Therie is a natural tendency to think of American sports car racing as a west coast invention: if you’re racing cars that are at best “water resistant” it makes sense to do it in a sunny climate. But going racing is more about disposable income than the weather. Shortly after WWII the largest concentration of wealth in the US stretched from the financial centers of the north-east states through the manufacturing cities of the mid-west, a swath of geography dotted with storied racetracks from Limerock Connecticut to Elkhart Lake Wisconsin.
In Pittsburgh the steel industry created jobs for lots of engineers and technicians; the kind of guys who liked to go home and tinker in the garage. Well paid steel workers bought lots of new cars - making Pittsburgh auto dealerships some of the biggest in the country - and supported a vast network of mechanics, parts suppliers, and machine shops. While there was no race track in Pittsburgh, the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) was holding races on make shift tracks - often laid out on the runways of small town airports (if you have photos or even memories of the races at Connellsville airport I would love to hear from you!). And just a few hours drive would put you at top-notch tracks like Mid-Ohio or Virginia International or Watkins Glen.
Conditions were perfect, and the spark that really got things rolling came (strangely enough) from the folks at Chevrolet. In 1954 the Corvette was a bit of a flop. Rushed into production after a show car caught the public's attention, the Corvette was powered by Chevy's hoary "stovebolt" straight 6 backed up by a 2 speed automatic "Powerglide" transmission - hardware that failed to live up to the car's sporting intentions in a major way. Both Chrysler and Ford were selling sedans with new V8s that had seriously raised the bar for straightline performance, while Corvettes were sitting around in dealerships unsold. And then, at the urging of newly hired engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov, for the '55 model year Chevy installed their new 265 cubic inch small block V8 into the struggling Corvette, and the rest - as they say - is history. The V8 finally gave the Corvette the power to match its looks, and created the first sportscar that American's understood - the Corvette quickly became an automotive icon.
Just south of Pittsburgh was Yenko Chevrolet, where owner Frank Yenko was trying to prepare his son Don to take over the business. Don Yenko naturally drove a Corvette, and it didn't take much for him to get caught up in racing himself. But young Yenko proved to be more than a well-off good-time Charlie; he recognized that there was money to be made selling fast cars to speed hungry steel workers, and that the faster the car the more money there was to be made. Yenko would eventually become a "tuner" - modifying brand new Chevy's for high performance use and selling them in the Yenko showrooms.
But in 1959 Don Yenko was just another salesman with Corvettes to move. One day a youthful couple walked in looking to trade their '57 Corvette for one of the new fuel injected 'Vettes, which Chevy had just tweaked to a very healthy 290 hp. Mike and Donna Mae Mims left with a new '59, and an invitation from Don Yenko to attend a race he had entered in Akron. The Mims were living the "dual income - no kids" lifestyle 30 years before it would have a name, and it didn't take long for the racing bug to bite. Mike and Donna joined the Steel Cities SCCA and began racing their 'Vette at the local tracks. Donna proved to be the better driver, and she actually won a race or two. The picture below (which can be found in lots of places on the internet, so I don't feel bad stealing a copy) shows her after a win at the Cumberland, Maryland airport track in 1961.
The kind of question only a modeler would ask: is the car in this picture white or... pink? Donna Mae painted most of her race cars bright pepto-bismol pink, but no one seems sure about this car. There are interviews with Donna that give conflicting reports (most of them from her later years - let me tell you your memory isn't as reliable as you think once you pass the 50 year mark). And if you look on the fender, you'll see the words "SQUIRREL CAGE", which was (and still is) the nickname of the Squirrel Hill Cafe, a Pittsburgh bar long favored by college students - I'm wondering if Donna was a regular there.
Donna was a "looker" - petite and blonde and hard to miss in her pink driving suit, and she took no prisoners on the race track. She quickly became a bit of a celebrity at local races. The SCCA club she and Mike had joined included members that would become racing legends in the next few years, including Don Yenko. Before long Donna was working as Yenko's executive secretary, tagging along on his racing trips, and meeting the people who would sponsor her racing. Sadly diving into racing did not help her marriage; she and Mike were divorced soon after - something she refused to talk about afterwards. In 1963 Donna bought a race-prepped 1959 Austin Healey Sprite and had it painted her trademark pink. By the end of the year she racked up enough points to become the first woman to win an SCCA national championship in the highly competitive H-production category.
A pink MG, TR3, and Stinger Corvair all followed, and while she had some success she never repeated a championship. She would be invited to drive in various races, including the Daytona Continental, in an assortment of cars including a Sunbeam Alpine and the weird Ferrari derived ASA. Maybe most famously, Donna was part of an all-woman team in the 1972 Cannonball Run; racing in a Cadillac stretch limo they went off the road in the middle of Texas when co-driver Peggy Niemcek nodded off - the car rolled, breaking Donna's collarbone and coating the inside of the car with green porta-potty fluid.
And then almost as suddenly as it started, the excitement of racing in the 60's ran headlong into the OPEC engineered oil shortages of the 70s. As gas prices climbed and gas stations literally ran out of gas, miles-per-gallon became much more important than horsepower and general interest in racing waned. Donna Mae retired from racing and pretty much disappeared from the public eye - rumor has it that she spent some time in Maui. And when cheap gas came back in the 80s and sports cars became cool again, Donna was back in Pittsburgh, volunteering at vintage races and hanging out with local car clubs and driving her pink '79 Corvette.
Sadly, Donna died in 2009 at the age of 82. Even in death she made national news by requesting her body be seated in her '79 Corvette for visitation; the folks at the Beinhauer funeral home somehow pulled it off - their doorway was reportedly just 2 inches wider than the car.
Obligatory modeling reference: I've been working on a model of Donna's championship winning Bugeye Sprite for some time, using the hard-to-find Gunze kit. I'll do another post about the project in the future, but this article has gone way too long already. And if you're looking for an interesting racing subject for your next build, there are lots of photos of Donna's cars on the web - Think Pink!
Don
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