10 in 18 of his 25 races in 2020-21. He moved up to the Craftsman Truck Series last year and finished 11th in his debut. Last weekend at Daytona, in his first race of the new season, he failed to finish after crashing seven trucks on the 58th lap of the 250-mile race. His best finish in seven Xfinity races in 2022 was 12th.
NASCAR legend Richard Petty and Rajah Caruth ride on NASCAR’s float in the 134th Rose Parade on January 2.
(Michael Owen Baker/Associated Press)
“Racing online taught me to get information through my eyes, my hands and my ears. So that was limited,” Caruth said in a phone call earlier this month. “When you get into the real car, you are used to using all your senses from the start and using them to feel vibrations and sensations from the vehicle.
“At first I didn’t really know how to marry the two of them. But now that I’m kind of into it, they really work hand in hand, almost feeling like I have a leg up. I’m just used to having so many, I guess ports would be the word, kind of like you have USB stuff on a laptop right? I have a lot more than I am used to when I get into the real car and that sometimes gives me a helping hand.”
Mike Beam tells him to take Caruth at his word. The president of GMS Racing, the Caruth truck team, Beam admits he couldn’t tell a USB from a UFO. “I’m 67 years old and I can barely turn on my computer,” he said. “My grandchildren turn it on.”
But Beam sees the value in simulated racing, which grew in popularity during the COVID-19 shutdown when drivers couldn’t get on track to practice. Instead, they used multimillion-dollar racing simulators like the one General Motors owns at its Statesville, NC test center.
“The program is so realistic that you feel the bumps. You feel everything and you really get a sense of the race car,” said Beam.
Whether those hours behind a computer will translate into continued success in a real race car for Caruth remains to be seen, but Beam – a former crew chief to racing legends Richard Petty, Michael Waltrip, Bill Elliott and Sterling Marlin – says the rookie is “best special.”
“The one thing he has going for him is a great work ethic. And he has a really good system,” said Beam, who will drive Caruth full-time this year in the No. 24 Chevrolet truck and allow him to run eight Xfinity Series races, including Fontana, for Alpha Prime Racing.
“Whether he’s going to make it, I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t. He’s a good clean racer. He brought the car home in one piece, got everything out of the car that was possible. That means a lot. What I always say to young drivers is that you get out what you put in. Rajah, he believes that. He’s not going to pass up this opportunity.”
Just in case, Caruth takes a slew of classes at Winston-Salem State where he’s majoring in motorsports management.
Rajah Caruth awaits the start of an ARCA Series race at Dover International Speedway in May 2021.
(Chris Szagola/Associated Press)
“As a black man, it’s important to give myself options and my education is something no one can take away from me,” said Caruth, who said it takes a village to help him juggle a stressful job with his academic responsibilities.
“Well, I have a nice therapist,” he said jokingly. “I have a cool mom and dad and sister and mild teachers and a good support system and a great racing team. So really, the circle I was able to create in this last bit has allowed me to pursue both endeavors.
Chases that started when Caruth logged into his computer to play a video game.
