Top Fuel Dragster Legend, Shirley Muldowney
This week’s post was spurred by news that earlier this year, Fox Sports had run a documentary on National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) legend and ’70s icon, Shirley Muldowney. My plans to watch and then recommend Shirley immediately went awry when I learned the film is not available online. But the woman is far too interesting for me to just walk away.
Described by the filmmakers as “[s]alty, sassy, and unflappable, Muldowney crushed stereotypes and became an integral part of the gritty, golden age of drag racing. She'd be the first woman to earn a license to drive a Top Fuel dragster, first woman to win a professional racing championship, and the first driver to win three Top Fuel championships.” (Emphasis added).
Her career was defined by hard-won firsts.
The first time I’d ever heard of Shirley Muldowney was on the checkout line at Shop Rite. Supermarket tabloids—Weekly World News and The Star and The National Enquirer—were once the ink and paper equivalents of click bait, set out on racks and flashing audacious headlines to a captive audience while fresh produce and dairy items ran along conveyor belts. I think the Shirley Muldowney headline I’d seen was something like “Woman Wins Drag Racing Title” or perhaps, “Mother Wins Drag Racing Title.” Tabloid headlines were quirky, incongruous enticements that could just as easily be true or untrue. A woman winning a drag racing title was in the realm of, “Exorcism Backfires!” or “Hubby Watches Wife Blow Up—in a Hot Air Balloon!”
Though the headline was meant to be read as improbable, the story beneath it was real life and it stayed with me. I remembered the name, Shirley Muldowney, though she wasn’t featured in any of the mainstream women’s magazines I’d ever read, and I didn’t hear about her again until I happened on the intriguing, though somewhat quiet film, Heart Like a Wheel. The Shirley Muldowney biopic was released in 1983 and had the feel-good narrative arc made popular by Rocky: plucky underdog perseveres.
Except, unlike, Rocky, this was a true story.
Except that Shirley Muldowney most likely never considered herself an underdog. She’s referred to as “perhaps the most tenacious competitor drag racing has ever seen.” Those that knew her thought the film should have been titled, Heart Like a Bulldog.
Shirley Muldowney didn’t fully like the film (she particularly disliked Bonnie Bedelia in the title role), though she thought its release was good for the sport. The scene that was most memorable for me had Shirley Muldowney in a hospital bed, recovering from the burns she’d received in a Funny Car accident in 1973, as she watches Billie Jean King take on Bobby Riggs in the much-hyped “Battle of the Sexes.” In many ways, the scene was prescient. The biopic of Shirley Muldowney’s life is currently difficult to track down; like the recent documentary, it’s not streaming online. Amazon has copies for sale on DVD and VHS.
Still, there are YouTube videos and old interviews, enough available to tell the story of the highly skilled and intensely competitive woman who raced Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters.
Born in Vermont in 1940 and raised in Schenectady, while still in high school, she started off with illegal street racing and then competed on tracks in upstate New York. In 1965, she pivoted to the NHRA in a move that seemed made-for-Hollywood. Her qualifying time to get her pro license beat the track record. Being a woman, she was deemed not only unqualified, but also a danger to the other (male) drivers. For her Top Fuel license, which required the signatures of three NHRA drivers, she scrounged for signatures and managed to have two of the top racers of all time, “Big Daddy” Don Garlits and “The Bounty Hunter” Connie Kalitta, sign for her.
But the road to her becoming, “a legend in Top Fuel drag racing who happens to be a woman,” wasn’t easy. Unlike Bobbi Gibb—who ran the then-off-limits-to-women Boston Marathon in her brother’s clothes, got to Wellesley and had a cadre of young women (the next generation of feminists) cheering her on—Shirley Muldowney’s path was a bit different. The early days had fans throwing cans of soda at her, irate that she was beating the men. She was motorsports’ “greatest and bravest pioneer” with “the arrows in her back to prove it.” She also had a talent and skill that couldn’t be ignored.
In 1977, she was the first woman to win the NHRA Top Fuel championship. In 1980, she was the first person to win the title for a second time. In 1982, she was the first person to win the title for a third time.
Despite these achievements, the national media barely acknowledged her. When a guest of Johnny Carson’s in the mid-1980s, which was after the release of her biopic, he had to explain to the audience who she was.
By then racing fans had changed their minds and flocked to see her. Feminists still didn’t know who she was.
Though her rise to fame was both smack in the middle of the women’s movement’s heyday and jaw dropping, even now, you won’t easily find her mentioned on any feminist-leaning website. A Google search will have top hits: Motorsports Hall of Fame, Automotive Hall of Fame, Autoweek, Speed Sport, Motor Trend, Nitromater, Drag Illustrated, Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing. You can scroll and scroll and it takes a while to get to the YouTube link from 2020 when she’d been remembered in her hometown, the Albany-Schenectady region of upstate New York, for Women’s History Month by fellow female racing fan turned newscaster, Julie Chapman.
Well before there was Women’s History Month, back in the early 1980s, when Shirley Muldowney was staring down her third NHRA title, another title was in the news. Title IX. The legislation was championed by many, including the creator of Peanuts, Charles Schulz, a tennis fan and friend of Billie Jean King, who advocated for all female athletes through the character of Peppermint Patty.
Peppermint Patty was a loud voice on Title IX, particularly in a comic that first ran on August 8, 1982. In that piece, irate that the nightly news sports report has failed to mention a single female athlete, Peppermint Patty counts off the names of 19 women. In that list, Shirley Muldowney is dead last, behind women who were accomplished, but maybe not to the extent of someone who’d won national titles in a male-dominated sport. And beyond winning was the overall statement she was making for women. Before the NFL wore pink to bring awareness to Breast Cancer, Shirley Muldowney’s pit crew wore pink shirts. Men in pink shirts in the testosterone-drenched world of the NHRA as early as 1980.
Ironically, when Longreads revisited Charles Schultz and Peanuts and their championing Title IX through the advocacy of Peppermint Patty, the author references the August 8, 1982, Sunday comic and credits Schultz for having included “less-than-household names” in the list of 19 female athletes and then mentions “drag racer Shirley Muldowney.” In this piece, she’s listed first.
The Longreads piece reshuffles the names but doesn’t mention having done so. It wasn’t a sinister move. It wasn’t even inaccurate. But the fact that her name was picked out among 19 other female athletes and listed first by a journalist writing in 2019 makes the cultural significance of the drag racing legend very clear. What’s also clear is that her cultural significance sat on the edges of mainstream America for too long. Back in 1982, few outside the world of motorsports knew what a force of nature she was, even though Shirley Muldowney was then the most successful “woman race driver in history” and poised for her third NHRA title, which was unprecedented; something no person, man or woman, had ever done.1
NHRA Top Fuel drag racing was never the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, known commonly as “Wimbledon.” No tennis whites. No strawberries and cream. If you grew up in New Jersey in the 1970s and ’80s, the TV and radio ads for Englishtown’s Raceway Park are a deeply etched earworm. The kind of racing that Shirley Muldowney excelled in lived in a certain corner of the country. The America where Playboy Playmates hosted fans for meet and greets and where you’d find a model right next to “Big Daddy” Don Garlits.
Current centerfolds and former centerfolds appeared at car shows routinely as part of their publicity tours. The woman who’d been chosen as Playboy’s Silver Anniversary centerfold had been a featured guest at these events every year that she’d been promoting the magazine. She’d shared with one reporter her teenage memories of watching “Saturday night drag races down Grand Avenue in Ponca City, OK.”2
Maybe it was a little rough-around-the-edges America. And it wasn’t just rough – it was dangerous and not for the faint-hearted.
Though this was exactly the person who should have been recognized by journalists reporting on the women’s movement, second wave feminists were known to favor a certain type as their role models. Yes, the early 1980s celebrated Loretta Lynn (who’d married at 13) with a biopic, but generally, feminism wasn’t eager to celebrate women who’d married as teenagers.
Shirley Muldowney married when she was 16. In her own words, “I was a kid from upstate New York with no guidance, no direction. I was headed for trouble, nothing going for me. Then I found the sport at a very young age and was able to make something out of it.”
Having married so young, she was a mother by age 18, just as she was starting her career. One of the many things under-explored in the Shirley Muldowney story is her role as a working mom.
Shirley Muldowney’s son, John, had been born in the early days of her illegal drag racing. By the 1970s, he was on her pit crew and worked alongside his mother for much of her career. The implausibility of “a mother-son team in the male dominated world of drag racing.”3 Just let that wash over you for a minute. A woman not only fighting her way to the top of her field, but also bringing her son into the fold with her. Well, isn’t that a cover story piece for Ms. magazine?
On January 2, 2019, Avery V. Mead and Rita Vigil launched their podcast, “I Don’t Know Her,” as a vehicle to spotlight women who’d been overlooked or forgotten by history. Esther Eng (Filmmaker), Isadora Duncan (Dancer,), Wilma Rudolph (Athlete), Antonia Novello (Surgeon General of the United States), Fanny Brice (Vaudevillian). The show released episodes until June 2023. One of the podcasters was a fan of the 1994 song, “Shirley,” which she’d wanted to use as theme music. Looking into the lyrics, she discovered the song was about a real person. That happenstance led to this irony. The feature on Shirley Muldowney was the podcast’s very first.
Episode Notes
This Week’s Recommended Watching
Shirley (1986) is an interview of Shirley Muldowney following a devastating accident on the track in Montreal. The full “Shirley Muldowney” story begins at minute 10:44.
This Week’s Recommended Reading
“Riding into history: Women re-create historic cross-country motorcycle trip”
This Week’s Music
"Roll Me Away" by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band (on Spotify and Amazon Music).
Just One More Thing
Who would you choose to spotlight in a show like “I Don’t Know Her?”
“Muldowney on Verge of Third NHRA Title,” Fort Meyers News-Press, September 8, 1982.
“Car Show,” News-Press (Fort Myers), January 11, 1980.
“Younger Muldowney Fuels Own Drag Career,” The Newark Advocate, June 11, 1982.
Fascinating woman and career.
Thank you for this great, well researched story. I met Shirley at some auto event, not the drag strip. There was a line to get her autograph. I was a late teenager in the mid 1980’s with my parents. Shirley had the most inviting, graceful demeanor and struck up a conversation with my mom (also born in 1940). I just recall that it was like running into a friend at the grocery store.
I saw her race in the early to mid-1980’s at Baylands Raceway in the SF Bay Area and watched Heart Like a Wheel in the theater. Shirley Muldowney is a great American! Thank you for keeping her achievements and her memory alive!