Shirley Muldowney
The Stopwatch Never Cared Who Was Driving
Shirley Muldowney was born June 19, 1940, in Burlington, Vermont, and grew up around Schenectady, New York. Drag racing in the 1950s and 1960s was not exactly standing around wondering when a woman would show up and reorganize the Top Fuel record book.
Muldowney showed up anyway.
She started in street cars, moved into gas dragsters, survived enough Funny Car fires to decide that sitting behind a nitromethane engine might actually be the sensible choice, and eventually became the first woman licensed to drive an NHRA Top Fuel dragster.
Then she did the part that settled most arguments. She won.
Not once as a curiosity. Not against a watered-down field. Muldowney kept beating the best fuel racers in the country until three NHRA Top Fuel championships made explaining her away considerably harder than simply admitting she could drive.
It Started With a ’58 Chevrolet
Muldowney’s first trip down a drag strip came in 1958 at Fonda Speedway in New York. She was 18 years old and driving a 348-powered 1958 Chevrolet.
Doorslammers led to purpose-built race cars. Her husband, Jack Muldowney, built her first dragster, and in 1965 she earned an NHRA dragster license. The pair raced throughout the East and Midwest, progressing from an injected car to blown gas dragsters and eventually a twin-engine machine that appeared at the 1969 and 1970 U.S. Nationals.
The cars were getting quicker. The reception was not getting much warmer.
Plenty of racers and officials were willing to believe a woman could show up at the track. Believing she belonged in one of the quickest cars there was a different question.
Muldowney’s solution was wonderfully uncomplicated: keep racing until the timing slip became harder to argue with than the driver.
Funny Car Tried to Set Her on Fire
When Top Gas began disappearing in the early 1970s, Muldowney moved toward Funny Car. The Muldowneys bought an older Mustang Funny Car from Connie Kalitta and joined a class rapidly becoming one of drag racing’s biggest attractions.
Funny Cars were fast, spectacular and very good at catching fire. Muldowney endured a series of serious fires, including another during qualifying at the 1973 U.S. Nationals.
That was enough field testing.
Late in 1973 she turned toward Top Fuel and, driving a car entered by Pancho Rendon at Cayuga in Ontario, earned her Top Fuel license. Don Garlits, Tommy Ivo and Connie Kalitta were among the racers who signed off on it.
There are worse people to have examining your driving.
Getting In Was Only the First Argument
Muldowney spent much of 1974 match racing while learning Top Fuel. She failed to qualify at her first two NHRA national-event attempts, then made the field at the Springnationals.
By 1975, English Leather had joined as a major sponsor and the operation was becoming a serious national contender. At the Springnationals she earned her first NHRA Top Fuel round win and reached the final before losing to Marvin Graham. A few months later she made another final at Indianapolis.
Don Garlits beat her there.
Losing to Big Daddy at Indy was not exactly proof that somebody didn’t belong in Top Fuel. The woman racers had spent years treating as a curiosity was now lining up in national-event finals against the men who defined the class.
Columbus, 1976: The Door Came Off Its Hinges
On June 13, 1976, at the NHRA Springnationals in Columbus, Muldowney qualified No. 1 with a 6.031-second run, becoming the first woman to qualify No. 1 in an NHRA professional category.
Then she beat Bob Edwards in the final and became the first woman to win an NHRA national event in a professional category. It was only her sixth Top Fuel national-event start.
There are pioneers who spend an entire career proving somebody ought to get an opportunity someday. Muldowney got the opportunity and immediately started collecting trophies.
1977: World Champion
The following season removed whatever doubt remained. With Connie Kalitta tuning, Muldowney put together three consecutive summer victories at Columbus, Englishtown and Montreal.
By the end of the year she had won the 1977 NHRA Top Fuel world championship, finishing more than 16 elimination-round wins ahead of runner-up Pat Dakin.
Not a women’s championship. There wasn’t one.
The Top Fuel championship.
That wasn’t sneaking through an open door. It was taking the room over.
Muldowney also became only the second member of NHRA’s 250-mph Club when she ran 253.52 mph at Orange County International Raceway in 1977. Garlits had been the first.
The comparison was becoming appropriate.
One Championship Could Be Dismissed. Three Could Not.
Muldowney and Kalitta split after the 1977 season, and 1978 and 1979 were lean years by championship standards.
Then came 1980. Muldowney won four of NHRA’s 10 national events, compiled a 21-4 elimination-round record and closed the season with victories at Seattle and Ontario to secure her second Top Fuel championship.
In 1981 she added an AHRA world championship. Then she came back in 1982 and won the NHRA title again.
That season included victories over Don Garlits at the Gatornationals and Lucille Lee in the first all-female NHRA Top Fuel final at the Springnationals. At Indianapolis, Muldowney met Connie Kalitta in the final and beat him.
Indy had beaten her in 1975. Seven years later, it belonged to her.
Three NHRA Top Fuel championships — 1977, 1980 and 1982 — made Muldowney the first three-time champion of the modern Top Fuel era.
By then, describing her merely as a woman who had succeeded in drag racing was underselling the situation rather badly. She was one of the racers everybody else had to beat.
Then Sanair Tried to End It
On June 29, 1984, Muldowney was running nearly 250 mph during the NHRA Grandnational at Sanair in Quebec when trouble with a front tire sent the dragster off the racing surface and into a drainage ditch.
The car came apart around her.
Muldowney suffered a shattered pelvis, badly broken legs, broken fingers and a nearly severed thumb. Six surgeries and roughly 18 months of rehabilitation followed.
The reasonable assumption was that one of drag racing’s greatest careers had just ended in a ditch in Canada.
Shirley Muldowney had already spent most of her racing life dealing with other people’s reasonable assumptions.
Walked Away: Shirley Muldowney — Sanair, 1984
Back in the Car
By early 1986, Muldowney was racing again. Not making ceremonial passes or touring the pits to show everybody she had recovered.
Racing.
The comeback took time to produce victories, but the speed returned. In 1989 she became the first woman to run a four-second Top Fuel pass, qualifying No. 1 at Reading with a 4.974.
A month later at Phoenix, she won the NHRA FallNationals. It was her first NHRA national-event victory since the 1984 crash and the 18th and final NHRA win of her career.
Five years after being broken badly enough that walking was an accomplishment, Shirley Muldowney was back holding the trophy.
The Movie Wasn’t the Legacy
Hollywood noticed before Muldowney was finished racing. The 1983 film Heart Like a Wheel, with Bonnie Bedelia playing Muldowney, carried her story far beyond the drag strip.
But Muldowney did not become important because somebody made a movie about a woman racing Top Fuel. Somebody made the movie because she had already done something remarkable enough to deserve one.
She continued racing long after the championship years and made her final competitive appearances in 2003. NHRA later ranked her No. 5 among its Top 50 drivers from the organization’s first 50 years.
She was the only woman on the list.
No Asterisk Required
By the time Shirley Muldowney was finished, the argument had pretty well worn itself out.
Eighteen NHRA victories. Three NHRA Top Fuel championships. An AHRA championship. A U.S. Nationals victory.
Those aren’t impressive numbers “for a woman.” They’re impressive numbers for anybody willing to strap into a fuel dragster and go looking for trophies.
The list of firsts is enormous: first woman licensed in Top Fuel, first to reach an NHRA Top Fuel final, first to qualify No. 1 in an NHRA professional category, first to win an NHRA professional event and first to win an NHRA professional championship.
Firsts get remembered because somebody has to kick the door open. Muldowney did something harder after that.
She kept winning.
One victory could be dismissed as a good weekend. One championship might still leave somebody enough room to invent an excuse. Three championships made that fellow look increasingly silly.
Then Sanair nearly tore her apart, and she came back from that too — eventually running in the fours and winning another NHRA national event.
She never needed a separate class, a special trophy or a softer rulebook. She wanted the same lane, the same Christmas Tree and the same finish line everybody else had.
Once Shirley Muldowney staged the car, the interesting question was no longer whether a woman could drive Top Fuel.
It was whether the poor fellow in the other lane could beat her.
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