Shirley Muldowney vs. Danica Patrick

Recently NASCAR legend Richard Petty got in hot water for saying that the only way Danica Patrick could win a NASCAR race was if no one else showed up.   The issue of women drivers, and particularly women race drivers, is this week’s blog topic.

Before Danica Patrick, the most successful female race car driver was Shirley Muldowney, who was active in NHRA (drag racing) from the mid 60’s up until her retirement in 2003.   Not merely competitive, she actually won three NHRA Top Fuel championships, in 1977, 1980, and 1982.   That means not merely winning ONE event, but the entire season.   The nature of drag racing means that winning an event means not beating 35 other drivers on a dragstrip simultaneously, but winning a bracket of paired races. 

Danica Patrick started out in Indy Racing League (IRL) before NASCAR.   From 2005 to 2010 she raced in IndyCar, switching to NASCAR in 2010, initially in Nationwide (2^nd tier) and bumping up to Sprint Cup (top tier) in 2012.   Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jimmy Johnson, etc. are in Sprint Cup.   In her entire career, through IRL to Sprint Cup, Patrick has won ONE race, in 2008.  Her highest position was 5^th place in the standings, the 2009 IRL season.  While she has won pole positions, these are won by driving quickly alone on the track, and do not translate into results amidst the full field of competitors on the track at once.  To date she does not appear to be competitive. 

Granted, there are big differences between drag racing and stock car racing.  In drag racing you drive the dragster from a dead stop for a quarter mile, racing at most one other competitor in the other lane, in as close to a straight line for that 1320 feet as you can.  NASCAR means driving around a track, among a field of 30-something other drivers. 

The local tracks have “bracket racing”, which means you can literally bring your street car to the track, zip off at the same quarter mile as the NHRA legends, and compare your E.T. and mph to theirs in an apples-to-apples comparison.   Obviously a street car isn’t going to compete with a top fuel dragster (the fastest category), or even the Pro Stock dragster (the slowest category), but the track and measurement are the same.   A street car might be anywhere from 20 seconds (slow minivan) to 14 seconds (fast muscle car) to 12 seconds (Dodge Viper or Z06 Corvette).   Race motorcycles are even faster.   

            To give examples, my best speed in my fastest car, a 1992 Pontiac Firebird Formula 350, was 14.28 seconds and 98 mph.  The current NHRA records are: Pro Stock, 6.471 ET, 214.69 mph; Funny Car, 3.965 ET, 324.15 mph (John Force); Top Fuel 3.701 ET, 332.18 mph.   This means John Force covered the same quarter mile it took my car to cover in 14.28 seconds, in just under 4 seconds (10 seconds faster), at over 3 times the speed by the time he reached the end of the track. 

            Needless to say, the same does not hold true for NASCAR.  You cannot bring your street Camaro or Mustang down to Daytona and race your buddies.  For that reason, drag racing appeals more to me as someone who sometimes drives “performance” cars., emphasis on “sometimes.”

Also, I’ve noticed that NASCAR has a bit of a soap opera element to it.  Fans get passionate about their allegiances to different drivers, and subjective qualities of the drivers come into play.  Jeff Gordon, in particular, seems to elicit the same hostility as Justin Bieber.  But the world of drag racing also had its drama.  Muldowney was dating Connie Kalitta, “The Mongoose”, a rival of Don Prudhomme, “The Snake”.  Don Garlits and Jungle Jim and Jungle Pam were also colorful characters in the 70s.  Some of this can been seen in “Heart Like A Wheel”, the movie about Muldowney, featuring Bonnie Bedelia as her, though Muldowney was not impressed by the film or Bedelia. 

Anyhow.  If you look at many of the records Muldowney and Patrick have made, almost all of them are “first” or “best” by a woman, not first or best overall.  There are so few women in racing that either of these two were bound to break some of these records.  Clearly among the sports, Muldowney was far more competitive.  As it stands, Patrick’s only virtue appears to be as a photogenic, articulate Go Daddy spokesperson amidst a male-dominated sport.  The likelihood of her of winning a Sprint Cup race is extremely low.  Her likelihood of winning the trophy – top points score by the end of the season – is effectively nil.   Contrast that with Muldowney’s three championships. 

Why are women not more competitive in racing?  Given how diligently the engineers try to reduce weight in the race cars, a lighter woman (e.g. 5’2”, 100 lb Danica Patrick – no Brienne of Tarth!) should be competitive against a bigger, heavier man driving the exact same vehicle.  Neither a vagina nor ovaries appear to have any direct impact on steering, shifting, accelerating or braking, relative to male anatomy. 

In Puttering About In A Small Land, an early Philip K. Dick novel with no science fiction elements, the major character Roger Lindahl articulates why he believes women make poor drivers:  because they don’t focus on driving.   The book was written in 1957 but not published until 1985, a few years after Dick died.  By 1957, automatic transmissions had become popular in American cars.   With an automatic, as opposed to a manual, a driver can shift attention away from shifting the transmission and let his – or her – attention to other things, which may not even include driving.  I find my own attention wanders immensely if I’m tired.  The safest and most effective driving is when you’re focused exclusively on driving.  While I can’t speak from my own nonexistent experience in NASCAR (though I have bracket raced, as noted above) it takes little imagination to ascertain that what holds true at 70 mph on I-95 is even more important at over 200 mph at Daytona. 

I’m not going to suggest that Danica Patrick isn’t winning NASCAR races because she’s fixing her makeup or thinking about wallpaper or the argument she had with Ricky the night before, or worried that her race jumpsuit makes her butt look fat.  This isn’t the blonde chick on “The Big Bang” (who we know is no bimbo in real life anyway).  I’m sure she’s 100% concentrated on finishing 30^th instead of last, on not crashing again, and on finishing the race.  But results are results.   She is NOT competitive.  Why is that?

Women love to brag about their ability to multitask.  Relative to men, they are definitely better.  Men think in linear, series, terms:  focus on one thing to the exclusion of all others, do that, do it right, then move on to the next task, tackling problems and assignments one at a time.  Women think in parallel: they are more apt to try to do many things at the same time, but while they may be better at doing so than men are, none of the individual tasks will be completed as competently as if it had been done exclusively.  While this may apply to most of the women drivers out on the roads today, I don’t think this is necessarily the issue with Patrick, as noted earlier. 

So I remain stumped:  problem identified, but not conclusively solved.   Perhaps it is a male-female brain thing.  In my earlier blog I suggested that gays are people with the wrong-sex brain.  Notwithstanding “Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby”, that Will Ferrell NASCAR parody in which a competing driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen) from “Formula Un” – a GAY driver! – defeats Ricky Bobby, I’m not aware of any NASCAR champions who are gay.  For that matter, I’m not aware of any lesbian race car drivers either, and by all appearances, Danica Patrick only sleeps with men.  For that matter, the same holds true for Shirley “Cha-Cha” Muldowney.  While I’m not a big champion of gay rights, maybe a lesbian NASCAR champion could resolve this issue once and for all.