Bringing a vision to life

CHICAGO — Julie Giese used the tenacity she learned growing up on her family’s Wisconsin dairy farm to create something completely new in the NASCAR world — the first-ever street race event.

Giese grew up working alongside her parents, Russ and Barb, and brother, Wayne, on their dairy farm near Edgar, Wisconsin. Wayne, along with his wife, Samantha, and son, Justin, continues to operate the family farm as Sam-Way Dairy. Giese credits the work ethic and determination she gained in her formative years as giving her the determination to forge her career in NASCAR.

The Chicago Street Race is the first-ever street race sanctioned in NASCAR’s 75-year history. As the president of the NASCAR Chicago Street Race, Giese, who had previously served as the president of Phoenix Raceway, was tasked with building the event from the ground up.

“This was the first time we ever did anything like this, and it was the first time for the city of Chicago to do anything like it,” Giese said. “A lot of my job, especially in the first year, was building community relationships with residents, businesses and civic leaders. We had to convince everyone to get on board with the vision we had for the street race.”

Giese accepted the assignment in November 2022 of starting the event to be held in July 2023.

“Those first few months, getting that first event up and off the ground were challenging,” Giese said. “There were so many questions from the community — what was it, were cars likely to crash into buildings, how loud would it be, was it safe? Our vision was to run around Grant Park, which is a beautiful front door for the city, so the concerns were understandable. Building those community relations that first year was as important as the operations and logistics.”

Touting a never-done-before event that would dramatically alter the daily life of the city’s downtown for several weeks was not an easy sell, Giese said.

“All I could really do is just say, ‘Trust me,’” Giese said. “All I had was a video of a virtual model of what this could look like — that was it. It’s not like we could shut down the streets and do a practice run to show everyone, because shutting down the streets was a main point of contention and concern.

The Chicago Street Race is a 2-day event, taking place the first weekend in July. However, the event set up the first year impacted parts of Grant Park and the surrounding area for several weeks, Giese said. Over 2,000 concrete barriers are used to build the racecourse, just one part of the logistics.

“We’re closing down DuSable Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue (for the weekend),” Giese said. “That had never been done before, for consecutive days.”

The first year, the total load-in and load-out schedule was close to 50 days, from start to finish Giese said. However, now they have cut that time in half.

“We’re 23 days from start to finish, including race weekend,” Giese said. “We don’t start closing streets until a week before the race. We’ve been able to fine tune the process to be substantially less disruptive to the locals, which was important to us.”

The ability to bring a vision like the Chicago Street Race to fruition was born of skills learned watching her family navigate farming Giese said.

“I’m not afraid of long hours because I watched my parents getting up early in the morning, working all day, doing chores at night and fieldwork well into the night sometimes,” Giese said. “There wasn’t ever just a day that you took it easy, so I really never knew anything different, and I’m so grateful to have learned the value of hard work to make things happen.”

After high school, Giese headed to the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, where she majored in animal science, planning for a career in the poultry industry.

“I did an internship one summer in Madison and after two days behind a microscope, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do,” Giese said. “I got back to River Falls and told my advisor I didn’t know what I wanted to do. They were in the process of opening up a new major for agricultural marketing, and that seemed appealing to me.”

With her new trajectory set, Giese decided she wanted to apply what she had learned to racing.

“My dad’s a big race fan and I’ve always been a race fan,” Giese said. “When you think about it, in NASCAR, so much about the sport is marketing-driven and sponsor-focused. I had a friend from Stratford, Wisconsin, who raced on local Midwest tracks. He let me dabble in trying to find him some sponsorships, but I don’t think I sold one sponsorship. I was not good at it, but it was fun to see that side of it.”

As graduation approached, Giese sent out resumes to racetracks around the country.

“I didn’t think it would be that hard to get a job, but I got lots of rejection letters,” Giese said. “I kept those letters. Most of them are signed by people who are now my peers. One was actually signed by someone who hired me later in my career.”

Giese eventually landed a job at an agricultural advertising agency before becoming a public relations coordinator for Watkins Glen International in upstate New York in 2001.

“That was a big step for me,” Giese said. “It was the first time I was more than a couple of hours from my family, but it was a great opportunity in an entry-level position. That’s really where my career started.”

From there, Giese spent time at Daytona International Speedway, where she was involved with the design and development team in a $400 million renovation of the facility. From there she went on to Phoenix Raceway to serve as a project manager for that track’s renovation.

“I loved Phoenix Raceway, but when the opportunity here in Chicago came about, I was intrigued to be a part of something that had never been done before,” Giese said. “It also brought me closer to home, to my family.”

The family connection hit home for Giese when she received a call from her mother in August 2023, just weeks after her first successful street race. Her mother called with the news that the family’s barn had caught fire.

“I was able to just hop in the car and get home as quickly as I could, to support my family,” Giese said

The lessons learned on that farm laid a foundation for a career that has surpassed her wildest teenage dreams, Giese said.

“It maybe wasn’t always the most fun at the time,” Giese said. “We never went on family vacations; the animals and the farm were always the priority. But looking back, it taught me so much; it made me who I am today and gave me the skills to make a vision a reality.”