On Wednesday, we broke the news of Danica Patrick's 2010 NASCAR plans.
Almost immediately I started getting questions about the history of female competitors in stock car racing's top three series -- Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Trucks.
After some digging, I can see why people have so many questions. Finding information about women in NASCAR is almost as difficult as, well, finding women in NASCAR. It wasn't so long ago that the official NASCAR media guides included a "Female Competitors" section. The Cup Series book actually boasts about the 13 different women who have raced in the sport's biggest league. But as more time has passed since Shawna Robinson made her final Cup start in 2002, those sections began to mysteriously vanish.
Why do I suspect that Danica's arrival will probably bring that section back?
Anyway, as we celebrate (or, as some of you have made very clear, bemoan) Mrs. Patrick's 2010 arrival, here's a banzai lap look at the history of women behind the wheel in NASCAR.
Let's Start At The Very Beginning (A Very Good Place To Start)
The very first NASCAR Strictly Stock (now Sprint Cup) Series race was held on June 19, 1949 at the old Charlotte Speedway. The field included 33 racers. One of them was a woman. Dahlonega, Ga. native Sara Christian started 13th in a car fielded by her husband (good man). The car finished 14th, but with friend Bob Flock behind the wheel. Christian handed over her car when Flock blew an engine early in the race.
One month later, Christian took the green flag on the legendary Daytona Beach and Road Course, along with Flock's sister Ethel Mobley, and Louise Smith, one of only three times that three women have started the same Cup Series race. The trio did it again later that season at the Langhorne Speedway in Pennsylvania, where Christian earned the first female top 10. Winner Curtis "Pops" Turner insisted that she join him in Victory Lane. (The third didn't happen until July 4, 1977, when three women started the Firecracker 400 at Daytona.)
Christian made seven starts in all, Mobley two and Smith 11. I interviewed Smith back in 1998 and she recounted that first start on Daytona Beach: "I had been racing there around Greenville, S.C., around home you know. I went down to Daytona to watch the race, but I really wanted to go run that race on the beach, so I took my family's shiny new car and put it in the race. Well, I was racing along fine and cars starting getting rutted up in the sand and my car took a big ol' flop backward, just tore it all up. I tried to have it fixed before I took it back home, you know before my husband saw it, but when I got home he showed me the local paper. It said, 'Local woman races at Daytona, wrecks car.' He wasn't real happy about that."
In all, Smith won nearly 40 races across a slew of different racing divisions. In the 1970s she reentered Cup as a team owner and in 1999 was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in Talladega. "If I was a man I'd already be in here," the normally light-hearted "First Lady Of Racing" said without a hint of laughter.
In the late 1990s, NASCAR paid tribute to Smith by bringing her on stage during its much-hyped "NASCAR's Night In Hollywood" celebration. She then stood on stage to be serenaded by a live rendition of the Beach Boys' "Little Old Lady From Pasadena."
Awwwwkward.
For the next couple of decades, women had little to celebrate in the sport. Between 1955 and '77, the distaff half of the human race was represented just once, when Goldie Parsons finished 14th at Dog Track Speedway in Moyock, N.C. Although on Sept. 13, 1962, Mamie Reynolds did become the first female car owner to win a Cup race when Fast Freddy Lorenzen took the victory at the Augusta Speedway in Georgia.
"That's Janet, Miss Guthrie If You're Nasty"
When the final book is written on the women who stood at the forefront of the sports equality revolution during the 1970s, it will have to include at least one chapter on Janet Guthrie, an engineer and pilot turned motorsports milestone maker.
In an era when women weren't allowed in the garage area, not even wives, Guthrie simultaneously kicked the gate open in both Indy Cars and stock cars. When she narrowly missed the field for the '76 Indianapolis 500, she was immediately whisked away to Charlotte, where super-promoter Humpy Wheeler had a ride waiting for her. While most in the garage scoffed (I'm looking at you, Richard Petty), she received enough tech help from Junior Johnson's team to make the field for the World 600.
The following year she became the first woman to compete in the Daytona 500 and the Indy 500. She made her name in open wheel racing, but ended up making 33 Cup Series starts. In woefully inferior equipment, she finished in the top 15 in 17 of her 33 starts, earned a career-best sixth at Bristol and became the first (and still only) woman to lead a lap in a Cup race, coming at the Indy-clone Ontario Motor Speedway in Southern California.
The Janet To Danica Gap
After Guthrie made her last NASCAR start in 1980, a long line of women have taken turns behind the wheel of a stock car, though most with very limited success. Racers such as Tina Gordon, Jennifer Jo Cobb, Erin Crocker, Tammy Jo Kirk, Kelly Sutton, Deborah Renshaw and Robin McCall. Just last weekend at Talladega, Chrissy Wallace, daughter of Mike, raced with her father in the Truck Series race, her seventh NCWTS start. But the two with the most prolific careers were a pair of racing ladies who were also married to the sport ... literally.
Patty Moise started 133 Busch (now Nationwide) Series races from 1986-98, many as the owner of her own team. Several of those seasons were spent as a full-time Busch Series racer competing against her husband, Elton Sawyer, now an executive with Red Bull Racing. She was a highly regarded road racer, thanks to a background in IMSA, and made her Cup debut at Watkins Glen in 1987, driving a car co-owned by Ernie Irvan. In all, she made five Cup Series starts.
Shawna Robinson made her stock car name in the now-defunct Goody's Dash Series (the same circuit that brought us Michael Waltrip) scoring three wins. She soon moved up to Busch, often racing against Moise. Under the tutelage of longtime car owner and former Roger Penske partner Michael Kranefuss, she became the first woman to make a Cup start since Moise's final try in 1988. During most of that time she was also married to longtime crewman Jeff Clark. She is also the only woman to win a pole position in the Busch Series (Atlanta, 1994), the only woman to race in all three of NASCAR's top national series and she once used an all-female pit crew during a Truck Series race at the Texas Motor Speedway. She bowed out of racing to raise her kid, and then returned briefly before concentrating on her very successful interior decorating career in Charlotte, taking care of a clientele list that includes a who's who of NASCAR drivers, car owners and crew chiefs.
Ryan McGee
