Fast Women, Changing Times
It’s Saturday night in the gritty farm town of Fort Morgan. The scent of alfalfa comes and goes on a bitter wind swirling over the little skillet-shaped dirt track at I-76 Speedway. You could go crazy trying to make out car numbers as they rush through pools of low-wattage light. But every time two or three cars rip sideways through turn 3 at 85 miles an hour, the paying customers in the bleachers get a stinging taste of the glories they’ve come for: a dozen unmuffled race engines screaming bedlam, the hard-sliding cars kicking clots and pellets of sticky brown clay into the fans’ faces. They’ve coughed up ten bucks apiece at the ticket windows, and for that they’re not just watching a sporting event: They’re also getting pounded by its ear-splitting decibels. They’re inhaling its hot exhaust. It’s physically assaulting them.
Sit ringside at the fights and you get spattered with sweat and blood. Sit behind turn 3 at I-76 Speedway and you eat dirt for three hours in the midst of a relentless, joyful noise. For those who love it, here’s the best of everything – all five senses fully engaged.
“There she is,” announces a wind-burned man wearing faded bib overalls and a John Deere baseball cap. “Here she comes.” The black-and-red No. 3 car, a 400-horsepower, open-wheel “midget” that can make 100 miles an hour on a half-mile track, slides out of the turn and onto the short dirt straightaway, four or five car lengths behind the leader, two-time series champion Keith Rauch. The driver at the wheel of No. 3 is a 22-year-old, 5-foot-10-inch former fashion model named Julee Jamison, who lives in Highlands Ranch. But the only runway she’s thinking about tonight is this treacherous little strip of hard dirt in chilly Fort Morgan, 80 miles northeast of Denver.
“I think this is going to be an awesome year, the year it’s all going to take off for me,” she had said a few days earlier. “It’s taken awhile, but most of the people I race against have been driving for 15 or 20 years. I’ve only been racing these cars for three. There’s only one way to go, and that’s up.”
From ill-lighted I-76 Speedway, with its dirty wind and its tepid bratwursts-on-a-bun from the Piggin’ Out BBQ stand, it seems an impossible journey to the Boulevard Prince Albert I in glamorous Monte Carlo, on the sun-drenched French Riviera. But if Jamison gets her wish, that’s where she’ll be six or seven years from now, no longer turning short-track laps on the dirt in Fort Morgan or Cheyenne or McCool Junction, Neb., but slipping into the cockpit of a blood-red Ferrari Formula 1 car, say, or a sleek, silver McLaren backed by a $10 million-a-year racing budget. She’s already walked the Grand Prix course in Monte Carlo, in the company of a former boyfriend; someday she means to drive it.
That is a long-shot dream for any young driver. In all its forms, motor racing is one of the most expensive and exclusive sports, and only the best, the bravest and the fastest ever get near NASCAR’s top-of-the-line Sprint Cup races, the Indycar series or the international Grand Prix circuit. But for Jamison, 18-year old Jaime Bubak and high school junior Savannah Rickli, all from the Denver area, the odds of making it in the big leagues of automobile racing are getting a lot better.
Four women – including superstar Danica Patrick and Sarah Fisher, who owns her own team – raced in this year’s Indianapolis 500, the most ever (Patrick finished sixth; all four women completed the race). On Feb. 6, six women started in the 43-car field of a lower-tier stock-car race in Daytona Beach, Fla. Full-throttle progress takes other forms, too: increasingly, women are lending their skills to racing teams as engineers and pit-crew members.
In 2008, the phenomenally popular Patrick became the first woman ever to win an Indycar event (in Motegi, Japan), and drag-racing star Ashley Force remains at the forefront of her sport’s ultra-fast Top Fuel class. It’s taken awhile, but the all-boys’ club has finally opened its doors wide to girls and women. Janet Guthrie, who became the first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500 back in 1977, feels pride and relief. “I thought it would take two generations,” she told the Associated Press last month. “But it’s only taken a little more than one.”
In her day, Guthrie faced a letter-writing campaign that sought to keep her off the big oval at Indianapolis, and she remembers the team owner telling her why NASCAR officials saw to it that three women drivers were on the grid for the 1977 Firecracker 400: “to prove they didn’t belong.”
All that has changed. Women’s driving skills are now proven, and in terms of marketing value and across-the-board public appeal, Danica and Co. may be the best thing that’s happened to motor sports in decades. Since finishing fourth at Indianapolis in 2005 at age 23, Patrick’s endorsement contracts have roughly quadrupled, and despite some dicey moments at the track – including heated arguments with fellow drivers – she’s now one of the most sought-after athletes in the country.
Why not? From the moment speed-sport pioneers such as Shirley Muldowney, Guthrie and Lyn St. James put the pedal down in the ’70s and ’80s, the racing world began to evolve, and whatever vestiges of gender prejudice remain look irrelevant. “When you put that helmet on and go out there and out-qualify the guys,” says Denver sports-car racer and performance driving instructor Christine Jerritts, “there’s not a lot to talk about. And these days, most of (the male drivers) are very gentlemanly and polite about it.”
What might be called the Danica Effect is not lost on Julee Jamison. “Being female in a male-dominated sport can now be a huge advantage,” she says. “You’re marketable, and everyone’s going to be talking about you – as long as you know how to drive. That’s the main thing. And when you get off the track, you can look like a woman. Nothing wrong with that.”
She would know. Jamison began racing go-karts at 15 (half the kids were girls) and moved on to bigger, faster sprint cars three years later, savoring every high-speed corner. But in the summer of 2007, a year after her graduation from Thunder Ridge High School, the willowy blond teenager was walking with friends in downtown Denver when a scout from a local modeling agency spotted her. A year after that, she found herself living in a midtown Manhattan apartment with four other young women, all under contract to New York’s Click Talent.
But the life of a mannequin was not for her. She disliked the rules, the demands to starve herself, to look like a stick. Jamison returned to Colorado, completed studies as a medical assistant and climbed back into a top-winged sprint car, the same sort of car that her father, a Denver business owner, had raced for seven years at the now-defunct Rocky Mountain Speedway. Then she switched to a non-winged midget car, the kind of $100,000 bullet that has been a useful steppingstone for many famous drivers, NASCAR stars Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and J.J. Yaley, among others.
Now her mentor and crew chief, Jamison’s father, Bryan Jamison, jokes, “I’m jealous. I’d still like to be racing, too.” But the No. 3 is Julee’s baby now. She makes most of her own mechanical adjustments these days, but her mother, Tami, still makes the chili back in the car transporter, and her sisters Alicia and Amanda are there to cheer her on. She’ll race more than 20 nights this season, a grueling schedule that will take her from Colorado and New Mexico to Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming.
“I need to get my name and my ability out there,” she says. “Right now.”
“We’re all in if Julee wants to go on,” her father says. “If she can get sponsors and the right breaks. You have to move through the ranks somehow, and this is a good starting point for her. She’s very focused on racing, and wherever she goes with it, we’re with her. Otherwise, we’ll stay right here and run this as long as we can run it.”
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On the evening of May 1, two dreams came true at once for Jaime Bubak. Wearing a sparkling blue party dress she had bought secondhand for $15, the Ralston Valley High School honors student went to her senior prom at CU-Boulder’s Folsom Field on the arm of boyfriend T.J. Trengrove. Due to some last-minute confusion, Bubak’s corsage got left behind in the refrigerator and thus made no appearance. But that didn’t matter, because the 18-year-old’s other prom-night wish, her secret wish, was also fulfilled: on May 1 it rained steadily over the I-25 corridor north of Denver, washing out the Saturday night races at Colorado National Speedway.
That meant Bubak and her black No. 12 modified coupe wouldn’t fall behind in the early-season points race, because no one – including her father, Rich, who drives the 15 car – would get a jump on her while she was off dancing the night away.
“Sure, I was very happy,” she says.
Last summer, Bubak became the first woman in the 62-year history of Colorado National to win a main event at the track. That night, Bubak was delighted. But her father was ecstatic. In his 31 years as a Colorado race driver, Rich Bubak, who owns a repair garage in Golden, has won 70 main events at a lot of places and has two roomfuls of trophies to prove it. But Jaime Bubak’s win was something else: effort rewarded for the kid he calls Squirt, reward for her 4.2 grade-point average (she’s completed advanced placement courses in Spanish and statistics), her all-out play as a third baseman in fast-pitch softball, the way she knocks on doors every spring trying to get sponsors for the car. And the love she always showed her grandfather, who died last October.
“There was a lot of huggin’ and high-fivin’ and everything else,” Rich Bubak recalls. For her part, Jaime Bubak cried when she got the checkered flag. But there’s not much crying in motor sports, and when she made her 2010 season debut on the CNS asphalt on May 22, she had reason to celebrate: driving her newly rebuilt 525-horsepower car for the first time in competition, she finished sixth, one spot ahead of her father.
“I’ve always told her,” Rich Bubak explains, “that once the green flag drops, I’m just another racer out there: If you can blow my doors off, go right ahead. Because I’m not going to give an inch, either.”
Bubak will likely put her racing career on partial hold when she begins studies this fall as a nursing major at Denver’s Regis University. “School comes first,” she says firmly. “I need good grades to keep my scholarship and get my degree, but in the summers I’ll try to race as much as I can.”
After that, who knows? Bubak’s looking at NASCAR’s widely admired driver diversity program, which helps women and minorities make their way into the sport, and she’s thinking about ways to combine her driving skills with her medical training – as a race-track paramedic, a sports trainer or a rehabilitation counselor specializing in
racing injuries.
racing injuries.
Whatever happens, Bubak and her family are thankful for the social changes that have made her dreams possible. “I remember a time when women weren’t even allowed in the pits,” Rich Bubak says, “much less in race cars. But people like Janet Guthrie, Lyn St. James and Danica Patrick changed that. For Jaime’s generation, they are the real road-pavers.”
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At the age of 32, Christine Jerritts thinks it’s probably too late for her to go pro. “I’m having a ball,” she says. “As long as I get to keep driving faster cars and I keep challenging myself, I’m perfectly happy. Of course, if an opportunity came along, I wouldn’t say no.”
For the time being, Jerritts contents herself with campaigning in a 2.3-liter Formula Enterprises car – a bright blue, open-wheel Mazda that can make 155 miles an hour – on the regional Sports Car Club of America circuit. This is her fifth year of amateur racing, but it didn’t take nearly that long to reach one conclusion: “It’s addictive.”
Jerritts, who holds a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Colorado and runs her own business consulting company, Imagine Math, says she learned to drive in “terrible cars” – a ’76 Buick Skylark and a full-size Chevy van – while growing up in Louisville and Boulder. But she was always fascinated by automobiles. In 2005, she signed up for a two-day performance driving class at the old Second Creek Raceway and was instantly hooked.
“I was grinning ear-to-ear,” she remembers. The next day, she went out and bought a race-prepared Mazda Miata sports car for $10,000.
Last month, Jerritts and a partner, fellow racing driver Denise Longwell, conducted their first driving safety clinics for women, a program called Wheels in Heels, at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City. Statistics show that women are safer drivers than men, Jerritts says, but males are more willing to explore the limits of their cars. “We wanted to provide an environment for women to try that stuff, to see what it feels like, so when (emergency) situations pop up they can respond with skill and confidence.”
And if two or three of those drivers (who paid $249 apiece for the clinic) were to catch the racing bug themselves, so much the better. “Car racing is one of the few sports where there is really no difference between men and women,” Jerritts says. “The differences in physical strength are really no factor, although I’ve heard that driving a stock car can be pretty demanding, but nothing a woman can’t overcome. And when it comes to the racecraft part of things, we might actually have a slight advantage: Women tend to be a little more patient, a little more strategic, so we’re more willing to let things play out. We don’t have to fight for every corner on every single lap.”
Jerritts regrets that she doesn’t see more women drivers at Colorado’s SCCA races – just five out of 70 competitors on a recent weekend at her home track, High Plains Raceway, in Byers. Confidence behind the wheel, she believes, promotes confidence in all phases of human performance: “mental preparation, goal-setting, everything.”
For her own part, the mathematician in Jerritts responds to the unique demands of driving a race car at the limits of its performance. “When you’re searching for those last couple of tenths (of a second), you have to understand what the car is doing, why it’s doing it and how you are affecting it. There comes a moment when there is no longer any sensory overload, when the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic sense through your hands all come together. That’s what racing is all about. That’s why it’s beautiful.”
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Savannah Rickli will be searching for just such a transcendent moment June 27 when she climbs into her 2003 Mini Cooper S, cinches the harnesses and gets her mind ready to negotiate one of the most daunting race courses in the world.
The 12.42-mile ascent up Colorado’s most famous mountain is a harrowing piece of business featuring 156 turns and some frightening high-altitude overhangs, so the car’s navigator, Rebecca Greek, will also need to have her wits about her.
Here’s the thing: Rickli, a junior at Dakota Ridge High School, is 16 years old and, as far as anyone can tell, will be the youngest racer ever to attempt the legendary Pikes Peak Hill Climb.
“I’m just another driver,” she says. “The car doesn’t know how old I am, and it doesn’t know I’m a girl. I’m just a person with a dream.”
Maybe her big day won’t be such an uphill climb after all.
SideBar
Motor racing is a dangerous sport, and the drivers interviewed for this story have had their bad moments, which they recalled calmly and with good humor.
For Julee Jamison, the first one came in Rock Springs, Wyo., at the beginning of 2009, when she ran “high,” slipped the right rear wheel of the midget over the top of the track’s dirt “cushion” in turn 3 and flipped straight into the wall. Says she: “My philosophy? You’re not driving fast enough if you’re not crashing sometimes; in these cars, that’s how you learn where the ‘edge’ is.” Incident two: at Eagle, Neb., at the end of last year, Jamison was passing a car on the inside at 110 miles an hour when the other driver caught a wheel on the super-tacky surface and “unloaded” straight into her. “I woke up five minutes later as they were putting me onto a stretcher,” she says. “No major injuries. Pardon my language,” she adds, “but to drive race cars you need balls.”
The week after Jaime Bubak scored her main-event win at Colorado National Speedway, “a guy turned her into the wall and the car was destroyed,” her father recalls. “She was out for the rest of the year, and we had to have an entire new frame built. She was second in the points race at the time, and I got pretty testy because none of it was her fault.” Bubak, who suffered bruises to both heels when they slammed into the front of her driver’s seat, shrugs: “That’s racing.”
On June 30, 2006, Christine Jerritts rolled her Mazda Miata six or seven revolutions at Sandra Motorsports Park in Albuquerque. “The antifreeze and oil came raining down, but I was absolutely fine,” she says. “The next day I rented another Miata and went racing again. You can’t be frightened out there, and I never am. As a matter of fact, you’re slightly safer on the racetrack than you are on the highway. For one thing, we (race drivers) are not drunk, and we’re not texting.”