Shirley Muldowney changed drag racing by refusing to stay in the stands. Shirley Muldowney Top Fuel history starts with a first: she was the first woman to earn a license in the NHRA’s fastest class. Then she went further. She won three world championships, in 1977, 1980 and 1982.
No Top Fuel racer had ever won three titles before her. That record alone would make her a hall of famer. However, the path she took to get there is what makes her story worth retelling.
She came up the hard way, building a career from street racing to the biggest stage in the sport. Along the way, she collected firsts that stand in the record books.
From Schenectady streets to a pro license
Muldowney was born Shirley Roque on June 19, 1940, in Burlington, Vermont. She grew up in Schenectady, New York, according to her Encyclopedia.com biography. At 16 she married Jack Muldowney, a drag racer and mechanic. At the time, she did not yet know how to drive.
That changed quickly. She began street racing in Schenectady in the 1950s, and her first car was a 1940 Ford fitted with a Cadillac V8. In 1965 she earned her NHRA professional license. She also raced Funny Cars in the early 1970s and reached the final at the 1971 NHRA Nationals in Indianapolis.
In 1973 she moved up to Top Fuel. According to the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame, that step made her the first woman to hold a license in the class. The NHRA itself lists that first at the top of her record.
Learning to win in a Top Fuel dragster
The early results took patience. Muldowney failed to qualify twice before she made her first Top Fuel start at the 1974 Winternationals, NHRA National Dragster editor Phil Burgess wrote in a history of female Top Fuel drivers. She won her first round a year later, at the 1975 Springnationals. Later that weekend she lost the final to Marvin Graham.
Even so, 1975 brought big moments. She finished runner-up to Don Garlits at the U.S. Nationals. At that same event, she became the first woman to make a five-second pass.
The breakthrough arrived in 1976. In her sixth career start, she won the Springnationals and beat Bob Edwards in the final. As a result, she became the first woman to win a Professional class at an NHRA national event. She also qualified No. 1 at the same race with a 6.031-second run, another first for a woman in a Pro category.
Three Shirley Muldowney Top Fuel titles
The 1977 season turned her into a champion. She won three straight summer races, at Columbus, Englishtown and Montreal, according to the NHRA’s ranking of its top 75 moments. Then she took the title in a runaway. Her points total finished more than 16 round-wins ahead of runner-up Pat Dakin.
That May, she also ran 253.52 mph at Orange County International Raceway in Irvine, California. That speed made her the second member of the NHRA’s 250-mph club, behind only Garlits.
In 1980 she won again. The NHRA says that made her the first driver of either gender to repeat as Top Fuel champion in the points era, which began in 1974. Two years later, in 1982, she added a third crown. In fact, she became the first Top Fuel racer to win three world championships under any scoring format.
A career that lasted into 2003
Muldowney kept racing long after those titles. In total, she competed at 186 NHRA national events, 179 of them in Top Fuel, and won 18 of them, the NHRA reports. She remains the only woman to win Top Fuel at the U.S. Nationals. In 1989 she also became the first woman to run a four-second pass, at the Keystone Nationals.
Hollywood noticed her story, too. The 1983 film Heart Like a Wheel covered her life through 1977. Bonnie Bedelia earned an Academy Award nomination for playing her, and Beau Bridges played racer and car builder Connie Kalitta.
Muldowney retired in 2003. By then, she had reached the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 1990. She later joined the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2005.
Her place among women in Top Fuel
The women who followed her show how far ahead she was. Lucille Lee became the second female Top Fuel winner at Atlanta in 1982, nearly six years after Muldowney’s first victory. That same year, Muldowney beat Lee in the Springnationals final, the first all-female Top Fuel final.
Since then, only Brittany Force has matched part of her record. Force won Top Fuel titles in 2017 and 2022, making her the only other woman to win a championship in the class. Still, Muldowney’s three titles remain the most by any woman. In 2001, the NHRA ranked her fifth on its list of the Top 50 drivers in its first 50 years, the only woman on that list.
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