June 21, 2020 at 6:04 AM

When Vicki Wood walked away from racing in 1963, the boys had had enough.

The Detroit native, whose more than 150-mph speed record on the sand at Daytona Beach still stands 60 years later, recalled in an interview a few years ago she was told to put herself in their shoes. Imagine hearing that you let "that woman run rings around you."

"The boys said that if I keep on racing with them they?re going out on strike," she said in the interview posted on YouTube.

Wood died June 5 at Beaumont Hospital, Troy, of heart-related causes at the age of 101, according to her niece, Bev Van De Steene of Warren. Although Wood grew up in Detroit and got her start racing at tracks in the area, she spent much of her life in Florida before returning to Michigan a couple of years ago to an assisted-living facility in Sterling Heights, her niece said.

"She was so good in fact that she was the first woman driver to race with the men at Flat Rock and indeed was beating many of the stars of the day. It was due to her prowess on the track that she was able to attract the interest of corporate sponsors and make her way to the ?Big Time? in NASCAR," according to her biography in the Michigan Motor Sport Hall of Fame.

The New York Times noted that Wood "broke the gender barrier in 1957 in Michigan and in 1959 at the Daytona International Speedway, which had just opened that year."

NASCAR founder Bill France gave Wood the OK in 1959 to race at Daytona, but when she got there, she was told women were not allowed in the pit area, which set France off, the Times reported.

"Vicki Wood is not a woman. She?s a driver, and she?s allowed in the pits," he said when he found out, according to the paper.

Although she broke gender barriers, Wood was also a top driver. She won 48 titles during her decade-long racing career, and she holds "the all-time fastest record for a stock-bodied automobile on the beach at Daytona with a speed of 150.375 mph," which she set in 1960, according to her biography. Beach racing is, however, a thing of the past.

? Detroit Free Press ?
Interesting read...