Stardate 20030521.0304

(On Screen): Tim Blair is unimpressed by the fact that a woman will compete in a PGA tournament this coming weekend. Women have the LPGA, but this is apparently a first in the PGA. Anyway, Blair talks about his experience as a kid watching a woman named Lombardi compete in Formula One in Australia, and comments on how she ended up actually scoring points.

I'm afraid that Blair doesn't know the half of it. As far as car racing goes, Drag Racing is a quintessentially American form of the sport and I'm not sure anyone else in the world has any equivalent. (Who else besides an American would mount a jet engine on a car chassis and race it? Or build a jet-powered motorocycle?)

Lombardi may have been at least somewhat competitive, but Shirley Muldowney was a force to be reckoned with in Top Fuel Dragsters, which are those monsters with the huge tires in the back and itty-bitty bicycle wheels in the front which can reach 320 MPH on a quarter mile. At age 62, she's still racing. (And she has her own web site.)

For all you non-Americans, that means that from a standing start, they've accelerated to 505 KPH at the end of 400 meters.

In fact, for a long time Muldowney had the best all-time record for wins of any woman in drag racing, and indeed a record most male drivers in the sport could only envy. But recently another woman breezed right through her record and never looked back.

Angelle Savoie is a babe, and she's an RN, but she'd rather drag-race motorcycles. What she drives on the drag strip looks nothing at all like a street bike, but she's managed to reach 192 MPH (305 KPH) on a quarter with hers, and that is really cooking. And like Muldowney, Savoie is a force to be reckoned with. (And she's got a web site, too.)

These two iron ladies don't just put up a respectable showing for a brief time and "score points"; they've both dominated their respective segments in drag racing for years, and it's hard to imagine a more macho, testosterone-drenched sport than drag racing. They're not just good by the standards of ladies; they're better than most of the men in the sport.

Annika Sorenstam would have to be Tiger-in-drag to even come close to the kind of place in golf that Shirley and Angelle have in drag racing. Just competing is nothing; you have to totally shame all the men. Angelle won the NHRA bike championships in 2000, 2001 and 2002.