AN APPRECIATION

Lyn St. James, driver, Dick Simon Racing

One in an occasional series.

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

It is said that auto racing is a young man's game.

So what is a fiftysomething woman doing in the field of the 2000 Indianapolis 500-Mile Race?

If your name is Lyn St. James, you're no ordinary woman.

This road-racing veteran and multiple Indy 500 starter has been doing much since her last foray at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1998. She has turned her focus onto sports media, doing television and writing columns.

She has also been working behind the scenes, whether as the first executive director of the Women's Global GT (WGGT) series, spearheading the diversity program of the CART FedEx Championship Series, or working with the Women's Sports Foundation. She has also given her efforts to help the daughter of fellow driver Al Unser Jr. in her personal fight against transverse myelitis.

It has not been easy for the woman who gained reknown for driving a car dubbed "The Spirit Of The American Woman," qualifying repeatedly for the Indy 500. She has more starts at Indianapolis than any other woman.

Her finishes, however, have been checkered: drivetrain problem with a few laps to go in 1993, clipping the back of another driver in 1994 while slowing down for an accident put her some 30 laps down, getting caught in the midst of Stan Fox's near-fatal Turn One crash in 1995, getting taken out by a rookie driver's mistake in 1997, getting pinched on the outside in the 2000 race.

In recent years, just making the race has been an adventure on and off the racetrack. St. James didn't have a ride going into the 1998 Indy Racing League (IRL) season. Deals were made, deals fell through. But then, she got hold of sponsorship from the Lifetime television network, and suddenly, she was back in her element.

"I know it wasn't appropriate, but I felt like crying just for a couple of seconds when I went out," St. James said after she she shook the car down before qualifications in 1998. "Just for a second, I thought about what I had gone through to get here this year, and what a big financial gamble this is. Still, in that moment I knew this is my destiny. For me, it's not being in the garage area, it's not walking around the pits, it's that moment when I am in my car, all buckled in, looking through my helmet's visor at the scoring pylon, and I'm on pit road heading out onto the track. I'm in my space; my turf; where I'm meant to be."

She, however, did not make the field, and spent a long year and a half on the fringes of the racing community, working on foundations, serving on advisory panels.

In 2000, she came back with her trusted friend Dick Simon, driving the familiar No. 90 down the 50-foot-wide tunnel of pavement at more than 230 miles an hour. After a frightening qualifying crash on Pole Day, she made the field in the last row just before the end of Bubble Day.

"I've stretched (my career) later than most, but then again, I was always a late bloomer," she said to the Indianapolis Star-News. "I didn't get started in racing until I was 24."

But perhaps St. James' greatest legacy in motorsports is the fact that a second woman made the Indy 500 in 2000. Sarah Fisher, the teenage hotshoe from the sprint car ranks, is on the well-funded Derrick Walker operation, and had a quick car. Unfortunately, she wound up nudging St. James into the wall about a third of the way into the race.

While the irony of "the two women taking each other out of the race" was undoubtedly a subplot to the 2000 race result, there was another irony which cannot be overlooked.

"It just dawned on me that the men are going to be surrounded by women, with Sarah (Fisher) being the youngest driver (19) and me being the oldest (53)," St. James told The Star-News.