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

“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.