Legendary ‘Lady Leadfoot’ was a motor sports icon

World-famous race car driver Denise McCluggage simply cannot be contained within a 600-word column limit. So, here’s “part 2” of her story. 

Nicknamed “Lady Leadfoot,” her personality filled the entire track area. She was a fan favorite in the 1950s and ’60s. 

McCluggage especially loved driving sports cars and competing in Grand Prix-style races on road courses. Her favorite ride was a Ferrari 250 GT.

 

In 2013, McCluggage reflected on her career during an interview with Rick Peterson, a sportswriter in her hometown of Topeka, Kansas.

“I happened to have a knack for it, and that’s all you needed then,” she said. “You just went racing, and if someone liked the way you were driving, they offered you a car.” 

It was “a friendlier time, with no barriers between fans, journalists and drivers,” wrote Amy Wallace, a freelance journalist based in Pasadena, Calif. 

“The world of sports car racing in these years possessed a beautiful and paradoxical character,” Wallace said. She cited author Todd McCarthy who said racing in the 1950s “was an elegant pursuit open to anyone who cared to engage it and on whatever basis you wanted; you could visit on weekends or succumb to it entirely; you could…do it just for the fun and thrills or take it very seriously indeed.” 

“And, for a brief window of time, you could also be female,” McCarthy said.

Wallace said women athletes in other sports may have faced more difficulty in breaking through, but “car racing in the 1950s was oddly welcoming. Perhaps because of its rag-tag, upstart nature, the sport was wide open – a near-meritocracy.” 

“Later, McCluggage would recall the precise moment when she realized that her cherished upstart of a sport was growing up.” It was in 1962 at Meadowdale Raceway, in Carpentersville, Ill. 

“I knew things were changing when I drove my Ferrari racing car from New York City to Chicago, all alone, no mechanic…and I saw that my competition, two Corvettes, had arrived on a double-decked trailer,” McCluggage commented. 

“I said, ‘Oh, no, this is different.’” 

Her last official race was in 1967. It was easy to walk away, she said, because racing had always been, for her, a means to something else, Wallace wrote. 

“For me, it was a path,” McCluggage said, “rather than a destination.”

 

She was a sports journalist who covered motor sports by racing against the men. It was the only way for a woman in the 1950s to gain access to the garage, the pits and the press box. 

It was all part of McCluggage’s master plan to achieve greatness as one who wrote about racing sports. She continued to write until she died in 2015 at age 88. 

McCluggage, who graduated in 1947 from Mills College in Oakland, Calif., with a degree in philosophy, was quick to debate anyone and everyone who challenged whether race car driving was a “real sport.” 

She cited novelist Ernest Hemingway, who said: “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” 

McCluggage added a fourth sport to that list – horseracing. “Race car drivers were no different than jockeys,” she’d say. “They were skilled pilots; you couldn’t win without them.” 

Auto racing wasn’t McCluggage’s only interest. By her own words, she “dabbled” in interior decorating, competitive snow skiing, parachuting and bungee jumping. She said she led “a smorgasbord sort of life. Maybe I’ll come back sometime and have a full-course dinner.”