‘Bounty Huntress’ paved way for women

At some point, she said, the ride had to find an end. The green lights couldn't always mean go. The quarter mile couldn't go on forever.

But would it really surprise anyone if Shirley Muldowney, the little girl from upstate New York who grew up to become an icon, a legend, a mover and a shaker, decided she would hammer that engine a little longer?

After all, she was only 62 at the time. What's another 10 years? Stop right there, she says.

"I think that would mean the Pink Lady would be the Pink Old Lady," Muldowney said at a press event in February 2003, a month before the first of her final six appearances.

"But I still have the same attitude I've always had. My best still may be yet to come."

In a drag racing career that has been the inspiration for a generation of young drivers, young women and anyone with a hint of youthful exuberance, Muldowney has been the gold standard.

More than 30 years later, the roll call of accomplishments is still remarkable for someone who has been known by her nicknames as much as by her real one: The First Lady of Racing. The High Priestess of Top Fuel. Or, simply, Cha-Cha.

However you say it, she's a winner.

She was the first three-time National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel drag champion, the league's highest division. She is the only woman to ever win a Top Fuel title.

Hollywood has tried to capture her glow. Madison Avenue has tried to cash in.

But Muldowney is still the same simple woman who still lives in a small town of 10,000 in southern Michigan -- candid, outspoken and raring to roar, even if she finds it hard to say goodbye.

The "Last Pass," as Muldowney's sponsors called it, was the toughest of all.

"It's one of the hardest decisions I have ever made," she said. "That drive to be a champion never goes away."

It was a drive that began on the streets of Schenectady, N.Y., when a teenaged Muldowney would drag race her high school friends for fun and it would continue in a supercharged, twin-engine Top Gas dragster in the mid-1960s.

At the time, no other woman had ever been permitted a qualification to drive such a vehicle. No other man or woman won like Muldowney.

She spent the first few years winning exhibition races from New Hampshire to Ohio.

But, by 1971, when the NHRA decided to eliminate the Top Gas category due to the introduction of new divisions, Muldowney decided it was time to dive in head first. She chose to move into the popular new Funny Car category, a division of vehicles run on nitro-methane fuel that produced violent horsepower and violent oil fires. She experienced both.

Nicknamed the "Bounty Huntress," Muldowney won in her first time out and at nearly every stop, including her first national event at the International Hot Rod Association's Southern Nationals her first year. But in two years running Funny Car she also experienced four bad fires, including one in 1973 at the NHRA U.S. Nationals, drag racing's biggest event. With burns covering most of her body, Muldowney had discovered there was nothing funny about Funny Cars.

"I drove them when they were really bad machines," she said.

Still hungry for more, Muldowney took on the big boys, qualifying and receiving her license to drive in Top Fuel, the king division of drag racing. A queen emerged.

In two lightning-quick years, Muldowney blistered the competition and shattered stereotypes and racing records. She also became the first woman to advance to the Top Fuel finals in June of 1975. When she beat Bob Edwards on June 13, 1976, she had her first NHRA win.

Sports Illustrated magazine wanted her and her pink race car on its cover. A racing world wanted every piece of her.

Over the next 25 years, records fell. She won four season titles, the first coming only a year after her first victory, and she won the respect of everyone who had ever thundered down a drag strip.

Congress recognized her. Fans adored her.

But she stayed the same old Shirley ... outspoken, aggressive, committed and daring. Even after a crash in Montreal, Canada, in 1984 nearly ended her life, Muldowney came back 18 months later as committed and as controversial as ever.

Everyone could hear her roar.

On her accomplishments: "It's all because I'm a tough old broad."

On money available to women drivers: "I am ... in this women's drivers group that could not find serious funding if their lives depended on it, and it just p----- me off."

And, in the mid-1970s, when a bleach-blond female Top Fuel driver tried to add a little sex appeal, there was Muldowney: "There is no room for bimboism in drag racing."

Decades later, she is the only woman to turn drag racing into a blur of pink.

"I can only hope," she said, "that what I have done for racing is half of what racing has done for me."

Perhaps the feeling is mutual.

Jason Stein is a feature writer with Wheelbase Communications. He can be reached on the Web at www.wheelbase.ws/mailbag.html. Wheelbase Communications supplies automotive news and features to newspapers across North America.