‘Fast lady’ on the racetrack never let her lack of stature slow her down
Joy Rainey, who has died aged 77, was internationally known as a motorsport figure of race, rally, and hillclimb renown who overcame restricted growth to champion the cause of women behind the wheel. She wrote of her exploits in two books, and in a column for Britain’s Daily
Telegraph from 2000 to 2006.
Good company, and known for her blunt responses, Rainey refused to tolerate the description of her 3ft stature as a disability, saying: ‘‘I was born small and this has never been an issue to me . . . And don’t call it bloody dwarfism.’’
Tenacious and competitive, in recent years she had bought more than one
McLaren supercar. She had them modified with a crane to allow her to fit her mobility scooter into the vehicle: onlookers got a shock to see a short elderly woman winching herself into a 320kmh sports car. Though her cars had to be adapted, she competed on equal terms.
In 2019, Rainey recalled that meeting New Zealand car designer and racing driver Bruce McLaren when she was a child, and being allowed to drive a racing kart he was testing, gave her the taste for motorsport.
Muriel Joy Rainey was born in Geelong, Victoria, on December 18, 1942. Her father, Murray Rainey, was also of restricted height yet he became a noted racing driver and threetime Australian Formula 3 champion. Under the care of her mother, Norma, who was not of restricted height, Joy wore leg-irons in an attempt to straighten her limbs.
Joy grew up among racing cars, notably at the Geelong circuit. Her father was a key figure in establishing the Geelong Speed Trials in the 1950s and was one of the first Australians to race a British Cooper singleseater racing car.
‘‘When Dad was racing,’’ Rainey said, ‘‘he used to let me sit in the Cooper and the mechanics would push me on to the grid for the start, with me steering. That really gave me the buzz. I was not going to let my bloody height stop me, ever.’’
While she was attending Geelong High School in the mid-1950s, her father took her on a trip to Europe and she met many of the famous racing drivers of the day.
Back in Australia, the failure of an early marriage to a fellow kart racer left her free to indulge in motorsport. She was soon to race her father’s newly constructed ‘‘Rainey Karts’’ to competitive success, and went on to win the Australian national karting championship. ‘‘Don’t you dare call them ‘go’ karts,’’ she warned.
The Rainey family moved to Britain in 1968, settling in Surrey. Joy discovered a love of foreign languages, and studied in Italy. She drove a Triumph Spitfire to and from her studies in Perugia.
Buying a red E-type Jaguar in 1972, Rainey won many British events, including her first hillclimb in 1974. Blessed with a racing driver’s eye and lightningquick reactions, she competed across the disciplines and dominated hillclimbing during the 1980s.
She drove single-seat racers and was rarely off the podium. Prescott and Shelsley Walsh were her favourite British hillclimb tracks, and she held the female speed record at Shelsley Walsh for 22 years.
Rainey had a close bond with her father and the pair vied for victories in a brace of 1930s Alfa Romeo 6C and 8C racing ‘‘specials’’ which they restored and modified. She won the 1983 Castrol Midland Hill Climb Championship Classic Class in the Alfa 6C 2300. From 1985 she competed in a single-seat Pilbeam-Hart racer and then raced a Murrain – another ‘‘special’’ engineered by her father.
She was absent for some years because of financial misfortune, but bounced back and in 2004 drove in the London-to-Sydney Marathon in a tuned-up Morris Minor with her new partner, Trevor Hulks. The following year, Rainey’s autobiography Fast Lady: My Life in Motorsport was published with a foreword by Alan Jones, the Australian 1980 Formula 1 champion.
In 2009, a plan to drive a 1904 Oldsmobile, with a top speed of 40kmh, across the United States with Hulks was abandoned after his death from prostate cancer. In 2013 she finally made the 5000km trip with Mark Riley, becoming the first woman to traverse the US in a veteran single-cylinder engined car.
In 2014 she drove the Oldsmobile from Adelaide to Darwin, becoming the first woman to drive across the Australian Outback in an antique vehicle.
Rainey also promoted the cause of Aboriginal rights and ran a shop selling Aboriginal works near her home in the English Midlands. She wrote for many publications, and was a leading member of the Bugatti Owners’ Club. –
‘‘That really gave me the buzz. I was not going to let my bloody height stop me, ever.’’