On Memorial Day weekend, I will watch the Indianapolis 500. Motorsports can be divided into a lot of types and series; Indy is the senior and signature race of the Indy Racing League series. Indy is an oval, the cars are open-wheel. I love open-wheel racing, but I much prefer road courses. I follow Formula One much more closely. More about that later. So Indy is not my favorite series or kind of racing, but I will watch anyway — because of Indy’s place in history, and because of Danica Patrick’s.
There have been pioneering women at the high levels of many forms of racing, but especially at Indy, I think because of its symbolic importance. First, there was Guthrie. She started out as an aerospace engineer who went racing full-time. She raced around the Sports Car Club of America for a while and turned to Nascar, where she was the first woman to race in their top series, then the Winston Cup. She drove the Daytona 500 and was Rookie of the Year, and she competed in 33 Winston Cup events, finishing as high as sixth. Starting in 1977 she raced in open-wheels at Indy, too. She qualified in 1977, ’78 and ’79. The first time, the car had problems and she did poorly. The last time, same thing. But in between, in 1978, she had a really good run, finishing in the top ten: ninth, after starting 15th. With a good car, she could drive with the best in the sport. (Guthrie has a well-regarded autobiography, “A Life at Full Throttle.”)
I have a soft spot for Lyn St. James because, while I was too young to remember Guthrie, I watched St. James’ debut with rapt attention. She was already a road-racing veteran when I first saw her, and in her career she drove twice at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, won the 24 Hours of Daytona twice, and won the 12 Hours of Sebring once. I saw her qualify at the back of the pack in 1992 for Indy. The cars were powerful and twitchy and the track was slick that year; the polesitter crashed on the formation lap! Lyn St. James finished a heroic eleventh, keeping the car on the track when thirteen cars crashed and most of the field did not finish, and was Rookie of the Year — the only rookie to even finish a nerve-shattering 500 miles. Lyn made seven trips to the Brickyard (As Indy is called for the three-foot strip of bricks at the start-finish line), but never again had a really competetive car and never managed a top-ten finish. With a lifetime of top-flight racing, she has not retired to catch up on her reading. Instead, she now runs the nonprofit Winner’s Circle Foundation.
Sarah Fisher started at Indy at just nineteen years of age. When she and St. James started together, it was the first Indy with two women racing. The traditional “Gentlemen, Start your Engines!” has been “Lady and Gentlemen …,” at least since St. James (I don’t recall if they acknowledged Guthrie) but that year, for the first time and not the last, it was “Ladies and Gentlemen …” Sarah Fisher has her own team now, but she’s never had a very good ride. In a half-dozen trips, she has crashed several times and never finished better than 18th. However, elsewhere in the series she managed a pole position, the first woman to start an Indy race from the pole.
Everyone who followed racing and some who don’t saw Patrick coming. She moved to Europe at 16, alone, to race in the brutally competetive Formula Ford series there. She was second at the English Formula Ford festival, the best ever finish by an American. Motorsports journalists started reporting on her after that, seeing her move through the Formula Atlantics towards the big show.
Qualifying for the 2005 Indy, her car’s rear slid in the first turn. It was a disastrous moment; most drivers would have been in the wall, and she shocked everyone by keeping it on the track and then, icewater in her veins, staying fast despite the scare to start fourth, the best starting position by a woman. She led nineteen laps (first woman to lead at Indy), overcoming two key mistakes to finish fouth, the highest by a woman, and to be named Rookie of the Year. (Two out of five women to face the Indianapolis 500 have been Rookie of the Year. That’s 40%. Just sayin’.)
She took three poles her rookie season, but did not win a race. Everyone knew she could, everyone waited to see when she would.
In 2006 at Indy, with a less competetive car and still a bit shaken by the death of teammate Paul Dana, she started and finished Eighth — two top ten finishes in two tries.
In 2007, she was in the hunt and ran as high as second, but finished eight when Scotsman of Italian descent (and Ashley Judd’s husband) Dario Franchitti won the rain-shortened race. Three top ten finishes in three consecutive years. In the season as a whole, she had three podium finishes.
As Jill reported, in late April, 2008, she won the Japan 300 at Motegi. She is the first woman to win an Indy race. That should put her head in the right place as she heads into this year’s Indianapolis 500.
There have certainly been women racers of distinction in other series. In drag racing, both dragsters and pro stock bikes have women legends in their history (Shirley Muldowney and Angelle Sampey, respectively). (Bonnie Bedelia, one of the better actors of her generation I think, played Muldowney in a now-dated but very watchable movie, Heart Like a Wheel.)
Michele Mouton very nearly won the World Rally Championship in an Audi Quattro that lacked the reliability to match her skills, and did win both one of the series events and a prestigious non-series event, the Pike’s Peak hill-climb. When the governing body decided that the “killer B” Group B rally cars were too fast and powerful, Mouton retired rather than race in less powerful Group A cars. Ha!
However, there is a lot of room for improvement at the top. NASCAR has not had much in the way of women; Formula One has had only five women drive and only one had what anyone would call a career (Lella Lombardi finished as high as Sixth, the other four women had just a handful of races each and never earned a championship point).
There are some women coming up in sports car racing; Liz Halliday does well in American Le Mans, and I think Milka Duno (the third woman, with Patrick and Fisher, in the 2007 Indy) may be less out of her depth in sports cars than she is in Indy cars. Simone De Silvestro got a win in Atlantics in April, and with Katherine Legge is the only woman to win in Atlantics. Legge also tested an F1 car, though she races the German Touring Car series for Audi now. But the groundswell of women at the lower levels of racing is not yet fairly reflected at the upper levels. There should be women in F1 cars, WRC cars, sports cars at ALMS and at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and in NASCAR’s top series every year, not just a few times a decade. I hope we’re getting there.
When my daughter is old enough to watch it with me, I hope that as the starter says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines,” eight, ten, twelve women fire the engines and pull out on the formation lap, each hoping to have her name inscribed on the Borg-Warner Trophy, and little girls in karts around the country can root for any woman, not just the woman.
I don’t pretend to have exhautive knowledge of the women in the pipeline for the top series; if anybody knows of women we should keep an eye on, leave them in comments.