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Near the end of Fast
Women, Denise McCluggage tells author Todd McCarthy
that she knew her wonderful ride through the early
days of American sports car racing was about to end
when she drove her Ferrari from New York City to
Chicago for a race at the Meadowdale track "and
I saw that my competition, two Corvettes, had arrived
on a double-decked trailer. I said, "Oh no,
this is different.' I knew I'd never be able to compete
with that. Plus, I drove there, raced, and drove
home on one set of tires. You could drive a whole
season on one set of tires. Now it costs as much
to do one race as it did then for a whole season."
The times, both in American society and on the racetrack,
were changing. An era was ending. Eventually, women
would again play leading roles, in society if not
on track, but for the time being, as McCluggage explains,
it was going to be different, very different.
To make sure we don't forget how it was, even if
it cannot be that way again, McCarthy, more like
a great film director than like the chief film critic
for Variety, which is his day job, takes us
back some 50 years to the birth of post-war sports
car racing in the United States and he introduces
us to a group of remarkable women who raced not only
on the same tracks but often wheel-to-wheel against
the men of the era, men who included such legendary
figures as Phil Hill and Carroll Shelby, James Dean
and Steve McQueen.
But as McCarthy shows us, these women, women such
as Denise McCluggage and Ruth Levy, Suzy Dietrich
and Mary Davis--and many others--were legends in
their own right, legends now preserved on the pages
of this delightful book.
McCarthy doesn't merely tell us about the races,
he explains how and why these women emerged as real
racers, why the time was right, and why it was fleeting.
Rather than simply give us a turn-by-turn review
of the races, McCarthy focuses on the people-the
women and the men, and on their lives, and, yes,
their relationships.
"In one of the wonderful paradoxes in a decade
rife with them, it was precisely during that time,
most of all between roughly 1953 and 1958, that women
raced in numbers and with an excellence unheard of
until then and arguable unmatched to this day,"
McCarthy writes. "It was a privileged moment
in the grand sweep of American automobile racing,
a small window of time when the sport was accessible
to virtually anyone with a desire to purse it; if
you had a car and were good enough, you could drive
it to the track and race. Women included…
"And then, suddenly and without their having
see it coming, it was over, sooner than seemed possible.
The window, which had opened so wide that all the
fast young women had to do was climb right through
it, closed again."
While no one may be able to open that window again,
McCarthy's book allows us to look through and to
enjoy the view.
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