Getting Real

6/8/05

’ve just lived through a shitty month, but the highlights were all the people who came up to me at the drags, sent emails, sent cards, made phone calls or just asked if there was anything they could do when they heard that my mother died in mid-May. My mom always encouraged me to follow my interests in life and in drag racing. As long as I didn’t tell her racing horror stories or the speeds I was driving it was cool with her. When I had the opportunity to go from SoCal to the US Nationals in ’64 with Wild Bill Shrewsberry and Jack Chrisman’s Sachs & Sons Comets it was, “Go have fun on your summer trip” -- she just didn’t want to hear all the gory details since I was still a minor. OK, it was a different time back then.

I think all the ability my mother had as a teacher and as a strong, determined woman helped me to expect the same in all women, so when Shirley Muldowney, Judy Lilly and Shirley Shahan arrived in an era of women’s rights and liberation they were not a novelty to me. Who said women couldn’t achieve the same things as men did on the dragstrip? With the quarter mile being the great equalizer, if you had the tune-up or could pound the gears on your four-speed - whoever got the finish line first was the winner; the gender of the driver didn’t matter to me.

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Over Memorial Day weekend Danica Patrick grabbed the spotlight from just about everything else in sports. The cover of Sports Illustrated, she’s hot! She did a hot photo spread in FHM magazine, the cover of three sections in USA Today, her own segments on Spike TV and a guest shot on Letterman’s Show. Her car was fast on qualifying and carburetion days at Indy, she led laps, she made rookie mistakes, but what is the big deal, why all the hype?

The panica about Danica was because she’s a hot woman! She’s a good driver in a strong car with very good skills and intuition, but so were a lot of men in the Indy 500 and three of them passed Danica late in the race landing her a well deserved fourth place finish, just another driver in the record book. Since Indy is the Greatest Spectacle in Racing she also picked up $378,555 and Rookie honors. Her presence also helped to boost ABC’s TV ratings 60% higher than the 2004 race. Unfortunately a lot of casual fans will never remember that Brit Dan Wheldon won the 2005 Indy 500, a terrific race.

Back to drag racing.

While deserved, there’s little chance we’ll ever see anything like Indy 500 or NASCAR payouts in drag racing in our lifetimes. With the recent appearance of Pro Sock rookie Erica Enders the hype from NHRA has been tremendous, but as was incorrectly portrayed in her Disney-produced movie, very few hard-core fans care that she’s a woman.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for young girls to have a fine role model like Erica, but long ago the majority of the drag racing public grew up to accept women as equals in a lot of ways. We no longer have a situation of woman versus the men. It's driver and machine versus the racetrack, and you’d better have the tune-up. Everything has got to be in place from the wheelie bars to the ignition timing, the chassis set-up, the shift points, the driver’s focus, reaction time, track lane prep, everything. And at Topeka when you don’t qualify you put the racecar back in the transporter like Bruce Allen, Barry Grant, Mark Pawuk, Ben Watson or Jamey Ober.