MILLS IS ENTERING THE NO-PREP WORLD WITH SUPPORT
FROM MANY OF THE COMPANIES WHO’VE BEEN ON BOARD
WITH HER FATHER’S SUCCESSFUL RADIAL VS. THE WORLD
PROGRAM, INCLUDING FUELTECH.
were talking about, and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m re-
ally excited.’ But you don’t really think about how
much support you have until something like this.
I know my dad has people that follow him, but I
really never thought, Oh, I have these followers.”
To Mills’ relief, the news was received pretty
positively across the board. Fans, fellow racers
and other supporters made comments offering
prayers for DeWayne in his cancer bout and good
luck to Kallee as she made the step up.
“It made it a little bit more refreshing because
I was really, really worried about what people
would say,” she admits. “People are always going
to have negative things to say about you when
you’re doing good and you’re doing good things.
There’s always one group of people that you can’t
ever please. And I was really worried that people
were going to be like, ‘Oh, she’s just getting into it
April 2020
because her dad blah, blah, blah. But I don’t race
because my dad lets me race. I race because I like
to race and we do it as a family, and he doesn’t
make me do anything that I don’t want to do. So if
I don’t take the initiative to want to be there, he’s
not going to put in money and time and effort.”
K
ALLEE MILLS’ FIRST PASSES in the purpose-built
no-prep car happened during a secretive
test session at Emerald Coast Dragway,
just northeast of Pensacola in the Florida
panhandle. It was secluded by design.
“I told my dad I want to go somewhere where
no one knows where we’re at,” Mills says. “I didn’t
want to post on anything. I didn’t want to go to
a really well-known track. I wanted to go some-
where where no one’s going to be because I have
never driven a big-tire car. A big-tire car and a
small-tire car are two totally different things.”
“I was extremely nervous, I can’t even explain,”
Mills says. “That was as nervous as I’d ever been.
The first time I just did a burnout. I did good. I
never stuck the tire or anything. I was just a little
long shifting in the burnout because I’d never had
to shift a car in the burnout, and I did good. I
backed up. I was so shaky; my legs were so shaky.”
Kallee wasn’t the only one who was nervous.
DeWayne was just as nervous outside the car, if
not more nervous, as he pulled his daughter into
the beams for her first launch in “Golden Kong.”
“My dad pulls me into the lights and he was
like, ‘I was holding my breath the entire time
and as soon as you left I thought I was going to
pass out,’” Mills recalls. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, I
felt the same exact way.’”
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