Early NASCAR driver Vicki Wood dies at 101

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 beat them.

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 racing 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 told an interviewer, without detailing the time that she flipped over another car at Flat Rock Speedway in Michigan. The accident sent her sailing over the wall, into the track’s retaining screen and on to the hospital, where she was kept under watch for two days before returning to the cockpit a week later, with bruises but no broken bones.

After a less painful race a few years later, a male driver confronted Wood and vowed that he and the other men would “go on strike” if she kept at it. “How would you like to go to work the next day,” she recalled the man saying, “and have them say to you, ‘I thought you were a race driver? How come you let that woman run rings around you?’ “

She decided to retire, later telling Autoweek, “I had had enough.”

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 almost to the end of her life. Her Florida license was revoked when she was 98.

“The worst thing they could have done to me,” Wood said.

Wood started racing at a time when most competitive drivers were amateurs and hobbyists, without the multimillion-dollar corporate sponsorships of today’s competitors. 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. “Auto Speed Champ Whiz at Housework,” the Detroit Times declared in 1955.

The 5-foot-3 Wood cut a striking figure at the racetrack, donning colorful scarves and sometimes striding through the pit in a skirt and high heels. But she was all business in the car, drawing on a knowledge of automobiles that she traced to a childhood spent hanging out with six brothers. “I had to tinker with cars or be left out of everything,” she explained.

Wood competed at shorttrack races in Michigan in addition to setting records at NASCAR speed trials, notably at Daytona International Speedway and what was then called Atlanta International Raceway. At those events, she followed in the stead of women such as Sara Christian, Ethel Mobley and Louise Smith, who began competing in NASCAR soon after the association held its first sanctioned race in 1948.

“Not only was she doing something that was unheard of at the time in following the beat of her own drum, she was doing it well,” said Julia Landauer, who races in NASCAR’s Whelen Euro Series. “When I think of women in racing, I think of people like Janet Guthrie, Shirley Muldowney, Shawna Robinson. They got more press. . . but I think that Vicki Wood should be in that pantheon.”

The fourth of seven children, Victoria Rose Raczak was born in Detroit on March 15, 1919. Her father was a contractor, her mother a homemaker. After graduating high school Vicki married Tom Fitzpatrick, who served in the Army during World War II and was killed when he picked up a live hand grenade in Germany.

In 1947 she married Clarence “Skeeter” Wood, a furniture salesman who had four children from a previous marriage. Wood helped raise the three youngest – Ed, Donna and Wayne – who survive her, in addition to many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her stepson Bob Wood died in 2015, following Skeeter’s death in 2000.

Wood started racing on a challenge from her husband, whose own racing career was cut short by injuries. Together they watched a powder-puff race at their local track, Motor City Speedway, that left Wood unimpressed.

“The women in that race were so bad,” she told Autoweek last year. “They were all over the track, running into the wall and all that sort of stuff. I said to Skeeter, ‘If I couldn’t drive any better than that, I wouldn’t be out there.’ He didn’t say nothing until the next week when he says, ‘Let’s go to the races.’ “

Instead of joining the spectators in the bleachers, Skeeter led her toward a 1937 Dodge coupe in the pit. “Okay, smarty,” he told her. “You think you’re so good, here’s a car. Now go out there.” With no training or experience, she finished ninth. The next night, she won a powder-puff race on the dirt at nearby Mount Clemens. A week later, she won on the asphalt at Flat Rock. “It just kept on that way,” Wood said.

According to the Michigan Motor Sports Hall of Fame, which inducted Wood in November, she was the first woman to race with the men at Flat Rock. Her success paved the way for an invitation to Daytona Beach for NASCAR’s 1955 Speed Week, where Wood was handed the keys to a Chrysler 300.

Her initial trepidation at driving on the beach – “How in the world can you drive on sand?” – gave way to elation, as she finished third in the speed trial championships, racing against the clock rather than other drivers.

Wood went on to receive special permission from NASCAR founder Bill France to try for a speed record at the newly opened Daytona speedway in 1959, only to be stopped by someone who told her women weren’t allowed in the pit area. “Bill France comes up and says, ‘Vicki Wood is not a woman,’ “she later told Autoweek. “‘She’s a driver, and she’s allowed in the pits.’ “

She topped 130 mph in a Pontiac, setting a women’s record.

A year later, Wood returned to Daytona Beach and had the fastest one-way run on the sand in history – “a huge accomplishment,” said veteran racing journalist Tom Jensen, that will probably endure with the beach now closed to racers.

“Because she’s somebody who only raced sporadically, and only raced locally, she did not have the global impact that somebody might today,” said Jensen, the curatorial affairs manager at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. “In today’s information age, where everything’s on the Internet, if a woman set the record she did in 1960 it would be headline news all over the country.”