JOHN LARSEN/FOR THE TORONTO STAR

Simona de Silvestro of Switzerland is mid-way through her first season in the IZOD IndyCar Series and is 20th in points.

Men and Women

can Compete pretty much equally in today’s IndyCar Series

 

 

“For women in motor racing, one can argue, there are no more obstacles to overcome. Janet Guthrie, the first woman to race in the Indy 500 in 1977, always held fast to the notion that…

 “a driver is primarily a person, not a Man or a Woman.”

Some 33 years later, a considerable list of women have made forays into a land of gas and grease that was once populated exclusively by men, and not only behind the wheel. There are female mechanics in the business, and women engineers. 

Sarah Fisher, one of a raft of women who have made names as drivers, has also become the first Woman to own an IndyCar team.

And Danica Patrick, the most famous of the distaff pilots, has become the first woman to win an IndyCar race, not to mention the first IndyCar driver to become a popular swimsuit model.

Patrick, along with her full-time gig with the Indy Racing League’s Andretti Autosport team — which will see her make a stop in Toronto for this weekend’s Honda Indy — has also picked up a part-time ride with Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s team in NASCAR’s second-tier Nationwide series.

So, indeed, there are no obstacles to overcome for Women Drivers.

All Patrick does to earn her living is work two jobs and take off most of her clothes on the side. At least one pioneer of the racing’s women’s movement can sound unnerved by the precedent.

 

“Women in racing are still early in our development process,” said Lyn St. James, 63, the former IndyCar driver who now runs a racing academy for women and girls.

 “All the other young drivers are carrying the weight of the example (Patrick) sets out. It’s like, ‘Is that what I have to do to get a sponsor?’ ”

St. James, to be clear, spent a lengthy interview expressing admiration for the 28-year-old Patrick. Early in her career, St. James was a member of Patrick’s inner circle of advisers. And St. James, too, acknowledged that this has been a tremendous year for women in racing.

 

 A record four women, Patrick, Fisher, Switzerland’s Simona de Silvestro and Brazil’s Ana Beatriz, started in the Indianapolis 500 in May.

“I think we’re getting closer to the day when gender won’t be a headline (in racing),” St. James has said.

 

There are those who will tell you gender isn’t a story on the track. Beatriz, a 25-year-old from Sao Paulo, counts a man (the late Ayrton Senna, whose photo she has long kept at her bedside) as her greatest racing hero, and a list of IndyCar men among her favourite competitors.

She also shares a chief career crisis with which many men — among them Canada’s Paul Tracy — can relate. To wit, her lack of sufficient sponsorship has limited her IndyCar schedule, in her case to the season opener in Brazil and the Indy 500.

“Inside the track, we’re all the same,” said Beatriz, who raced at last year’s Honda Indy Toronto in the Indy Lights Series. “To me, it doesn’t really matter if I’m fighting with Simona or Danica or Tony or Helio.”

Patrick, for her part, has similarly played down the gender angle.

“I’m not a go-girl person necessarily, I’m like a go-person person,” Patrick has told ESPN. “Whatever gender barrier they’re breaking down, it’s just about people giving their all, doing what they love in life and being the best at it.”

 

De Silvestro, the 21-year-old rookie from the Bernese Alps, has previously dwarfed Patrick’s achievements in the developmental Atlantic series, where she won five times in the previous two seasons. Patrick never finished better than second during her time at that level.

And though De Silvestro hasn’t enjoyed particularly joyous results in her first season in IndyCar — she has finished no better than 14th and is coming off a race at Watkins Glen in which she crashed out — her skills have proven far superior to Milka Duno, the 38-year-old Venezuelan who has so far made the full IndyCar tour with Dale Coyne Racing this season.

Duno has been a permanent backmarker and, some say, a dangerous one. In last month’s oval race in Iowa, she was forced to abandon the race after officials deemed her slow-moving car a hazard. In the ensuing road-course trek at Watkins Glen, Duno drew the ire of Ryan Hunter-Reay, who saw her as an impediment to his success.

“There are 15 turns on this course,” Hunter-Reay told reporters, “and she’s the 16th.” 

Perhaps Duno’s presence isn’t a particularly inspiring example for young women, but certainly her story is a lesson in the way of the world. She’s on the circuit, not because she has shown incredible promise as a driver, but because she brings with her coveted sponsorship dollars that pay for things like tires and engines and mechanics.

Not knowing the terms of her sponsorship agreements, one can only speculate that her former career as a fashion model hasn’t hurt her cause, nor have the four master’s degrees her website says she owns.

There are no more obstacles to overcome for women in motor racing, in other words, except all the obstacles to overcome in motor racing.  

Beauty and Brains and skills never hurt,

but Cash is both King and Queen. 

“In grass-roots amateur racing, moms and dads are now saying it’s okay for our daughters to do this now,” said St. James. “It’s always been okay for our sons to do. But it hasn’t shown so much at the top levels of racing because it’s a very steep pyramid. 

“Very few people at all, Men or Women,

make it from amateur beginnings

all the way up to the world-class level in NASCAR, or IndyCar.”

“But that’s why I feel racing represents society better than (team sports) because women and men work together, live together, play together in the real world.

We don’t often Segregate ourselves.

“Motorsports represents what’s happening in society more than any other sport, because we don’t need to have a women’s division.”

 

www.torontostar.com

Dave Feschuk is a sports columnist for the Star.

 

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