Female Racers Free to Be Themselves at the Track

PHOENIX -- I suspect that if I gave you six guesses, or for that matter, sixty six guesses, you still wouldn’t guess what Danica Patrick is doing today, Monday, January 17, 2011.

Is she testing an Indy car? Nope.

How about shooting another music video or Sports Illustrated swim suit photo? Nope and nope.

And nope and more nopes to your other guesses.

So, what is she doing?

“I’m taking a sewing class,” Patrick said here Sunday during one of two panel discussions that were part of the fourth annual Wheels of Wellness historic racing car show, which annually kicks off classic car auction week in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun.

Though people may assume she has to be the ultimate tom boy to go wheel to wheel in the 200-mph world of Indy car racing, “I enjoy being a girl,” Patrick said. “And I like to iron. I’m very much a girl.”

Patrick’s point, I think, was that you really can be a woman and a race car driver. She found no disagreement among the other panelists -- Desire Wilson, former South African racing champion and the only woman to win a Formula One race; Denise McCluggage, pioneering sports car racer as well as the first woman to receive press credentials to cover the Indy 500; Bobby Rahal and Dario Franchitti, neither of them a woman but both Indianapolis 500 winners; and moderator Lyn St. James, the first woman to win rookie of the year honors at Indy.

The panel was to have included one more driver, three-time Indy pole winner Tom Sneva, but his grandson was racing his quarter-midget elsewhere in Phoenix and Sneva is crew chief and had to make that duty his priority.

Patrick also said she and the growing number of women now participating in motorsports have benefited from the groundwork established by women racers of previous generations. The history of women in American is being highlighted this year in the Women in the Winner’s Circle, a traveling exhibit from The Henry Ford museum.

McCluggage not only raced before there were corporate sponsors, but even before there were what we now recognize as professional racing teams, and she talked about how in 1961, she drove her own Ferrari 250 GT from New York to Sebring, where, with a co-driver, she won her class in the 12-hour race -- and was 10th overall -- then drove the car home by way of Chicago.

Some two decades later, Wilson was approached by Bernie Ecclestone about joining his Brabham F1 team as Nelson Piquet’s teammate. Instead, Ecclestone put another driver in the car and Wilson found a ride with the Ken Tyrrell’s team.

When she asked Ecclestone why he changed his mind, she was told the other driver -- Hector Rebaque -- “has really good hands.”

Wilson looked at her hands and asked if they were not good enough.

“His hands write really big checks,” Ecclestone responded in his way of saying that Rebaque and his sponsors had purchased his ride.

Meanwhile, Patrick noted that when she returned from racing Formula Fords in England, it was Rahal who personally engineered her Barber-Dodge series car, and then put her into his Toyota Atlantic racer and, in 2005, into one of the Rahal-Letterman Indy cars.

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Photo Credit: Larry Edsall