George and Jackie Bryce have celebrated 80 National Hot Rod Association Pro Stock Motorcycle victories and six series championships, three each with John Myers and Angelle Sampey.

But they also have traveled thousands of weary miles across America’s highways in the team hauler after weekends in which a promising weekend ended in a first-round red light. They’ve seen parts break, parts that cost what some families might spend for a week’s worth of groceries. They’ve consoled young riders who agonize about not being perfect in every pass down the racetrack. They’ve been entangled in sanctioning-body politics.

Julie Bryce is just 16, and she has been around the Star / Sovereign-Star Racing operation since she was an infant. She shared the U.S. Nationals winners circle with Myers when she was seven weeks old. And for 16 years she has seen her parents try to balance their family life – wanting to make her life as normal as possible, yet wanting to introduce her to amazingly smart and kind people in drag racing and to the big world outside their 11-acre homestead near Americus, Ga.

After toying for months with the idea of blasting down a dragstrip in a race car, the teenager finally completed a beginner course in December at Frank Hawley’s Drag Racing School at Gainesville, Fla., in a Super Gas car.

Despite an outstanding showing of 5.77 seconds in the eighth-mile with a 1.26 60-foot incremental that her observant dad said “blew me away,” Julie Bryce still isn’t sure if she wants to make that leap into the deep end of her parents’ world.

“I don’t know what will come of it,” George Bryce said of his daughter’s Christmas-break accomplishment in the class. “She’s an expert, for her age, in drag racing. She’s always been very interested in it. She likes reading all about it on the Internet. She’s never had a desire to race a motorcycle, but she’s always been interested in power and speed.

“She’s been personal friends with whoever our driver has been,” Bryce – who also has mentored Michael Ray, Chaz Kennedy, John Hall, and Scotty Pollacheck -- said. “She watches it, and she sees a different viewpoint of it than any of us do, of the pressure they live under, of trying to be perfect all the time, and dealing with mistakes and dealing with family and dealing with the business and all the politics.

“She just doesn’t know if she’s interested in that kind of lifestyle,” he said.

As for a career in driving, he said, “She’s on the fence right now. She says that it’s a lot of pressure, that her life’s pretty cool without all the pressure.

“But she’s going to school to be in marketing and public relations, because she wants to continue in motorsports, no matter if she has a helmet on or not,” Bryce said. “But she would recommend that anybody interested in the sport from any perspective needs to go through the school to learn exactly what’s going on at the track.”

Bryce said he has no problem with the notion that his daughter might compete on four wheels instead of two.

“The people who are really, really good on a motorcycle have a medical history behind them usually of broken bones and scraped skin and knees and elbows,” he said. “It took me a whole bunch of ambulance rides before I respected one.”

Besides, he had put her behind the wheel of a car before she was eligible for driver’s-education class.

“When she was 10 years old, I got her a ’68 Barracuda to drive around in a field out here [at home]. She’s real fast doing figure-8s, doughnuts, and spinning out and stuff, so I felt real comfortable with her being able to drive a car when she got her license. I wanted her to be good with vehicle control,” he said.

So Bryce wasn’t totally shocked when she performed well at Hawley’s school, which was so booked up that she had to wait months to attend an open class.

“I told her that if she wanted to race, she was born in the right house,” Bryce said.

However, he wasn’t convinced she was serious about driving.

“She’s never ridden a motorcycle, and we’ve never trained her on a motorcycle,” Bryce, who conducts drag-bike classes at his own school, said. “She’s never thought about it or tried.”

He said she kept mentioning that she might give Jr. Dragsters a go. He’d let her think about it, and sure enough, she’d bring up the subject maybe sixth months later. He told her, “Let’s do some research on it. Go on the Internet and look around and get back to me what we need to do.”

He wouldn’t hear about it again until another five or six months passed, and he’d ask her, “Did you ever go on the Internet?” Her reply was “I’ll look at it.”

So, her dad said, “I knew it was a passing fancy, a thought she was throwin’ around.”

Finally, one day he asked her if she might be interested in going to Hawley’s school, and she said that sounded like fun.

“She came down [to Gainesville] cold turkey, never even sat in a race car. She learned all the procedures pretty quickly, because she’s a fast learner,” the proud papa said.

“Only thing she was doing wrong that needed help was she’d been driving 55 mph for a year, and you make more abrupt changes (taking evasive action or changing lanes or making corrections) than you do when you’re going 100 or faster. She was a little aggressive with the wheel and had to keep lifting,” Bryce said. “Everybody was helping her understand how to be a little more subtle with the very, very gentle steering required when you’re accelerating so fast.

“I’m very proud of her, how fast she went and how she drove with her head on straight,” he said. “The car went a little to the left or right, she lifted. The car went a little bit where she didn’t want it to go, she lifted. I was really proud of that, compared to some people who drive over their head. That’s really hard to unteach. You see the heroes you and I have seen growing up progress and excel and put cars on their roofs learning how to do it.”

Bryce said should Julie choose to compete in a car, he has one that will be ready for her to use. Wizard Race Cars prepped the 1968 Hemi Barracuda with a Ray Barton engine, and it’s in Paul Demer’s JCR Chassisworks shop in Florida right now. “I’m going to go out and run it a little bit for fun,” Bryce said. “If it works good and it runs good and goes straight and Julie wants to drive it, I’m going to give her a chance to drive it.

“If she wants to keep pursuing it, I’m going to help her,” he said. “If she doesn’t want to, I’m going to support her with it, too.”

But young Julie Bryce will be the architect of her own career in the motorsports world. She might well have been “born in the right house,” but she will lay her own foundation when she’s ready to build.

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