Bonnie Henn

Bonnie, centre, with Janet Guthrie and Lyn St James

Bonnie Henn raced Ferraris and Porsches in IMSA between 1979 and 1985, usually as part of her father, Preston Henn's, team. She and Preston were IMSA’s first father-daughter racing team. Her other team-mates included Kathy Rude, Janet Guthrie and Desiré Wilson.

Bonnie’s career developed in tandem with her father’s. He only began racing two years before she did, having made his money buying disused drive-in cinemas, which he turned into flea markets.

Her first major finish was a seventeenth place at the 1979 Sebring 12 Hours, driving a Ferrari 365 GTB/4 with Lyn St James and Janet Guthrie. They were sponsored by Thunderbird Swap Shop, the Henn family business. Bonnie also entered the IMSA Daytona Finale, driving the Ferrari with Hal Sahlman. They were 28th overall, fifteenth in the GTO class. In between, Preston Henn ran an AMC Pacer for Bonnie in the Daytona 6 Hours. She did not finish. The underpowered Pacer must have been a stark contrast to the Ferrari she was more used to.

In contrast to her first season, 1980 was very quiet, as Bonnie concentrated on developing her driving skills. She was linked to a drive in an Alfa Romeo Alfetta in the Daytona 6 Hours, but did not start. The car belonged to Janis Taylor, who drove instead, with Del Russo Taylor.

1981 could have been her first attempt at the Daytona 24 Hours. Preston put together a Swap Shop team of himself, Bonnie, Desiré Wilson and Marty Hinze. Although she had practised in the team’s Porsche 935, she decided that she did not have enough experience to tackle the race itself, and stepped down. She did race the 935 at the Daytona Finale in November. Preston was her team-mate. They did not finish.

Desiré Wilson became something of a mentor to Bonnie at this time. She gave her advanced driving tuition and supported her through a part-season in IMSA in 1982. Desiré’s race seat with the Swap Shop team was largely down to her work with Bonnie.

Bonnie and Desiré aimed to start 1982 by teaming up again for the Daytona 24 Hours, but Bonnie, along with Janet Guthrie, dropped out. The three worked together again at the Sebring 12 Hours, where they drove a Ferrari 512BB/LM in “Miss Budweiser” colours for North American Racing. For her next race, the Charlotte IMSA round, she shared a Swap Shop Porsche 935 with Preston, and was rewarded with an eleventh place. Her best result of the year was a fourth place in the Daytona 250 Miles. She had jumped into the 935 of Preston and Randy Lanier after her own Swap Shop 935 expired after eight laps.

She raced with Desiré again at Mosport and Road America. At Mosport, she was 24th. Later in the season, she and Preston travelled to Japan to race in the Fuji 6 Hours, in the Ferrari. They crashed out on the tenth lap. At the end of the year, she decided that she no longer wanted to race. Sadly, this meant that Desiré Wilson’s place in the team became redundant.

Having announced her retirement once, Bonnie was persuaded back into action in 1983 with an all-female team, led by Deborah Gregg and carrying her Brumos colours. The third driver in the team was Kathy Rude. They drove a Porsche 924 Carrera in the Daytona 24 Hours and gave Bonnie her best finish of her career: thirteenth. They were sixth in class. Bonnie’s last event with the team was the Sebring 12 Hours. Driving the same car, she was 35th with her two team-mates. After Sebring, she retired for good, aged just 27.

She died suddenly in 2006. She was 49.

(Image from www.lynstjames.com)

The Fast Girl Trophy

Sally Stokes in her Mini

Brands Hatch, 19th May 1963

1. Joey Freeman (Aston Martin Spa Special)
2. Michaelle Burns-Grieg (Austin Mini)
3. Wendy Hamblin (Lotus 7) - fastest lap
4. Sally Minter (Austin A40)
5. Sally Stokes (Austin Mini Cooper S)
6. Ann Glover (Morgan Plus Four)

Anita Taylor (Ford Anglia) - DNF

Jean Dorken (Lotus Ford) - DNF

Entered, finishing position unknown:

Gabriel Konig (Austin Healey Sprite)

Mary Wheeler (Vauxhall VX4/90)

Gillian Sturgess (Daimler SP250)

Isobel Robinson (Ford Anglia)

Kim Stevens (Austin Healey Sprite)

Fritzi Landes (Austin Mini Cooper)

Wendy Atkinson (Austin Mini)

Sylvia Mason (Austin Mini)

Entered, did not race:

Jenny Tudor Owen (MGB)

Rosemary Seers (Sunbeam Rapier?)

Louisa Squires (Porsche 1600)

Tessa Hollis (Austin Healey Sprite)

Jean Aley (Mini Cooper)

The original Fast Girl Trophy was part of the BRSCC’s Members Meeting at Brands that weekend. Fifteen drivers took the start; as many as 21 may have attempted to qualify. The race was open to female drivers in saloon or sports cars and was run in a handicap format.

It was originally scheduled to run for ten laps, but was shortened to twelve minutes. Michaelle Burns-Grieg and Gabriel Konig had a low-speed collision on the formation lap, which had to be dealt with before the race commenced. On the fifth lap, Jean Dorken’s clutch blew up, then Anita Taylor rolled her Anglia after puncturing a tyre on the debris. The resulting pictures were picked up by several daily newspapers, who were all over this story of women drivers and carnage. Anita Taylor joked to a reporter that she would have to do her shopping by bicycle until the car was repaired. Some of the drivers used their own cars, while others were borrowed, from the likes of Chris Craft and Gordon Spice.

The race was won by Joey (Jocelyn) Freeman in an Aston Martin. This was her comeback race after a heavy crash in 1962, and her first all-female event. Anita Taylor and Michaelle Burns-Grieg had previously raced each other in the BSCC, the fore-runner of the BTCC. Fifth-place finisher, Sally Stokes, was making her competition debut. She was better-known as the long-term girlfriend of Jim Clark.

Another Fast Girl Trophy was apparently held at Mallory Park later in the year, but no results are forthcoming.

Full results for the race are rather hard to track down. There were fifteen starters, who were pictured in the Daily Express. One of the names on the list must have either dropped out or not qualified.

I am grateful to Richard Page, John Winfield and Richard Armstrong for their help in finding entry lists.

(Image copyright Alamy)

Rebecca Jackson

Rebecca Jackson is best known for racing Porsches in the UK, and for her “Project Le Mans” plan.

She grew up around motor racing, having been introduced to the sport as a baby by her dad. However, she was never a junior karter and only started competing once she was an adult, with her education finished. After university, she ran her own car sales business, which she started in 2007. For fun, she drove her Subaru Impreza on track days. She set up her own Youtube channel, in which she posted her own car reviews of vehicles she was selling. This was the start of her media career, which progressed in tandem with her racing ambitions.

Her first Porsche was a 924, in 2011, which she raced in the BRSCC’s Porsche championship. The car had cost her £5000, the proceeds from the sale of the Impreza, and was pretty basic. She was eighth overall. Her best finish was fifth, at Oulton Park.

Having gained valuable experience, she was fourth in 2012, having scored her first win at Snetterton, as well as a second and third. That year she also raced a Toyota MR2. Quite early in her career, she picked up a reputation as a wet-track specialist, having prevailed in a number of wet races.

For 2013, she swapped the 924 for a production-class Boxter, remaining in the same championship, but a different class. She won the class comfortably, and was 19th overall, six places above her nearest Boxter rival.

2013 saw her launch “Project Le Mans”, a four-year plan that would end with her racing at Le Mans. She used the Autosport International Show to canvass support. To begin with, this was in the form of spare parts, but she did get some cash sponsors on board.

In 2014, she planned to move into the Race Spec Boxter class, the highest level of Porsche  club competition. However, she opted for the Cartek Roadsports Endurance Series, a production-based championship, run by the 750MC. Her best results were two fifth places, at Snetterton and Silverstone, and she struggled a little with non-finishes and development issues with the Boxter. However, her performances were enough to earn her some good Class B finishes, including a second at Snetterton. Later in the season, she drove in the Birkett Six Hour Handicap Relay, as part of Team Turtle Wax, all driving Porsches or Ginettas. They were fifth on handicap, and 22nd on scratch, winning their class. Turtle Wax became her principal sponsor for the next three seasons.

Rebecca moved a little further up the Porsche racing ladder in 2015, with a view to a Le Mans seat in 2016. For this, she needed some top-level GT3 experience, which the GTUK championship provided. She was sixth in the GTB class of the GTUK series, driving a Porsche 997 Carrera Cup car. Her best result was a third place, at Donington, and she was normally in the top five. Although she was still in a Porsche, this was the most powerful car she had raced yet.

Another of her 2015 activities was her RecordRoadTrip, sponsored by the RAC and Audi. The aim of the trip was to visit as many countries as she could on a single tank of fuel. She was assisted by Andrew Frankel, and the car, an Audi, had a special enlarged fuel tank. The pair set a Guinness-ratified world record, having travelled most of the way round Europe.

Later in the year, she did another road trip, the Track 2 Track Challenge. Rebecca and Russian racer Natalia Freidina travelled around the UK and Eastern Europe and raced each other on circuits along the way, including some forgotten F1 tracks.

She spent most of 2016 in the GT4 European Series, driving a KTM X-Bow in the Pro class for the Reiter team. Her best finish was fifth, at Pau, and she was 20th overall. This was her first experience of a sports prototype. She also paid another visit to Dubai for the 24 Hours, but did not finish in the Sorg Rennsport BMW 325i.

This was the final year of her Project Le Mans plan, and true to her word, she raced at Le Mans. She did not compete in the 24 Hours itself, but in the Road to Le Mans support race for LMP3 cars. She drove a Nissan-engined Ligier to sixteenth place, with her By Speed Factory team-mate, Jesus Fuster. This was only the second time she had driven the Ligier. The first time was a month earlier, at Paul Ricard, where she raced in a round of the VdeV championship, finishing sixth.

In 2017, she raced in the UK Mini Challenge. The best circuit for her was Oulton, where she scored her best results, a 12th and 14th place. She was 19th in the championship.

She did not race in 2018. Although she kept it quiet for a long time, she finally announced that she was pregnant with twins towards the end of the year. She returned to the motorsport arena in late 2019, offering her services as a sponsorship coach and advisor.

Away from actual racing, she is a motoring journalist and broadcaster who writes for The Telegraph’s motoring section, among other publications.

(Image from www.rebeccaracer.com)

Catie Munnings

Catie Munnings won the European Ladies’ Rally Championship in 2016, aged eighteen and in only her second season of rallying.

She started in 2015, driving a Peugeot 106 in British club rallies, with her father Chris as her co-driver. Chris used to run the Brands Hatch and London rally schools, so Catie grew up around rally cars from a very young age.

Her best finish was 26th in the Lynn Stages Rally.  During the season, she tested a Peugeot, and so impressed watching team managers that they decided to put her straight into the European Championship the following season. In order to be eligible, she needed to have completed six rallies, so she did the Donington Park and Red Dragon events near the start of the year, to add to her four finishes in 2015.

Her ERC car was a Peugeot 208, co-driven by the more experienced German, Anne Katharina Stein. She won two Ladies ERC awards, in the Ypres Rally and the Liepāja Rally in Latvia. In Belgium, she was 65th, seventh in the Junior class and eleventh in ERC3. Her Coupe des Dames was assured when Melissa Debackere retired with accident damage. In Latvia, she was 25th overall, ninth in the ERC3 class, and eighth in the Junior class. She was 16th in the Junior standings at the end of the year, and won the Ladies’ championship.

In 2017, she declined a university place in favour of continuing her rally career. In June 2016, she had hurried back from Ypres in order to take an A-level exam.

Catie’s 2017 season was her second in the ERC with the Saintéloc Junior team. At the beginning of the season, she retired from the Azores Rally after an accident, and finished the Islas Canarias Rally in 68th place, out of 89 finishers. She did three more ERC rallies, the best of which was her last event of the season, the Roma Capitale Rally. She was 25th overall, second lady, and seventh in the Junior Under 27 class. Tamara Molinaro took her Ladies' crown, but she was the runner-up at the end of the year.

She was third in the 2018 ERC3 class, driving the Sainteloc Peugeot again. Her best overall finish was 17th in the Rally Liepaja. She was also 26th in Rally Poland.

At the end of 2018, she announced that she had joined the Red Bull extreme sports family, the first female rally driver to do so.

She continued to rally the Peugeot in 2019, although it was now run by the Peugeot Rally Academy. It was not a vintage season for her in the ERC, where she contested the ERC3 class with Veronica Engan as co-driver. Katie crashed out of the Azores Rally then had to withdraw from the Canary Islands event as she was unwell. Her best finish was 36th in the Rally Liepaja in Latvia and she picked up an ERC Ladies' trophy for her efforts.

There was not much in the way of rallying for her in 2020, partly due to the coronavirus crisis. She entered Rally Sweden in a Ford Fiesta with Swedish co-driver Ida Lidebjer-Granberg and finished the event in 42nd place after a penalty. During the winter season she also competed in the GP Ice Race event in Austrian, driving a Bentley Continental GT for the Bentley team.

Later in the year, she was announced as one of the drivers for Alejandro Agag's Extreme E championship, where mixed teams of two drivers tackle off-road circuits in remote locations. She raced for Andretti United Extreme E with Timmy Hansen.

She and Timmy won the Greenland round of the championship, the Glacier ePrix, and further podium positions in Saudi and the UK helped her to third in the championship. Timmy and Catie were often not the quickest in qualifying, but performed better in the races themselves.

It wasn't quite as good a season for the Andretti pair in 2022. Despite some good performances in qualifying and a Crazy Race win in Sardinia, they only managed one podium position, a third place in Sardinia following their Crazy Race win. They were ninth in the drivers' championship.

Driving solo, she made one guest appearance in a stage rally, driving a Land Rover in the Cambrian Rally in Wales. She was eleventh, with co-driver Claire Williams. She also entered on WorldRX round in Sweden, finishing eighth overall in the RX2e class.

Another season in Extreme E with Timmy Hansen was an up-and-down experience. The pair were second once in Scotland and third once in Sardinia, but a qualifying crash in Chile meant that they had to pull out, dropping them to seventh in the championship.

She also continued in rallycross in 2023, doing the first half of the RX2e series for the Swedish YellowSquad team, driving the Zeroid X1 electric car. The best of her three finishes was a seventh place in Norway.

As well as rallying, Catie had a burgeoning media career. She was the presenter of "Catie's Amazing Machines", a show for preschoolers about cars, aircraft and other machinery.

(Image from http://www.sportsister.com)

Cheryl Glass

Cheryl Glass is most famous for being the only African-American woman ever to race sprintcars professionally, and to race in Indy Lights.

She was born in December 1961 in California, and moved to Seattle two years later with her parents. They were a high-achieving family; her mother was an aircraft engineer, and her father a vice-president of the Pacific Northwest Bell telecommunications company.

Encouraged by her father, she took up dirt-track racing at the age of nine, in a quarter-midget car. A younger sister, Cherry, also raced, although not to the same level as Cheryl.

She competed all over the country, winning some races and titles, and moving through the sprintcar ranks. She made it onto the professional circuit and won the Northwest Sprintcar Association’s Rookie of the Year award in 1981. Among her rivals was Al Unser Jr.

In tandem with her developing sprintcar career, Cheryl graduated from high school with honours at sixteen. Before that even, she had run her own business, creating and selling ceramic dolls, which she started when she was only nine. She enrolled at university to study Electrical Engineering, but did not graduate, preferring to concentrate on her racing career.

Between 1980 and 1983, she continued to race sprintcars. A series of spectacular accidents did not put her off, although she sustained damage to her knees that required surgery. The worst of these happened at Manzanita, Phoenix. In 1982, she took part in the USAC National Sprint Silver Crown at Indiana.

By 1984, she felt that she needed to try a different discipline within motorsport. She set her sights on road circuits, and entered the Dallas round of the Can-Am single-seater challenge, driving a VW-powered Van Diemen. She had to retire after six laps, from eighth place.

Although she hoped to have the funding to contest the rest of the Can-Am calendar, she did not. The Dallas race appears to have been run in a second-choice car, as she was originally scheduled to drive an Ausca Racing Toleman.

In 1985, she tried truck racing, in a Toyota pickup, but she crashed during testing at the Los Angeles Coliseum, and did not actually race.

It was about this time that her father acquired a Penske PC-6 Indycar, which Cheryl tested at Seattle International Raceway. This car was built in 1978, and would never be competitive against the current generation of Indycars. Talking to the Los Angeles Times, she stated that her aim was the 1987 Indianapolis 500, after at least a part-season in CART in 1986.  

There is some talk of Cheryl taking the Indianapolis Rookie Test, but I cannot find any concrete information to confirm or deny this. Her 1985 accident seems to have been a considerable setback to her career, as she disappears from the scene for a while after that. She remained hard at work on her business interests, which by now included a high-end bridal and eveningwear design studio. She was a vocal advocate for young black people wanting to get into business and engineering. This, coupled with her photogenic looks and bold career path, meant that she remained a popular media figure.

She reappeared in 1990, and entered the penultimate round of the CART American Racing Series (Indy Lights), finishing seventh at Nazareth. Among her rivals were Robbie Buhl and Paul Tracy, the latter of whom finished below her. Although she was listed for the final Laguna Seca event, she did not start.

The following year, she entered the first two races of the season, but did not finish either, driving for her own Glass Racing team, sponsored by Elegente Eye eyewear. The car’s electrics gave up after fourteen laps of Laguna Seca, and she crashed out at Phoenix.

After that, things started to go very wrong for Cheryl. She appears to have become the target of criminal activity, motivated by racism. Her house was broken into and daubed with swastikas, and she was sexually assaulted by intruders. The police were called, but the incident ended with Cheryl herself being arrested for assaulting a police officer. Her family and friends protested her innocence.

She committed suicide in 1997, at the age of 35, although some mystery surrounded her death. She is still remembered as a pioneer in the sport.

(Image copyright Paul Jackson)