The AMAZING History of Shirley Muldowney

 

Drag racer Shirley Muldowney (born June 19, 1940) was the first woman to break through in that sport, making her virtually a household name in the 1970s on par with daredevil motorcycle jumper Evel Knievel.

Muldowney broke onto the scene in 1965 with a license to compete in the supercharged gasoline dragster category. To no surprise, a lot of people turned their noses up at a female competitor in this male-driven sport. That didn’t stop her. Not only did “Cha Cha” Muldowney go on to set a slew of world records, she also touted her femininity with a pink dragster. She endured a terrible crash in 1984 that could’ve ended her life, but not even that stopped her. After months of rehabilitation, she returned to the track to set a whole new range of world records until retiring from the sport in 2003.

The First Woman of Drag Racing

Shirley Muldowney was the first woman of drag racing, a certifiably macho sport that entails placing a driver inside a specially constructed 20-plus-foot four-wheeled cage with an engine underneath. Speeds can reach 250 miles an hour. Within the National Hot Rod Association's Top Fuel classification in which Muldowney achieved most of her wins, the car's engine is powered by nitromethane and is geared to burn out after a quarter-mile strip, the distance of a match. Her male competitors liked to assert the woman driver had an unfair advantage because of her weight, which hovered just above 100 pounds.

Buying and maintaining such vehicles is both expensive and risky, but more dangerous are the physical hazards that drag racing presents, and Muldowney came close to becoming a martyr for the sport in 1984 when she endured a horrible accident out on the track. When the tube in one of her front tires snapped, it sent her into a tailspin, breaking several bones throughout her body. Undaunted, she returned to the sport two years later.

Diminutive But Determined

Muldowney inherited her challenging nature from her father, a former prizefighter. She was born in 1940 to Belgium "Tex Rock" Benedict Roque, a cab driver; her mother Mae worked in a laundry in Schenectady, New York, where she and her older sister grew up.

When Muldowney, who was small for her age, became the victim of schoolyard bullies, her father instructed her: "Here's what you do: You pick up a board, you pick up a pipe, you pick up a brick, and you part their hair with it," Mae Muldowney recalled in an interview with Sports Illustrated's Sam Moses.

The toughness ingrained in Shirley by her father turned to rebelliousness in her teenage years; she would regularly sneak out of the house in her pajamas to attend informal drag racing heats with her boyfriend, Jack Muldowney.

At the age of 16—the year she started to drive as well—Muldowney married her boyfriend and quit school. A son, John, followed two years later. During this period, she began drag racing herself in a 1940 Ford her husband had fitted with a Cadillac engine. "I'd say the first time I ever took my life in my own hands and got away with it was when I really appreciated what I thought I was capable of," she told Moses.