I am a race fan. A gearhead, a breadhead, a tifoso. You could say it’s in my blood. My grandparents were professional racecar drivers. I have enjoyed going to car races most of my life. I attended the NASCAR Championship Weekend last year and the Shriners Children’s 500 and NHRA Arizona Nationals this year. As much as I love racing, however, I am disappointed that it has a reputation for a lack of diversity, and I especially wonder why, in this day and age, there aren’t more women in racing.
For instance, there are currently no female Formula One drivers, and there is only one female NASCAR Cup and IndyCar driver.
The International Motor Sports Association (IMSA), the pinnacle of North American sports car racing, has a handful of female drivers, and so does the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Nitro series. In my estimation, though, only 1 to 3 percent of IMSA and NHRA drivers are women.
To get into the “why” of it, I went to a direct source. My grandmother, Bobbee Nylander, who is now 82 years old, was one of the first female drivers in the IMSA GT Championship series. She was an endurance driver, competing most successfully in races of six hours or more, with her best finish being 3rd in class in the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1977. She was nearly always the only woman in the race. She shared some of the challenges she had as a female driver in a predominantly male sport.
“It was difficult to be a female acting like a female in a men’s sport,” Nylander said. “You had to act kind of tough and rough and ready, and if you were too polite and sweet, they didn’t take you seriously.”
She also raced against NASCAR drivers. According to her, male drivers, especially NASCAR drivers, didn’t appreciate being shown up by female drivers.
“My experience was they would beat me down the straightaway, but I’d pass them in the turns,” Nylander said. “And they didn’t like that.”
But that’s not the only challenge female drivers face. Auto racing is expensive, according to Nylander.
“It just takes a lot of money,” she said. “And they can get that from getting sponsors.”
But getting sponsors is not easy, and it’s not due to a lack of talent. Famed NASCAR driver Danica Patrick, who was the only female NASCAR Cup driver for about 15 years, eventually retired from racing, due in part to a lack of sponsors.
Ida Zetterström, the 2023 FIA European Top Fuel World Champion who now drives for JCM Racing, the only all-female NHRA racing team, talked about having difficulty finding sponsors.
“Right now we have 10 races on our schedule, not a full season, but we’re working on finding the funding to be able to run a full season this year and years to come,” Zetterström said.
There are organizations, however, that are trying to help women succeed in auto racing.
Iron Dames, for example, is an all-female motorsport project that supports and promotes women in racing as drivers, engineers and crew. They provide opportunities primarily in world endurance racing at various levels. According to its website, Iron Dames is focused on shattering stereotypes and proving that women are capable of competing at the highest levels of motorsport.
Certain car makers, like Porsche, are also increasingly supportive of women racers. Porsche partners with Iron Dames and also features its own female driver program, the Porsche Mobil 1 Female Driver Program, which provides support and opportunities for female drivers in the prestigious international Porsche Carrera Cup series.
This year, seven women competed in the Rolex 24 at Daytona in January, which was actually down from nine the previous year. This may sound like a lot, however, a total of 230 drivers competed in the 24-hour race this year, so only 3% were women. Four of them were on the same team, and the other three competed on teams with men.
One major change from when my grandmother raced was that now we’re seeing a number of all-female racing teams forming. In the IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup series, the Iron Dames team consisted of Michelle Gatting, Rahel Frey, Sarah Bovy and Karen Gaillard, and in the NHRA, the first all-female driver combination for a Nitro team consists of funny car driver Alexis DeJoria and top fuel driver Ida Zetterström.
“Being the first all female nitro team is obviously really cool,” Zetterström said. “We have had some incredibly strong females in NHRA and in the nitro classes for many years, but this is the first all-female nitro team, and it happened organically. That’s what I really love with it.”
There are also several women who have competed in three or more different elite disciplines, a feat only a small handful of men, including Mario Andretti, have been able to do. For instance, Janet Guthrie competed in NASCAR, IMSA and IndyCar. She was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2006. Katherine Legge also competes in IMSA and is the only woman competing in NASCAR and IndyCar.
What I’ve found, however, is that even when female drivers have talent, sponsors, and support, they still have an uphill battle when it comes to overcoming stereotypes about women and motorsports. For decades, women have been featured in the calendars and posters that decorate the walls of nearly every auto repair garage and tuning shop, suggesting that a woman’s place has typically been sprawled across the hood of a Ferrari wearing nothing more than Daisy Dukes and a string bikini top.
It doesn’t matter how fast they are. They are still assessed and judged according to their looks.
“They look like this, and then they whoop your rear end on the track,” Ron Capps, a three-time NHRA funny car champion, commented at a recent NHRA press conference. I’m sure he meant it as a compliment.
So, while strides are being made in the fastest and shortest race series, like NHRA drag races, and the longest races, like the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Challenge, I’m disappointed that there hasn’t been more of a movement toward diversity in all the races in between, like IndyCar, NASCAR and Formula One. In the 50 years since my grandmother put the pedal to the metal, we’ve had a female vice president, six female Supreme Court justices, and around 100 female astronauts in space. But we still have not significantly increased the number of elite female race car drivers.
As a race fan, I look forward to the day that my future daughter and I can watch a race together, and she will be able to see herself in the faces of the drivers.
