The women who made race car history deserve their own movie
PERSPECTIVE | Their stories aren’t easy to find
The checkered flag had a pair of panties sewn into it. Pretty full coverage by today’s standards, but likely considered somewhat racy when it was waved for the winning female drivers in the ’50s and ’60s at the long defunct Freeport Speedway racetrack out on Long Island.
I flipped through photo albums at the Himes Museum of Motor Racing Nostalgia in Bay Shore, Long Island with the assistance of Marty Himes, owner and curator of the museum. He told me how popular and beloved the Freeport Speedway was for a significant part of his life.
When he was 12-years-old, he secured a job waving cars into the parking lot with a flashlight on race days. Today, his museum is a graveyard for all that Freeport racing was. It’s maintained with a reverence, a genuine fondness and love for a place he and so many others considered home.
I was most interested in an album full of black and white photos of the underwear-adorned flag and triumphant smiles of women drivers standing next to the cars they raced with.
At one point, Long island had about 40 racetracks. Today, only one remains. It was where families went, where teenagers hung out, and where communities came together.
Even Janet Guthrie, the first woman to race at the Indy 500 and Daytona 500 spent time competing out on Long Island at the now-closed Bridgehampton Race Circuit.
“Being a woman simply wasn’t an issue,” Guthrie says, when asked about how gender played a role in her early years of racing. “We were all just drivers.”
Still, it wasn’t always perfect. She recalls a weekend in the ’60s when NASCAR protested to officials that they had to share the paddock area with women.
“The officials’ response was more or less, ‘gee, that’s too bad’. We stayed where we were,” says Guthrie.
Aside from the rare events where men and women mixed, if you were a woman who wanted to race there was “the ladies division” or “Powder Puff derbies.”
The women drivers mainly consisted of wives and girlfriends of the men who raced. Why? Racing cost money. The price of entry fees, sponsorships, equipment, maintenance and upkeep for the cars added up quickly.
Jessica Zell used to compete races along with her husband in the ’70s and ’80s.
“I used to sit in the high school library and read hot rod magazines because I loved to look at hot cars.”
She knew nothing about the tracks on Long Island, but during her senior year of high school in 1970 she met her future husband on a blind date. He took her to a drag strip on their second date and then to the track in the spring. She was immediately hooked.
After competing in demolition derbies and Powder Puff races, she and some others approached Islip Speedway owners Jim and Barbara Cromarty about establishing a women’s division. Barbara liked the idea. Initially the women’s division only ran a couple races as an added attraction. The following year they raced weekly for the entire season.
Keeping women in the division proved to be somewhat difficult because husbands or significant others wouldn’t always be available to help with upkeep of the cars. Zell, at her husband’s suggestion, learned to maintain and repair her own car. “If you want to race them, then learn how to fix them,” she says.
Zell eventually retired because the expense of keeping up two race cars was overwhelming, although she has no regrets. Costliness is still pervasive today on the bigger NASCAR stage. The gender imbalance always traces back to money, says Guthrie.
“Motorsport is expensive. When you reach the top levels of the sport, the annual expense easily runs into millions, and in my opinion, women still have more difficulty finding sponsorship than men,” she says.
Ask anyone unfamiliar with the sport if they can name a woman driver and aside from Guthrie, most can only come up with Danica Patrick. Yet for years, there have been women competing in a world that is still dominated by men.
Women named Janice Craw aka Lorrie Lawson, Peggy Smith, Bernice Royce, Marie Pinchuk, Barbara Farley, Harriet Gippi, Barbara Borghessi. These women have stories and histories, not easily found online.
In Pixar’s “Cars 3” installment this year, Margo Martindale voices a character named Louise “Barnstormer” Nash based on NASCAR legend Louise Smith who is historically known as the “First Lady of Racing.” And it’s a step in the right direction melding entertainment and history, but it’s difficult to wander through Marty Himes’ museum and peek inside sprint cars and spend hours looking at photos, listening to his stories and not feel that all these memories and stories also deserve to be better represented. I look at photos of Billie Kedenburg and I immediately see Laura Linney impeccably dressed and efficiently running a racetrack as a wife, then widow, then again as a wife and mother.
I imagine the spunkiness of drivers Bernice Royce, Barbara Farley and Marie Pinchuk being played by Michelle Williams, Lena Headey (or Olivia Wilde) and Emma Stone respectively as they navigate a sport where they’re incredibly talented but don’t always have the easiest access to compete. I can picture Mae Whitman as Jessica Zell, eyes lighting up the first time she witnesses a drag race. There’s an entire universe I want to peer into.
Racing is a huge spectator sport in the United States and stories of these women belong on our screens. Legislators have brought up the possibility of bringing drag racing back to Long Island. All the more reason that we should continue to tell the stories of those who came first.
