Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney may no longer reach speeds of 300 miles an hour, but she’s still keeping up a pretty good pace.
A legend in the sport of hot rod drag racing, the longtime Schenectady resident is now 84 and living in Huntersville, North Carolina, about 20 minutes north of Charlotte. While she no longer sits behind the wheel and competes against the best drivers in the world, she remains a big name in the sport, making personal appearances at least a dozen times each year at several top races around the country.
“I keep pretty busy going to events and meeting with the fans,” said Muldowney, who became the first female to earn a National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) license back in 1965. “I provide posters for the fans, I shake a lot of hands, pose for a lot of selfies. It’s a whole weekend for me.”
A longtime fan favorite, Muldowney is quite at ease with her fame. But the reason she remains so involved in her sport and such a popular figure is not because of all the adulation she receives. Instead, it’s her desire to help others whose life has often been a struggle. “Shirley’s Kids,” a non-profit charity created in 2015 by Texas restaurateur Stan Holt, is aimed at helping children in the drag racing community dealing with financial or medical issues.
“Stan was a drag racer himself who is now a very successful businessman,” said Muldowney. “He wanted to start a charity and he named it after me. That’s how it all began, and I’m very happy to be a part of it.”
Muldowney started racing at Fonda Speedway in Montgomery County in 1959 and won her first NHRA title in 1977. She went on to win 18 national titles and three world championships. Her racing career, however, actually started on the streets of Schenectady when she was only 15. Jack Muldowney, whose family owned a gas station at the corner of Union and Regents streets near Central Park, was the individual who realized her potential and provided her with cars and his expertise as a mechanic.
He also married her when Muldowney, whose maiden name was Roque, was just 16. Jack was only 19.
“I didn’t have a car of my own but I met a guy named Jack Muldowney and that’s where it all began,” said “Cha Cha,” who was born in June of 1940 in Burlington, Vermont, and moved to Schenectady with her family in the early 1950s. “It just seemed natural to me. There was a group of us, mostly kids, that were racing cars down the streets of Schenectady.”
Those escapades helped her get to know former Schenectady Police Officer Guy Barbieri, a bit of a legend himself when it comes to older Schenectadians. Barbieri died in 2001.
“He was a great guy, and we stayed in touch after I moved to Michigan right up until he passed away,” said Muldowney. “We had great fun, and I never got into any trouble.”
Muldowney’s early career was mostly behind the wheel of a Funny Car, but in 1973 she moved up to the premier class of the National Hot Rod Association, the Top Fuel category. That’s where she remained in the elite class – racing against the top men – for the next decade. Two years after winning her third title in 1982, she suffered serious injuries in a crash. She managed to get back behind the wheel following her injury and raced for another 15 years before finally retiring for good. Her life story was turned into a Hollywood movie, “Heart Like A Wheel, starring Bonnie Bedalia as Shirley, Leo Rossi as Jack Muldowney and Beau Bridges as Connie Kalitta, another legend in the sport of drag racing. The movie, released in 1983, received mostly good reviews, and Muldowney said she liked it, with a few small reservations.
“It was very good for the sport, and I thought it was pretty well done,” she said. “Hollywood came knocking so of course we took advantage of it in any way we could for the good of the sport. But Hollywood wanted a love story and I wanted a racing story. That was the only problem I had with it.”
While Shirley and Jack divorced in 1972, they remained good friends and stayed in touch until his death in 2007. She married Ryan Tobler, another top NHRA mechanic, in 1988, but the couple are no longer together. Muldowney’s only child from her first marriage, a son named John who worked on her crew and many others in NHRA races, died of a blood clot in 2017.
To be sure, Muldowney wasn’t a woman who managed to survive in a sport dominated by men. She thrived in it. Along with her three world championships and 18 national titles, she finished second in nine national races. She rebounded from her serious crash in 1984 to win Comeback Driver of the Year in 1987, and in 1989 she captured her final NHRA title. She returned to the Fonda oval in July 2002 and spent hours at the track signing autographs for her legion of fans.
She had spent much of her adult life living in Michigan before heading south to North Carolina in 2014. She says she was never afraid when she got behind the wheel of a race car, Not even when she reached 327 miles an hour, her personal best.
“If you’re afraid of what you’re doing, then you’re in the wrong place,” she said. “If you’re nervous, apprehensive in any way, then you need to try something else.”
Muldowney’s last public appearance in Schenectady was in 2005 at a hot rod/custom car show at the old Center City. While surgery forced her to miss her 2006 induction into the Schenectady City School District Athletic Hall of Fame, she would return to the area from time to time to see her mother and sister. Her mom, Mabel Scarborough Roque, died in 2017 at the age of 99, and her sister, Laura Roque, passed away in 2021.
“I still have a nephew in the area, and last year I was there because I was doing some research for a FOX documentary that they did,” she said. “I have a lot of great memories from Schenectady, but since my mom and sister passed away, I don’t have that many occasions to get back there.”
Muldowney, who left Nott Terrace High School in Schenectady after her junior year, said that becoming the first woman to be inducted into the city school district’s Hall of Fame was one of the highlights of her life.
“I’m in 13 different Hall of Fames, so that means I’ve been around a while,” said Muldowney, who was also inducted into the Eastern Motor Sports Hall of Fame in 2018. “It took a lot of courage. The sport wasn’t in its infancy perhaps, but it was in its early days, and there were a lot of people wondering what I was doing there. But most of it was fun, and I can remember how great it felt to get up at Fonda and and some of the other area tracks and beat the guys.”
Knowles had her night
Back in 1959 and 1960, when Muldowney really began regularly outracing many of the men, there were very few other women among the competitors. Lorraine Knowles of Schenectady, was one of the handful of young ladies who gave automobile racing a try.
“We were both from Schenectady, but I lived in the Carman area and we never really crossed paths other than at Fonda,” said Knowles, whose maiden name was Becker. “We also never really got to know each other that well because when we were racing at Fonda, in the pits she’d be at one end of the track and I was usually at the other. I was kind of doing it as a lark, only doing it in ‘59 and ‘60, and she was pretty serious and went on to be one of the greatest of all time.”
However, on a Wednesday night in 1960 at Fonda, Knowles actually came out on top in a race against Muldowney.
“My brothers were very much into the racing at Fonda, and on Wednesday nights, I’d be bored with nothing to do, so I would go up there with them and that’s how I started racing,” said Knowles. “I mostly got beat, and Shirley always beat me except for once.
“I can’t remember any other women up there except for me and Shirley, and we were competing in the super-stock division,” remembered Knowles. “I had a Corvette and she had a Corvette. It was fun, and that one time I beat her kind of set off a celebration on our end. We were all so happy. But she ended up doing so very well. I congratulate her on all of her success. She went on to do great things.”
