https://racer.com/2025/11/06/racers-...h-tony-stewart



By RACER Staff - Nov 6, 2025, 1:09 PM ET

Racers Roundtable: Lyn St James, Sarah Fisher and Linda Vaughn in conversation with Tony Stewart

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“I started in SCCA in a freaking Ford Pinto. My very first race, I drive it into a lake.”

Lyn St James, Sarah Fisher and Linda Vaughn have all been hugely influential figures within motorsport. But even icons have to start somewhere, as St James relates in her conversation with Tony Stewart, Fisher and Vaughn in this episode of Racers Roundtable on RACER Network.

St James continues the story of her inauspicious start.

“I lost concentration, and I ended up in this pond in Florida. Everything has, you know, water everywhere.”

“Is that Moroso?” Vaughn asks.

“Yeah, at Moroso,” St James says. “The car totally submerged, and I got out. They said it looked like I walked on water, because I opened the door, and I got out, and then I stood on the side, and I turned around, and I watched the car go, 'Blub, blub.' The car totally disappeared, and the cars are going around the racetrack, and I’m standing there like an idiot.

“And I’m thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t the thing I really should be doing’. We flat-towed the car home, and it was my street car. I mean, it makes no sense, but I was determined, and I just said, “I just gotta work harder, and I’m gonna figure this out.”

As three women who forged very different paths within racing, St James, Fisher and Vaughn have all been forced to overcome significant obstacles. Many might assume gender to be one of them, but St James believes that the bigger barrier is one that everybody who aspires to a life in racing must face.

"I read Peter Revson’s book when I was recovering from a crash, and when I realized what he went through because he was the Revson family, and then he was the pretty boy and all that, and the struggles that he went through to get respect from Formula 1 drivers, crew members, and teams, and all that, and I was like, 'You know, Lyn, just get over it'," St James recalls.

"Just show up. You’ve got to earn the respect of every person, and you have to learn about them to figure out what they know that you can learn from. And it changed my whole thinking. It wasn’t about being a woman. It wasn’t about anything. And every rookie... when a rookie shows up in any series, everybody’s gonna make it really hard, to test them out.

"The only thing that differentiates us from anybody else is maybe our gender, but the reality is we’re racers, you know?"

Sit back and enjoy an unfiltered chat between some giants of the sport, in a conversation that touches on everything from St James and Fisher going wheel-to-wheel at Indy in 2000, to why Vaughn will never drive a Top Fuel car again.

 

https://www.tamparacing.com/forums/d...ml#post9464621

 

Linda Vaughn Sold Her Hurst Olds to Pay Bills. The Industry Made Her a Hall of Famer

Burnout Society
5.54K subscribers


4,088 views May 13, 2026 #NHRA #DragRacing #LindaVaughn
For sixty years Linda Vaughn was the most recognizable promotional figure in American motorsports. She was the face of the Hurst brand from 1966 forward, she generated millions of dollars in shifter sales, she trained the Hurstettes, she helped architect the original Pro Stock factory money program, and she became the only promotional figure ever inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America. What she was never given, across that entire six decade run, was a piece of the brand she helped build. In this documentary we trace the contractual reality behind the Miss Hurst

Golden Shifter program from the 1966 hiring through every corporate sale that followed, from Sunbeam in 1970 to Cars and Concepts in 1977 to Mr. Gasket buying Hurst Performance for 3.3 million dollars in 1987 to Holley Performance Products, the publicly traded six hundred million dollar a year parent company that owns the Hurst name today. The story turns on a 1979 Hurst Olds she owned for forty years and had to sell during the pandemic to a collector named Bruce Smith, and the 2022 Autoweek interview in which she said, in her own words, that she sold the car to pay the bills.

That same car now sits on display in the main showroom of the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in Daytona Beach, in the same building she was inducted into in 2019. This is the story of how she ended up there, what the industry actually owed her, and what it actually paid. Fact driven, fully sourced, and built for an audience that lived through the era and never heard this part of it. #LindaVaughn#MissHurstGoldenShifter#HurstOlds#DragRacing#NHRA#MotorsportsHistory#MuscleCarEra#HurstPerformance#ProStock#FirstLadyOfMotorsports#DragRacingHistory#MotorsportsHallOfFame#ClassicMotorsports#BurnoutSociety