Keisha Fox

**Keisha** Ashley **Fox** (born 18 Jaunary 1995) is an American professional racing driver currently competing in the AT&T Champ Car World Series for Cherokee GP, driving the #62 for the team. She best known for becoming the first professional racing driver from the state of Maine to win a World Championship event at any level, when she won the 2020 Road America event as a rookie.

## Early Years

Keisha Fox was born in Bar Harbor, Maine, the oldest of three children to John and Shannon Fox. Her father, John, was a mechanic for the Archway Racing indy car team in the 1990s and the early 2000s, allowing Keisha and her brothers Alan and Marcus to have up close experiences with race cars growing up.

Keisha didn't begin pursuing racing until she was 8 years old, and traveling to race venues was often a tedious task. There are not many race tracks in the state of Maine for a driver to significantly move up the ranks. This same difficulty ultimately discouraged her brothers from racing as well, with the three siblings only sharing the same track once.

## Junior Categories

### Junior Modifieds: 2005-2011

Fox's professional racing career began at the age of 10, as she entered the world of stock car racing to cut her teeth. Modified cars, while technically open wheeled, were closed cockpit, rudimentary stock cars. They bore no similarity to any road cars, and their shape were roughly in line with a Prowler. Junior Modifieds, in the New England area, used these modified bodies, with V6 engines which produced around 300 horsepower. For Fox, and others between 9 and 14 years old, that was plenty enough power to learn the basics of stock car racing.

For Fox, she would spend her first 6 years racing in the category, struggling with finding appropriate funding to contend across the country or advance into higher class machinery. Despite consistent wins across those 6 years; she won 4 times in 2005, 7 times in 2006, 9 times in 2007, 13 times in 2008, 12 times in 2009, and 2010, and 13 times again in 2011, sponsorship was sparse to impossible to find. Desperate for a change in scenery, after she turned 16, Fox turned her attention to open wheel racing, deeming her stock car career a failure.

### Indy Development League: 2012-2016

For the 2012 racing year, Fox entered into the Indy Development League (IDL). The series was the lowest tier of the American open wheel ladder system. Similar to Junior Modifieds, most of the IDL competitions are regional, with the New England states having their own regional competition, something that was lacking in her previous series. At the age of 17, Keisha saw a road course for the first time as a competitor, racing on the roval layout at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

Fox spent 2012 getting up to speed to the completely alien racing category. Her father's old team, Archway, were more than generous to let Keisha learn in one of their cars, as she adjusted to road course racing, open cockpit cars, paddle shifting, and the lack of power steering, among other nuances. Keisha scored one win, at her home track of Speedway 95 in Bangor, Maine. The rest of the season was much of a write off, minus a top 10 result at Lime Rock Park during one of the three races held there.

## Personal Life

Fox is openly vegetarian, having moved to a vegetarian diet in 2017. She has been an advocate for better health standards, and has identified herself as lacto-vegetarian, meaning her diet includes items such as milk, and cheese, but not eggs. Fox is a fan of pasta, and famously took her team to a local pasta restaurant in Sheboygan, Wisconsin to celebrate, instead of the town of Elkhart Lake, where she won her maiden Champ Car race.

Fox has also come out as asexual, stating on social media prior to becoming a Champ Car competitor that she found "the idea of love in the 21st century" as "tedious, unnecessary, and inconvenient". Fox has since added to her viewpoints, adding that she believed gender roles were archaic and that the idea of having to step away from racing in order to have a family was the last thing she'd ever care to do.

## Indycar World Championship results

##### Key

* **#** (bold) indicates pole position for that event.
* *#* (italics) indicates most laps led for that event.