Teen Racer Annabeth Barnes Comes of Age in a Fast World and on Film

For Annabeth Barnes, stock car racing was just a way of life.

Her father, Darren, started racing stock cars at 17. Through mutual friends, he met Annabeth's mother, Tina.

"There's very definitely a history of racing in our family," Barnes tells ParentDish.

It's also a geographic thing: Stock car racing permeates the South.

"It's definitely part of our culture, especially down around where I live in North Carolina," she says. "On Sunday after church, you to go to the races. You don't think about it. It's part of you."

Barnes says she never thought racing go-karts (the sort of Little League of NASCAR) would make her a national celebrity. Now the 15-year-old is among the subjects of a new documentary film, and she and her parents just inked a deal for her to star in her own reality TV show.



The 93-minute documentary, "Racing Dreams," opened July 9 in New York and opens July 23 in Los Angeles. It has been opening in various smaller cities across the country for the past few months, mostly in the South, were NASCAR racing rules. The movie premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the award for Best Documentary Feature.

The film was a big departure for filmmaker Marshall Curry, whose Oscar-nominated 2005 documentary "Street Fight" followed the rough-and-tumble world of New Jersey politics. This time, Curry followed three young racers as they came of age and made the transition between go-karts and stock cars.

It changed Barnes's life.

She was just 11 years old when the project began, and was racing go-karts on dirt, just like her big sister, Jess. At a "karting convention" during the awards ceremony for the NASCAR Grand National Race at the Raleigh Speedway, she met Curry.

"Someone said there's this guy from New York who wants to talk to you about being in a movie," Barnes remembers. "We thought it was like a joke. We all said, 'Yeah, whatever'."

She was soon introduced to the other kids profiled in the movie -- 12-year-old Josh Hobson and 13-year-old Brandon Warren. That was also a life-changing experience, Barnes says. The boys raced on pavement. She raced on dirt.

For the sake of the movie, which follows Barnes, Hobson and Warren through an entire go-kart season as they face the trials of adolescence with the realities of racing, Barnes switched to racing on pavement, which was no small change. Think of racing as an art -- changing from dirt to pavement is like changing from oils to watercolors.

The dirt slips around underneath, Barnes says, and is constantly shifting.

"It's a completely different ball game," she says. "In my opinion, you have to be a 10-times better driver on the dirt."

Barnes was already popular on the NASCAR circuit, with 1,110 fans following her Facebook page. With the release of the movie, she says, she's become a bona fide celebrity.

"A lot more people know my name," Barnes says. "It's helped my family get sponsorships and other recognition."

"Other recognition" includes the reality show. Barnes says she doesn't have too many details on the project -- it doesn't even have a title yet. But the idea of living in a public fish bowl is a little intimidating, she says.

A sophomore at Alexander Central High School in her hometown of Hiddenite, N.C., about three hours west of Raleigh, Barnes insists her celebrity status isn't a big deal among her classmates.

"Everyone knows me as me," she says.

Attending a public school is tough, she says, and she misses a lot of classes.

She remembers an administrator telling her, " 'Because of your special situation, we're going to let you get by on this class and this class and this class.' I was, like, all right!"

Right now, Barnes' big priority is testing a new car on the track in Hickory, N.C. Long since graduated from go-karts, she is facing life in the big leagues.

"Good test at Hickory," she tells fans on Facebook. "Car is SWEET!"

Related: Amazing Kid: Teen Helps Break the Chains of Poverty Through Literacy