‘Lady Speedster’ set NASCAR records
She was “the fastest woman in racing,” headlines said, a “Lady Speedster” who slipped into stock cars for a kick while raising her stepchildren in Detroit. And while most female drivers competed in so-called powder-puff events, leaving the major races and speed trials to the men, Vicki Wood raced against “the boys” — and often won.
Soon after she began driving competitively in 1953, Wood became one of the first women to compete in NASCAR events. By the time she retired a decade later, in her mid-40s, she had won 48 trophies and set the record for the fastest run across the sand in Daytona Beach, Fla., reaching 150.376 mph in 1960.
“I got bounced around a little bit but never got hurt too bad,” Wood later said, without detailing the time she flipped over another car in an accident that sent her sailing over the wall, into the track’s retaining screen and on to the hospital. She returned to the cockpit a week later, with bruises but no broken bones.
Wood was 101 when she died June 5 at a hospital in Troy, Mich. The cause was heart-related, said her niece and caregiver, Bev Van De Steene, who recalled that Wood kept driving until her Florida licence was revoked when she was 98.
“The worst thing they could have done to me,” Wood said.
She called herself a “typical housewife, mother and grandmother,” and reportedly spent her time away from the track ironing her husband’s shirts and making her own clothes.
The 5-foot-3 Wood cut a
I HAD TO TINKER WITH CARS OR BE LEFT OUT OF EVERYTHING
striking figure at the racetrack, donning colourful scarves and striding through the pit in a skirt and heels. But she was all business in the car, drawing on a knowledge of automobiles she traced to a childhood spent with six brothers. “I had to tinker with cars or be left out of everything,” she said.
Wood competed at shorttrack races in Michigan in addition to setting records at NASCAR speed trials, notably at Daytona and Atlanta.
The fourth of seven children, Victoria Rose Raczak was born in Detroit on March 15, 1919. She was widowed during the Second World War, and in 1947 married Clarence “Skeeter” Wood, who had four children. Wood helped raise the three youngest, who survive her, in addition to many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her stepson Bob Wood died in 2015, following Skeeter’s death in 2000. After her husband’s death, she lived with Archie Brodey for 15 years. He died in 2018.