Who is the first female driver to win a NASCAR race?
Women participation has been growing steadily across all the NASCAR racing categories and is going to keep on growing in the upcoming years.
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Hailie Deegan (Credits: @NASCARXfinity)
NASCAR has been around for a long very time and has, over the years, witnessed the participation of both men and women in the competition. The sport has kept evolving year after year and is considered one of the best motorsports events on the planet. There are only a handful of other racing categories that can produce the kind of thrill and entertainment that NASCAR can come up with now and then.
As the sport has developed, the demand for more female participation is at an all-time high. Women have been participating in NASCAR since the sport’s inception, and the very first woman to win a race was none other than, Shawna Robinson. In 1988, she won a NASCAR touring series event, the Charlotte/Daytona Dash Series, for which, she also amassed the titles of Rookie of the Year, and Most Popular Driver. After success in the touring series, she decided to jump into the big leagues and took part in her first-ever NASCAR Cup Series race at the 2001 Kmart 400 Michigan.
However, her Cup Series stint did not last long, as her last outing in the competition came in 2002 at the Pepsi 400 Daytona. While her Cup Series career ran out of steam pretty quickly, she is a NASCAR legend as far as the participation of women is concerned. She participated in 8 Cup Series, 61 Xfinity Series, and 3 Craftsman Truck Series races during her racing career.
Moreover, with her first victory in NASCAR, she opened the door for women to have a serious go and try their hand against some of the stalwarts of the sport. Before Robinson’s victory, women were not taken seriously, but all that changed after she triumphed at the Charlotte/Daytona Dash Series. Since her victory in 1988, a few other women have also experienced the feeling of scoring a victory at a NASCAR-level competition.
5 women who have amassed victories in NASCAR
Women’s participation in NASCAR is growing steadily, and so far, quite a few have tried to make a mark in the sport. However, despite all the efforts, only four women have been able to win at least one race in one of NASCAR’s touring series. As mentioned earlier, Shawna Robinson was the first, and after her, Hailie Deegan, Manami Kobayashi, and Gracie Trotter have all managed to edge their name in the history books.
Hailie Deegan won her first race in 2018 in the K&N Pro Series West. She was the first woman to win a pro-NASCAR series race. Then, in 2019, it was Manami Kobayashi’s turn to score a victory. She won in her first and only start in the NASCAR Whelen Euro Series. After her, it was finally the turn of Gracie Trotter to get herself a victory as she was able to find a way to win the ARCA Menards Series West in 2020.
The dawn of a new era is approaching at a rate of knots. With the rate at which the sport has been growing, there is soon going to come a time when women’s participation across all the NASCAR categories will be relatively high in comparison to the old days. Whenever that happens, it would be great to see the action that would unfold on the track among the two genders.
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Rishabh Negi
(3244 Articles Published)