A nitro Funny Car was no place for a lady, especially one as gifted as Shirley “Cha-Cha” Muldowney. It was one thing for a woman to queer the macho aura of motorsport; it became existentially threatening when she started winning.
Born in 1940, Muldowney was raised by two working-class parents in Schenectady, New York, the town whose streets provided her first drag strips. Her interest in powerful cars was precocious, unusual and the source of countless speeding tickets. She dropped out of high school young, waited tables at diners and married a local mechanic, Jack Muldowney, when she was 16 and he three years older.
In their spare time they tinkered with cars, raced in the streets and plotted their professional careers.
In 1965, the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) granted Muldowney a professional licence for lower-class dragsters. It wasn’t easy – plenty sought to dissuade the organisation from granting it. When they did, and Muldowney joined the professional circuit, the crowds jeered and her competitors smirked. “In the early days, I had no doubts that a lot of people I raced against hated me,” she remembered many years later. “You had a bunch of spoiled brats, a bunch of farmers, good old boys – you had all kinds of types out there. And not only then, but throughout my entire career, that’s what motivated me to win.”
The type of twin-engine dragster she raced was losing popularity, and by 1970 she purchased her first “Funny Car” – at least, the chassis of it and the Ford Mustang body. The “Funny Car” – vehicles that resemble street cars but with supercharged, fuel-injected engines that provide absurd acceleration –remains one of the NHRA’s four professional classes today.
In the early ’70s, when this class became popular, the Funny Cars’ engines had a reputation for exploding, igniting the rest of the car. Like the faster-accelerating Top Fuel dragster – the long, thin, wedge-shaped machines with giant back wheels and conspicuously smaller front ones – the Funny Car is powered by an engine that’s fed a fuel made from a roughly 85/15 mix of nitromethane (“nitro”) and methane (“alky”, for alcohol). Driver Whit Bazemore once likened being at the wheel of the highly combustible vehicles to “riding inside a Molotov cocktail”. It didn’t help that the steel bodies of factory cars were replaced with much lighter fibreglass – the resin of which was not often treated with fire retardant.
Several of Muldowney’s Funny Cars exploded on the track. In 1972, during a race in West Salem, Ohio, her car went up while moving at more than 300km/h. Her goggles melted and she lost her eyebrows.
The next year, when her engine exploded, her brake cables melted and she had to depend solely upon her car’s parachute. “The area around my eyes was burned pretty badly,” she told her biographer decades later. “Not my eyes themselves, but all around them. But believe it or not, a week later I had a match race in Toronto against Ed McCulloch, and I was there with bandages on my burns. We repaired the body on the car and after fiberglassing it back together, it weighed another 200 pounds [90 kilograms]. But we made it to that match race, and we beat McCulloch! And he didn’t like it!”
McCulloch didn’t like it, but the race crowds, talk shows and magazines did.Muldowney became the first woman to receive a Top Fuel licence from the NHRA, and in 1976, 50 years ago, she became the first woman to win an NHRA Top Fuel competition. Three national championships soon followed. So too would fame and the spectre of death.
Shirley Muldowney remembers her appearance on the pro-drag circuit was considered a problem that would go away. That is, the macho blokes who comprised it hoped vainly that her presence was fickle. It wasn’t, and as she’s fond of saying: “The problem didn’t go away.”
Tough, profane and passionately committed, Muldowney stared down the abuse and cold shoulders of her male rivals. One wonders if the hostility tempered her, but it seems more likely that she was inherently tough and unswayable. And when she began beating the likes of Snake, Mongoose and Big Daddy – then winning multiple national championships – the crowds swelled and her public status shone.
A movie about her life followed in 1983, and while Muldowney thought the story inaccurate and the actress who played her precious and “snotty”, she was grateful for what it did for the sport’s publicity.
Some rivals eventually conceded her talent and strength; others still nursed their sad resentments. The world of professional drag-racing was comprised of large and pungent egos, of which Muldowney was unashamedly one, and it wasn’t merely the combustibility of engines that she had to contend with. “That weekend at the 1980 Finals, I made it to the final round to race Frank Bradley,” she remembered years later. “Frank wasn’t someone I knew personally, but I knew he had said some very unkind things about me back then. I was told it was he who had hung a water-filled prophylactic on the back of my trailer in the parking lot in Columbus.”
One wonders if the hostility tempered her, but it seems more likely that she was inherently tough and unswayable.
It was during those finals that she beat her ex-partner, Connie “the Bounty Hunter” Kalitta, who had not taken their separation well and was promising all of Muldowney’s competitors whatever help he could offer. “Connie was out to help whomever I was going to race that day,” she later said. “He was going into his ‘I’ll loan you a motor’ routine with my opponents, which was what we had seen him do before. ‘I’ll give you a set of tyres! We’ve got to stop her!’ and all the usual offers he’d make to help us get beaten.”
That year, “Cha-Cha” won her second NHRA Top Fuel championship. She was on a roll.
“The Accident” happened in June 1984, in the small Quebecois town of Saint-Pie-de-Bagot, just outside Montreal. Muldowney was 44. “The Accident” is how she refers to it, and how it’s typically referred to in drag-race lore.
“Everything seemed fine during the run, but just before the finish line, I could see one of the front tyres was losing the inner tube and the front end became very heavy, and then heavier, and then heavier still,” she remembered in 2005.
Travelling about 400km/h, her left front wheel blew and then both slanted at a near 90-degree angle. At this point, her steel, butterfly-shaped steering wheel spun so savagely as to act as a guillotine – partially severing her right thumb.
These machines have incredibly powerful engines, but their bodies are light and terribly vulnerable. At awesome velocity, Muldowney’s dragster veered off the strip straight into a grassy embankment – there were no guardrails then – and disintegrated. Contained in her roll cage, her legs exposed, Muldowney hurtled almost another 100 metres from the point of collision. “In my accident, the car shattered like glass,” she told Forbes earlier this year. “My legs were out for 300 feet. It beat the Jesus out of me, a very long, bad ride that knocked me out because I went in head-first.”
The rescue team couldn’t find her initially. There were so many parts of the car spread over such a large area, and the section of the roll cage that Muldowney was still strapped into was semi-obscured by mud – as was she.
Her body was shattered. All of her fingers were broken, her pelvis was fractured and the bones of both feet were in many pieces. Her thumb was successfully reattached, though, and after 18 months of physical rehabilitation, she had reclaimed most of her mobility – though one leg was now shorter than the other.
Muldowney returned as quickly as she could to professional racing. The fear of death was nothing compared with the thrill. “Drag-racing was my life,” she said in 2005. “Nothing else was as exciting, tempting or gratifying.”
She made her comeback in January 1986, and the next month appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson beside Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Seinfeld. When she was announced by Carson, she came out onstage with the aid of a walking stick. Watch the tape, and she appears far more nervous before Carson than she did re-entering the dragster’s seat for the first time after The Accident.
Remarkably, Muldowney won another NHRA competition in 1989, though the years of winning national championships were now in the past. She would continue driving, in select races, until 2003, when she was in her 60s. She’s still with us today, residing in North Carolina, 86 years old and one leg still shorter than the other.
“When we were winning, we were dominant,” she told her biographer in 2005. “I was strong. I was a fighter. I’d go after anyone and then go back at them if I had to. That was my makeup. When I was in the heat of battle, I fought with every ounce of strength I had.Not every driver was like that, and not many women – even today – take that approach.
“I’ve always told it like it is. I don’t know any other way, and there were times when all I could think of was, ‘Let me at ’em!’ I probably would have gone much further in my career if I hadn’t been that way. If you look at what I did in terms of today’s day and age, it wouldn’t work now.
“But I am what I am.”