Stephanie Ruys de Perez

 

Stephanie Ruys de Perez raced saloons in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. Although born in the USA, she lived in Canada for most of her adult life.

She first comes to the attention of the media in 1966, when she was interviewed for McLeans magazine for a feature about women in motorsport. She was racing a Sunbeam Imp at the Players 200 meeting and it broke down on the third lap. The writer, Alan Edmonds, was very taken with her blond hair and slim figure, and wrote a lot about how she enjoyed racing as a "sensual" thing. Her husband had taken up the sport that year and it is likely that this was her first season too, although a 1969 newspaper article says that she had been racing for five years by then, "the last two in a full-sized sedan". She is quoted as saying that she would be "very depressed" if she thought she was better than men, and hoped her husband was better than her.

In 1970, she had moved on to a more powerful car and entered the Can-Am Challenge Race for the Labatts Blue Trophy, driving a Chevrolet Camaro. It is unclear whether she qualified. She later raced this car at the Harewood Grand Finale meeting at Harewood Acres, finishing ninth in her race. In July, she did at least one round of the Canadian Touring Car Championship at Mosport, finishing fourth. The first mention of this car was in a June 1969 Ottawa Journal report, where she raced in a support event to the Can-Am Challenge Cup. The car itself is sometimes described as being purple.

In 1972, she was fourteenth in the Sanair Trans-Am race, in a Mini Cooper, driving for the Fossman racing tem. Her name is sometimes associated with works Ford team Comstock, who helped start the careers of many Canadian drivers of the time, but it isn't clear whether she raced for them.

One of her more famous exploits was a Battle of the Sexes match race she undertook against Bob Tullius in November 1973. Tullius had previously said that her Mini could be driven faster by a man, encouraging her to challenge him to the race. The event was a support for the American Road Race of Champions at Road Atlanta, with both drivers in identical Triumph Spitfires prepared to Showroom Sports Car spec.

Stephanie, who had never competed at Road Atlanta before, led for three of the five laps, but was caught on the back straight by her rival, who won by 1.8 seconds. A group of women apparently mobbed officials and tried to claim that there were five more minutes left on the clock. Tullius won a silver pig trophy for his victory in the "Chauvinist Match Race".

Not long before, in October, she had wrecked her Mini in a spectcular accident at Mosport, flipping it over during qualifying.

More detailed information about her career is not forthcoming, although she was quite famous at the time, appearing in TV and print adverts. One of these was for Shell unleaded petrol in 1971. In 1974, she appeared in a TV series called Food for Thought, presenting a fitness segment.

She died "at an early age" from cancer.

(Image copyright McLeans magazine)