Celebrating 78 Years of Women in NASCAR

While motorsports are a mixed-gender sport, they have been predominantly male-based for their entire existence. Several women, however, have competed in various forms of racing throughout the decades and have found success. In honor of Women’s History Month, we will be documenting several of the iconic women in NASCAR’s 78-year history.

The top step of the NASCAR ladder is the Cup Series, which has seen 17 women compete. Three women have competed in the sport’s biggest race, the Daytona 500, with none making more starts than Danica Patrick.

Patrick has far and away made the most starts by a woman at the highest level of the sport with 191, and seven starts in the Daytona 500, also the most by a woman. In 2008, she became the first woman to win an IndyCar race at Twin Ring Motegi in Japan. However, that success did not necessarily translate to stock cars, as her best career finish was sixth place at Atlanta Motor Speedway in 2014, one of her seven career top 10s.

Janet Guthrie is another trailblazer for women in NASCAR, making 33 Cup Series starts from 1976-1980. In 1977, the Iowa City native became the first woman to qualify for both the Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500, doing so in the same year, nonetheless. In 1967 and 1970, she won in her respective class at the 12 Hours of Sebring, one of racing’s biggest endurance races.

Off the track, Guthrie has been one of motorsport’s biggest activists for women, as she hopes that today’s young female racers do not experience the level of sexism she did. After failing to qualify for the 1976 Indianapolis 500, many drivers claimed it was because she was a woman. A.J. Foyt, often regarded as the greatest IndyCar driver of all time, was so angered by this that he loaned his backup car to Guthrie to test, and her times were more than well enough to qualify.

In an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary released in 2019, she said, “You can go back to antiquity to find women doing extraordinary things, but their history is forgotten. Or denied to have ever existed. So women keep reinventing the wheel. Women have always done these things, and they always will.”

Perhaps NASCAR’s best female racer was the very first one: Sara Christian. Christian competed in the very first NASCAR Cup Series race on June 14, 1949, in Charlotte, and raced in all but two races in NASCAR’s inaugural season. In the seventh race of the season at Heidelberg Raceway in Pittsburgh, Christian scored what is to this day the only top-five finish by a woman in the highest level of the sport.

Iowa is historically one of sport’s biggest spots for female athletes, producing talent like Caitlin Clark, Shawn Johnson, Janet Guthrie, as previously mentioned, and Des Moines native Shawna Robinson.

Robinson is a true trailblazer for women in motorsports, as in 1988, she became the first woman to ever win a NASCAR touring series race, doing so in the now-defunct Dash Series at New Asherville Speedway. She followed this up with two more wins in 1989 and made her lone Daytona 500 start in 2002, which was her best career Cup Series finish of 24th across her eight starts.

Three other women have won a combined six NASCAR touring series races, those being Hailie Deegan and Gracie Trotter in the ARCA West Series and Regina Sirvent in the Mexico Truck Series, all from 2018 to 2020.

Katherine Legge is the lone woman competing in the Cup Series as of 2026, racing part-time for B.J. McLeod’s Live Fast Racing. The O’Reilly Series has Natalie Decker competing part-time for Cedar Rapids native Joey Gase’s team, and the Truck Series has Toni Breidinger racing part-time for Rackley WAR Racing.

The various ARCA series are where the potential to win multiple races lies, with three-time race winner Hailie Deegan returning to the West Series in 2026 full-time, along with 18-year-old Mia Lovell for Nitro Motorsports, a team synonymous with winning. Isabella Robusto, who has loads of potential, is competing full-time in the National ARCA Series with Nitro Motorsports. Jade Avedisian and Taylor Reimer, two drivers with tremendous potential, are also making select ARCA starts in 2026 for race-winning teams.

Other full-timers include Quinn Davis and Logan Misuraca in the ARCA East series, and Regina Sirvent in the NASCAR Mexico Challenge Series.

These are just a fraction of the women who have competed in NASCAR throughout the years, and their history dates back to NASCAR’s beginnings. While we have still not seen a woman win a Cup Series race, it could only be a matter of time with the young talent working through the ranks and determined to achieve such a breakthrough.