There’s a photo and one 51-word paragraph acknowledging her win. It’s right there, on page 9 of the Maissue of National Dragster. There’s no doubt that Cox was NHRA’s first female class winner. We traded some emails and spent some time on the phone this week talking about his mom. Carol is 90 now, still alive but suffering from dementia, but her son, Steve, a successful racer in his own right, is leading the charge to make sure that her milestone is not forgotten. It was extremely thorough and well received but, in retrospect, I wish we had included Carol Cox’s accomplishment. We had timelines and feature stories and stats and lists of the women who have contributed - and continue to contribute -– to NHRA’s unparalleled gender diversity. We chronicled a lot of the groundbreaking female racers, from Shahan to Muldowney, from Murphy to Brittany Force. I don’t know, and there’s hardly anyone left to ask.īut Carol Cox and other women, including Shahan, Roberta Leighton, Paula Murphy, and Barb Hamilton, had other ideas -– and the support of some forward-thinking men - that helped break that stereotype.Ī couple of weeks ago, National Dragster published a special issue, titled Women of Power, that saluted the long history of female racers and their accomplishments and contributions to the sport. They certainly weren’t supposed to be winding it up and blowing it out on the dragstrip. Maybe NHRA, already successful though still fragile, imagined their world’s worst scenario of a woman getting injured or killed on the dragstrip and the headlines and horror it would bring. The most scandalous thing they might do was sneak a smoke in the backyard. Women, in the minds of some, were expected to be more like TV’s June Cleaver, home making sure that Ward’s shirts were always pressed and “the Beaver” and Wally were doing their homework. In 1961, a woman couldn’t even get a credit card in her name if she were single and a married woman had to have her husband co-sign for it. Women had been competing at local tracks for years -– often in a “Powder Puff" class - but weren’t allowed on the big stage of a national event. Just a year before Cox’s breakthrough, women weren’t even allowed to compete at NHRA national events.
They’re celebrated and saluted, publicized and praised, but it wasn’t always that way. NHRA is celebrated today as the motorsport of diversity, where women not only routinely compete but win not only events but also championships. While most people know that Shahan won Stock Eliminator at the 1966 Winternationals -– becoming the first woman to win an NHRA national event eliminator - few people are aware that four years earlier at The Big Go West, Cox won her class, S/SA, a feat she repeated months later on an even bigger stage, at the Nationals in Indianapolis.
One name that isn’t as well known and should be is Carol Cox, a Whittier, Calif., homemaker who is the first woman to ever win a trophy of any kind at an NHRA national event. Angelle Sampey: winningest female racer in NHRA history. Amy Faulk: first female Sportsman world champ.
#Carol cox pro#
Shirley Muldowney: first female Pro winner and champion. Shirley Shahan: first female national event winner. The names are familiar to most hardcore drag racing fans.
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