CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A year or two ago, sometime in the throes of a NASCAR Cup Series season, Jodi Geschickter met an old friend and kept an old promise.
Well, it wasn’t a promise. More of an off-the-cuff comment, really. It was from over two decades ago, not long after Geschickter and her husband, Tad, started their first race team. Geschickter was working two jobs at the time — working in the race team office during the week and as a flight attendant on the weekends — and she’d invited a pilot she’d worked with to tour her team’s race shop in Charlotte.
“He said, ‘I’ll make you a deal: When you get this going, and you have your airplane, I’ll be your pilot,’ ” she said in a phone interview Monday. “And I said, ‘Deal.’ And then I guess last year, the year before, we have a charter flight that leaves out of Statesville, and I walked out on a Tarmac to get on that charter flight.
