You won’t find many old car guys like us who can say: We were there in 1957, at Watkins Glen,when the Danica Patrick of her day, the great Denise McCluggage, was out there mixing it up with the best of the male drivers. It was a time when a thing like Danicamania was unimaginable.
Denise raced that day in her Porsche 550 Spyder against other great drivers, including Roger Penske (you might have heard of him), Bob Holbert (father of the late great IMSA champion driver and car owner Al Holbert), Briggs Cunningham (he of the famous Cunningham car and Cunningham Museum), and Paul O’Shea, driving a silver Mercedes 300SL Roadster with a chrome rollbar that glistened in the sun, the most gorgeous car any 10-year-old had ever seen.
We were there again, twice, writing about it, when the first woman raced at the Daytona 500 and Indy 500, where they had to say, “Lady and gentlemen, start your engines!” That would be Janet Guthrie, both places.
We were there when Shirley Muldowney, four-time NHRA Top Fuel champion, made her courageous comeback after shattering her legs and pelvis in a 250-mph again-and-again rollover crash of her dragster. “It took them six hours to clean me with wire brushes before they could operate that night,” she said. Our story was titled, Fiery Return of a Leadfoot Lady.
We had our own small rivalry on the track, against NASCAR trailbreaker Patty Moise, whom we maybe unfairly but not really regrettably described in Fast Guys, Rich Guys and Idiots (rare hardcover copies have gone for $200 on eBay, but you can get a signed paperback at www.sammoses.com) as looking great in tight jeans and being a crybaby on the track. The same thing has been said of Danica, although it’s a bikini she looks great in, and when she complains about other drivers she comes out swinging. Times change, and isn’t it terrific.
Patty deserved better ink, for her toughness; lots of guy drivers are crybabies. Danica sometimes deserves better ink, too—she deserves a lot less ink, but sometimes better. That’s the paradox that needs some perspective.
I only called Patty a crybaby because she once bitched to me about getting in her way on the track, in practice, and another time to my crew chief when the paint from my fender ended up on her door. She had a really fast Monte Carlo, built by the ace Tommy Riggins, because either her daddy was rich or he was totally financially devoted to her career. Like Danica. Or like half the drivers in Indy cars, it seems, and a growing number of them in Formula One, especially Brazilian. Or Argentinean. See the recent collapse of the USF1 team and car.
Daddy, sugardaddy, no difference, at least not to the car. All it wants is horsepower, cares less where it comes from.
Denise McCluggage’s daddy wasn’t rich. She did it all on her own, including racing a factory-supported Ferrari at Le Mans. She’s still around, writing herself, and watching it all quietly and spiritually from New Mexico. And with wry amusement, I suspect.
Finally, as recently as 2008, half a century after rubbing elbows with Denise at Watkins Glen as a young boy, I was rubbing fenders on the track in the Playboy Mazda MX-5 Cup race at Portland International Raceway as a not-so-old man, with one of the many hot young women drivers on the way up, who will soon drastically change the sport, let’s hope for the better. That would be then-17-year-old Kerstin Smutly, a graduate and protégé of the Lyn St. James Complete Driver Academy (Lyn herself was Rookie of the Year at the 1992 Indy 500), with 10 years’ experience, racing karts and midgets. I stuffed it inside her in the chicane, my two wheels in the dirt, and she never gave me an inch. I spun out chasing her to try again.
So I can say something about Danicamania, and the media, having been in that business for a real long time too. Danica is riding the media attention like a jockey on a thoroughbred, and whipping it too. She doesn’t always like it; it’s a distraction and often an annoyance, because she’s a super competitive racer in her heart, and all she wants to do is focus on the car and the team and the track. But she wouldn’t be a fast driver if she weren’t working it. You can’t be a fast driver without a fast car. You can’t have a fast car without money. Any driver who’s trying to bring as much money to his or her team is doing what they have to do, to be fast. That makes them a racer.
People knock Danica for chasing exposure in a bikini, but Shirley Muldowney posed for publicity in hot pants and go-go boots once, back in the ‘60s. She despised it, that whole “Cha-Cha” thing, but she did it in search of sponsorship, to go faster on the strip.
The big fair question is: How good of a driver is Danica? How good is any driver? Only as good as his or her car. Unless he’s Dale Earnhardt. Danica is at least as good as almost all of the men she’s racing against. And at least as brave as the best of them—do you know what kind of balls it takes to rub wheels in an Indy car at 200 mph?! (Speaking of which, let’s not forget Sarah Fisher.) Danica doesn’t back off. There’s a media mania over her because she’s pretty. So what.
Well, here’s what. What we really have to worry about, is a female driver being unable to get sponsorship unless she’s pretty. There’s where your male chauvinism might come in—from sponsors, not teams. I wonder about that GoDaddy guy. Such chauvinism might be mostly just business, reflective of the fans, who buy T-shirts and stuff. But maybe I’m selling them short. I hope so. It’s more than looks, it’s personality too.
Danica knows that, but she can’t exactly say it; it would never come out right. Nor can she worry about the challenges her competitors, female or male, might face. For now, all she’s worried about is going fast. Because she’s a racer.
Sam, sorry you weren’t at the 1992 Indy 500, because you could have added that to your resume. Good perspective….good story….good writing!
Actually, I was there. Forgive me for forgetting that Lyn St. James was Rookie of the Year at the 1992 Indy 500. But that’s almost the point of the piece. In 1992 there was no media mania over Lyn. Even though she’s pretty too!
So, lemme see… they got an advantage raisin’ money because they is beautiful and they is dang good drivers? Well, how come there ain’t more of them fillies in there?
Be a good thin’ too.
Hey gilapete, Have I heard you on the NASCAR XM radio station, callin’ in?
Great historical perspective on Danicamania. Love “Heart Like a Wheel”, the Muldowney bio-pic. Shirley rules. All those gals do – they had to be as fast as the boys and still had to hustle sponsorship with their looks. The guys sure as hell don’t have to look good. It’s a freakin’ man’s world. Just ask Danica & the grief she gets for flaunting it, the money she’d lose if she didn’t.
They broke the mold when they made Shirley Muldowney. I was at the Winter Nationals in Pomona once, getting an autograph after she won a big race against some guy. I congratulated her, and she looked at me with a big grin and said, “Ha! Knocked his dick in the dirt, didn’t I?” Someone later told me that was one of her favorite expressions.
Sam…I was not the Danica Patrick of my day, though thanks for the kind words. I was like you a journalist dabbling in what I wrote about. I did that with skiing as well. Yes, I did have a knack for driving fast cars and have some tarnishing trophies to show for it, but I was a diletante compared to Danica who was on a career path from her first Go-Kart. She even went off to England for some serious racing all by herself at age 16. At 16 I went off to college to study Philosophy, Ecomomics and Politics. Whole different arc.
Janet Guthrie was far more like Danica in her committment to racing. Janel struggled to keep her own cars running and hung in there for years until someone thought it might be time to have a woman run Indy and looked her up.
Unlike Danica (and Sarah Fisher as well) Janet was not met by accolades and open hearts just because she was female. On the contrary she was booed and told to go home and wash dishes. Teen age boys at Indy did ask for her autograph but then as they departed threw over their shoulders words to this effect:”We hope you crash in the first turn!” Janet drove open-wheel and NASCAR and did more than well in both despite the animosity toward women “out of place” in a man’s world. Happily in many ways things have changed. Unhappily in other ways things have changed. I never had to look for sponsors because such was taboo. Road racing was an amateur sport. And I could decide in the middle of the week to go racing on the weekend and call around to find someone to bring a car for me. It was only fun, not a livelihood.
Still fun. Want to mix it up in Miatas sometime? Jay will lend us a couple.
Denise, thanks for the feedback. And for adding some of your own history that couldn’t fit in the piece. But ah, you WERE the Danica of your day. It’s the word “day,” not “you.” And as you know, in writing your own column, sometimes you just gotta reduce things to a soundbite. But I do understand that you weren’t on that level, and that you don’t want people to think that you were.
As for Janet, it could get touchy here. All you say is true, about her commitment and the dues she paid. But she was her own worst enemy, especially with the media. She was angry. I could relate some specific examples, even personal, with me as the SI motorsports writer at the time. That “someone,” you mention, by the way, was Portland’s maverick car owner Rolla Vollstedt, who put her in an Indy car for one reason: she was a woman. Rolla wanted to do something different to attract attention.
Where Janet lost me, was when she claimed she beat Mario Andretti at Indy in 1978, her second year. Indeed, it was technically correct. She qualified 12 mph slower than the pole, and finished 9th, 10 laps down; only 14 cars were running at the end, a few of them limping, including Andretti in 12th. Danica would never make such a stretch, if she did she’d get far worse than insults from teenage boys.
YUes, Sam, Janet’s expressed frustration at not getting sponsors or competitive cars did turn off the media. Indeed, I once wrote that she couldn’t have it both ways: get a ride because she was a woman (the Vollstedt car) and later complain she couldn’t get a ride because she was a woman. Advantage once, disadvantage later.
Hey, I had three “rides” at LeMans – one on the Porsche factory team, one with NART and one with Briggs Cunningham – but I never actually ran. The organizers wouldn’t let me because LeMans was an invitational race and they “did not choose to invite women.” So. But it wasn’t my career. It was my career at the time to cover races and when the fools at Indy wouldn’t allow me into the garage area to interview drivers or even into the press box on race day I was furious. They finally had to yield on the press box but I never really forgave them. (The keeper of the gate to Gasoline Alley who would not honor my press credential told me: “You don’t want to go in there anyway. They smoke cigars and talk dirty.”)Talk about a long way, baby.
Oh yes, Janet wrote one hell of a book whose name escapes me at the moment as so many do these days.
Wow, the inside poop from the woman who was there. Fell kinda priveledged to listen in here…
I am over this whole Danica thing. As a woman, I’m delighted that Danica has made such a splash in the world of racing. She really can drive. As a woman, I’m also disgusted that she’s such a sellout. She doesn’t have to be, she really can drive, she chooses to be. All of those ads she does either half dressed or with other women who are half dressed, or less, take away from the fact that she’s a talented driver. Instead of being a great role model for girls and young women, proving that you can make it in a man’s world, she’s prostituted herself out under the guise of gaining sponsorship. I call bullshit. I’ve never seen an ad with a male driver getting a lapdance, but there she is, cheapening herself and all that she has and could have accomplished. She could have been a wonderful role model. Instead, she’s showing the world that no matter how talented she is, she still thinks she has to take off her clothes to make an impact. It’s tragic really. Danica, if you’re going to drive, drive. If you’re going to continue to do all of these other things on the side, don’t be surprised when no one takes you too seriously as a driver. There’s an old saying, if you’re going to act like a whore, don’t be surprised when people treat you like one. Who you are is all about the choices you make. And who Danica is, is coming through loud and clear.
Sam nailed it.
Denise WAS the Danica of her day, but her day was so very different than the current sponsor-driven climate. This much is certain, both gals can DRIVE and don’t ask for any favors on the track. While I appreciate Danica, I am profoundly grateful to Denise. Her illuminating self has been guiding light for lots of us gals. Her “dabbling” provided a Tsunami of courage to forge a career in a male dominated profession. Sound familiar?
When I got into this game – oh, so many years ago — the idea of calling myself an automotive journalist meant I damn well better know how to handle a vehicle in all manner of situations. I made it a point of choosing a leader in the field to emulate and that person was Denise.
This was a do-it-yourself, self-imposed doctorate program, where I endeavored to acquire, hone and keep revising my driving skills along with my writing,photographic and design abilities. Denise was the woman with whom my career resonated. I hold her in the highest esteem.
In the end, the work has to to speak for itself. And when you consider Denise McCluggage there are volumes that speak for, of and about her — on and off the track. Thanks Ms. M.
Sam,
Loved the article on Danica. Ladies in racing have always had to be more aggressive, tougher and work harder. Racing is a male dominated world and like it or not, women haven’t really been accepted, or taken seriously for
all that many years.
Denise, Lyn, Shirley, et al, lived in a time when women were supposed to be in the motorhome cooking, not, heaven forbid, on the track racing. Heck, we didn’t get to vote that long ago! I even remember when I couldn’t get into the NASCAR pits! That either means I’m old as dirt, or we’ve come a long way in a relatively short time.
Whether Danica has the body for a bikini (although she does) or not isn’t the point. She simply has to do what it takes to get attention. A woman has to not only drive on the track, but has to have drive to get ahead whether in the board room or in a race car. We need to applaud those women who have cleared the path and back those women who are breaking into the business.
Remember when they thought Elvis was awful because of the way he shook his hips? Whatever it takes to get your business “all shook up”, I say, go for it!
Meanwhile, does anyone know who won Danica’s first stock car race at Daytona, where she finished sixth? Guy named Bobby Gerhart, 51 years old, been grinding it out on ovals for 30 years. “I really need to thank Danica Patrick,” he said. “All the eyeballs were looking somewhere else. I’m not saying they’re all on me anyway, but I usually get quite a bit at Daytona. I didn’t do one interview while I was there. No picture, nothing. It was the first time I went there and didn’t get derailed on my thought process. It worked out very well for me.”