In my era, there were so few women that were racing at my level, You never really thought about yourself as: ‘I’m a woman in this race.’ You don’t think of yourself as something else. I was always the underdog because I never had funding and I was always given these cars to drive without any practice — I was always thrown in the deep end. For me it was always a concentration of what I was doing in this race car.

The biggest problem is there’s never really enough funding for a woman to complete all the steps, It’s opportunity, what team you’re in, the funding you have and so forth. I was expecting someone to come up when I saw one or two drivers come up that had a fair amount of talent, but they never quite got to where they needed to go.