Danica Patrick: Fit Bird Wins Race

It's a well-known and proven fact that girls can't drive. A quick Google image search for "women drivers" reveals the truth of it: photos of cars straddled between jetties and boats. SUVs on three wheels at filling stations and parked on rocks.

Stranded in mud, jammed between trucks, upside-down, fallen from bridges, half-mounted on fences and central reservations with two or three or sometimes four wheels high in the air. Driving along briskly with petrol hoses dangling from filler necks. It's irrefutably, unarguably and utterly true. Girls can't drive.

Why, though? Why? That's the question. Why? Why can't women drive? Why? Is it to do with hand-eye coordination? Does the art and skill of driving not matter enough to females? Can decent, attentive, precise driving not be part of the female psyche? Can it not occupy even the smallest corner of the female mind? Is it not something women can be interested enough in? Is it a spatial awareness issue? Possibly.

But the core of it is this: You need to be proud to be a good driver, you need to have a decent understanding of what the car is doing, how it works mechanically, you need to want to drive well. You need to be a man.

Clearly, womens' lack of driving skill makes them unsuitable for motor racing. That's why you don't see many women in race cars. It's the psychological makeup thing — no interest, no ability, no skill, slow. There aren't many females in racing because the ability to understand the car and drive it at the limit is simply not there.

It's not down to numbers or probabilities, no. It's skill deficiency, a simple lack of ability to drive any car fast. But on April 21, 2008, Danica Patrick won a major international open-wheeler race at Motegi in Japan, a 200-lap Indy Racing League (IRL) race on an oval where the average speed was 164.258 mph. Average. Danica Patrick is a woman.

This caused unrest at Top Gear magazine because we didn't understand it. At a planning meeting, we men — great drivers, all — sat down and tried to talk it through. Brows were creased. There were frowns. And more than a little angst. There was even a bit of nervous paper-shuffling and the occasional cough.

Some of us scurried around the place before we sat down, like chickens, not knowing which way to walk or look. We didn't know what the hell we were doing because we didn't know what the hell was going on.That figure again: 164.258 mph.

A girl? Beating men? International racing men, world-class driver men? No. Surely she would be too busy thinking about the ironing and go straight off the track? Ha-ha. Was she hurrying because she needed to get home and put the supper on? Mwah-ha-ha. And how did she get to the finish? Surely she would have got lost along the way? Ha-ha. Ah-ha-ha. Haaaah. Hmm. Umm.

She got lucky.

That's it. Luck. It was all about luck. Look at the race report. She took a punt on fuel strategy that paid off, which meant Scott Dixon, Dan Wheldon, Tony Kanaan and Ed Carpenter (all men) had to pit for fuel. They pitted with six laps to go, leaving Patrick in the lead. She conserved enough fuel to make it to the finish, while second-place driver Helio Castroneves (another man) almost ran dry.

Luck.

There was silence for a moment as we thought about it, and then one of us, probably the greatest of all the great driving men sitting around that table, shook his head and said sagely, "In motor racing, you make your own luck."

He went on: "Many great drivers have lost races through bad luck. Many great drivers have won races through good luck. Danica Patrick won that race, end of story. Luck is not a factor. She just won it."

He continued to talk about the Indianapolis 500 in 2005, Danica's first Indy in her rookie year, when she led for 19 laps and almost won it. Bad luck played its part at the end, and she finished fourth.

Then he mentioned her qualifying run at Mid-Ohio last year, when she put her car on the front row of the grid. Mid-Ohio is no oval — it's a proper, challenging road course, with right-hand turns as well as left. Second on the grid. And then someone said what we were all trying not to think, the thing we could never say. "Jeez. She's...it's possible that...it's possible that she's...she's quick."

And so it came to pass that a girl from Beloit, Wisc., made all the smug, sexist so-called hard-driving males of the world stop their joking. That TG office conversation you just read was fictional, of course. Now even the fiction ends.

We spoke to Susie Stoddart, a Scottish driver in Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM), probably the second-highest-rated race series in the world after F1, about what it's like to be a woman in top-flight motorsport.

"Obviously, you're a female in a man's world," says Susie, "but you tend to take it lightheartedly. There is a stigma there, but then you go out and prove them wrong. Men have such big egos! They think they're the best. They don't think a female can compete at their level. But you get nice comments, too. Drivers come up to me and say, 'It's tough out there, I respect you for doing what you're doing,' and that means a lot.

"But more than anything else, I love racing, I love the cars, I have a lot of passion for the sport. It's fantastic. I know it's unusual for me to be here, but I love it, so why not? And when I was a little girl, there were no role models. If little girls of 4, 5 or 6 see what Danica is doing, they might think, 'That's what I want to do when I grow up,' and get serious about karting."

There aren't many females in racing because the ability to understand the car and drive it at the limit is simply not there.

Other women have proved Susie's point. Lella Lombardi outqualified the likes of Graham Hill on her day. She finished sixth in the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuic. Less than two-thirds of the race had been run — it was stopped after a crash that killed five spectators — so the drivers were only awarded half-points.

That meant Lella scored half a point, the first and only points scored by a woman in F1. She also raced a NASCAR at Daytona, and won in sports cars. She died in 1992 of cancer, at only 51 years of age.

Why can't women drive? Well, they can, of course. They can drive every bit as well as men. Get karting, girls. Get karting.