Denise McCluggage

Denise McCluggage was a Kansas-born journalist and race car driver who carved out dual careers as both a pioneering female competitor in sports car racing and one of the most respected automotive journalists of her generation—proving that you didn’t have to choose between writing about the action and being in it.

EARLY YEARS

Born January 20, 1927, in El Dorado, Kansas, McCluggage grew up primarily in Topeka as one of three sisters in a lawyer’s family. Her father, Robert McCluggage, and mother, Velma, raised their daughters in a household that clearly didn’t put much stock in limiting what girls could do. After high school, she headed west to Mills College in Oakland, California, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1947—an early indication that this woman had brains to match her nerve. Her first job after college led her into journalism, initially covering women’s features before she decided that was boring as hell and carved her own path into what would today be called “extreme sports”—racing, skiing, and sky diving. She briefly married actor Michael Conrad (who would later win two Emmy awards as Sgt. Phil Esterhaus on “Hill Street Blues”), but the marriage lasted less than a year. Clearly, domesticity wasn’t going to hold her back.

OTHER INTERESTS

McCluggage wasn’t just about cars—she was an accomplished skier, photographer, and writer whose interests spanned far beyond the racetrack. In 1977, she authored “The Centered Skier,” a book that mixed Eastern philosophy with skiing technique and became something of a cult classic. Her photographs hung in museums and galleries across America, including the Peterson Automotive Museum. She even parachuted out of an airplane because, apparently, racing cars and skiing mountains weren’t quite enough adrenaline. Her syndicated column “Drive, She Said” appeared in some 90 newspapers, proving she could command attention with her words as effectively as she could with a steering wheel. Her circle of friends in New York during the racing years included Steve McQueen (with whom she had a brief affair after meeting over their mutual love of MG-TCs), James Baldwin, Briggs Cunningham, and Miles Davis—a crew that suggests she was as comfortable in intellectual and artistic circles as she was in the paddock.

EARLY SUCCESS

McCluggage started racing in the mid-1950s while living in New York, and she didn’t mess around with small ambitions. Legendary team owner Briggs Cunningham assigned her a Jaguar XK140 (chassis number S818207) to race, and she drove it well and often, most famously at SCCA races at New York’s Montgomery and Thompson Raceway. In 1956, she was racing an Osca MT4 in Nassau and a Jaguar XK140 at Thompson. By 1957, she was co-driving Cunningham’s Porsche 550 RS with Ruth Levy at Caracas. In 1959, she drove a Porsche RS to victory at Thompson Raceway in Connecticut, becoming the first woman to win a feature sports car race there—a breakthrough that announced she wasn’t just participating, she was winning.

NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS

• 1959: First woman to win a feature sports car race at Thompson Raceway in Connecticut, driving a Porsche RS.
• 1960: Placed fifth overall at the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen on September 24—the only woman to compete in the race that day.
• 1961: Won the GT class at the 12 Hours of Sebring driving a Ferrari 250 GT SWB with co-driver Allen Eager (a tenor saxophonist), finishing 10th overall and 1st in GT3.0—after driving the car from New York to Florida and back.
• 1963: Drove in the RAC Rally in a Ford Falcon but went off the road on the second stage.
• 1964: Took a class win at the Monte Carlo Rally in an Alan Mann Racing Ford Falcon Sprint, co-driving with Anne Hall.
• 1985: Became the first woman to receive the Ken W. Purdy Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism.
• Career: Received the Dean Batchelor Lifetime Achievement Award; was the only journalist inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame during her lifetime.
• 2022: Inducted posthumously into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America on March 8.

McCluggage raced at the Nürburgring three times and competed in major international rallies including the RAC, Acropolis, Alpine, and Liege-Sofia-Liege. She drove Porsches, Maseratis, Ferraris, and various other marques, often partnering with another female driver, Pinkie Rollo. She described her first Ferrari—a dark blue 250 GT—as a “mouthful of a car,” which is exactly the kind of vivid phrase that made her journalism so readable. She ended her racing career in the late 1960s but never stopped writing about cars.

INSPIRATIONS

While specific inspirations aren’t detailed in the research, McCluggage’s trajectory suggests she was inspired by the pure joy of speed and the intellectual challenge of mastering machines. Her friendships with artists, musicians, and thinkers—combined with her racing relationships with figures like Briggs Cunningham and Phil Hill—indicate she drew motivation from excellence in any form, not just automotive achievement.

REPUTATION

McCluggage was responsible, as much as anyone, for the spectacular rise in popularity of sports car racing in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s. Her writing was sharp, intelligent, and accessible—she could make you care about a race or a car whether you knew anything about either. As a journalist, she held the Ken W. Purdy Award and the Dean Batchelor Lifetime Achievement Award, and was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame—the only journalist to receive that honor during her lifetime. As a driver, she commanded respect from male competitors not because she was a woman who could drive, but because she was a damn good driver, period. She created her own niche in a world that didn’t necessarily have a place for her and refused to be pigeonholed into “women’s” anything. Denise McCluggage passed away in 2015, leaving behind a legacy as both a trailblazer and a storyteller who made motorsports more interesting for everyone who came after her.

FUTURE GOALS/PLANS

McCluggage passed away in 2015, so there are no future goals or plans to report.

REFERENCES

Denise McCluggage – Automotive Hall of Fame
Denise McCluggage: Racecar Journalist on 4 Wheels – CRS Automotive
Lady Leadfoot – Sports Illustrated
About Denise McCluggage – DeniseMcCluggage.com
Denise McCluggage – Briggs Cunningham
Denise McCluggage – Wikipedia
Denise McCluggage (USA) – All Results – Racing Sports Cars
Nostalgia: McCluggage at Sebring, 1961 – RRDC
Denise McCluggage – Legendary Drivers – Alan Mann Racing
Denise McCluggage – Kansas Oil Museum (PDF)
Denise McCluggage – Motorsports Hall of Fame
Denise McCluggage: The First Lady of Racing – MotorTrend
Neon-Lined and Tuned In: Denise McCluggage Embodied – Hagerty
Legendary Denise McCluggage Joins Motorsports Hall of Fame – Autoweek
Denise McCluggage, 1927-2015 – Hemmings