Shawna Robinson

Robinson was born on November 30, 1964, in Des Moines, Iowa, and her first racing was in semi-tractors rather than stock cars. Wikipedia credits her with 30 wins in that discipline before she moved to the Great American Truck Racing series, where in 1984 she became the first woman to win a points-scoring race, the Bobtail 100 at the Milwaukee Mile, and was named rookie of the year. The step into NASCAR came through the Charlotte/Daytona Dash Series, the sanctioning body's entry-level national touring division at the time, which she ran in 1988 and 1989. The Asheville-Weaverville win on June 10, 1988, is the one that gets cited, the first by a woman in a top-level NASCAR touring series. She finished third in points that year and took both the rookie of the year and most popular driver awards. In 1989 she won again at Myrtle Beach and at Lanier National Speedway, set two poles, finished third in points a second time and was voted most popular driver again. Across the two seasons she made 30 starts and recorded 21 top-ten finishes, a ratio most drivers in any series would be glad of.

The Busch Series was NASCAR's second tier, one step under Winston Cup, and Robinson ran 61 races there between 1991 and 1995. Results were harder to come by. In 1992 she was runner-up for rookie of the year to Ricky Craven. Her best points finish was 23rd in 1993. Her one top ten came at Watkins Glen in 1994, a tenth place on the road course. The day people remember was at Atlanta Motor Speedway in 1994, when she qualified on the pole for the Busch Light 300, the first pole by a woman in the series. The race itself was over almost as soon as it began: she crashed on the first lap and retired after 63 laps. The pole stands regardless, and it is why her name turns up in any list of firsts at Atlanta.

ARCA, the Automobile Racing Club of America, ran a national stock car series that shared several tracks and weekends with Winston Cup, which is why a Cup-focused site like Racin.net carried ARCA news alongside its Cup speed sheets. Robinson came to it in 1999 with five races for Phoenix Racing and Michael Kranefuss Racing. She finished second in the FirstPlus Financial 200 at Daytona, which Wikipedia describes as the best result for a woman in the series to that point, was fourth at Lowe's Motor Speedway and 30th at Talladega, and was named the season's highest-finishing rookie. In 2000 she ran the full schedule, becoming, in the article's words, the first woman to compete full-time in an American national stock car series. She finished in the top ten in half her races and ended the year sixth in the drivers' championship, the first top-six finish by a woman in the final standings of a national oval-track series in the United States. Two days from that season stand out. At Michigan International Speedway she took her first ARCA pole and set a track record doing it, then crashed on lap 82 and was taken to hospital with two broken ribs and a shoulder injury. At the Georgia Boot 400 at Atlanta she led 66 laps and was passed by Bob Strait with three laps to go, finishing second. In 2001 she ran two ARCA races, seventh at Daytona and third at Nashville. One thing the record does not contain is an ARCA win. You will sometimes see her described as the first woman to win an ARCA race; Wikipedia's account does not support that, and this page follows Wikipedia. The milestone win was the 1988 Dash race. The ARCA milestone was the Michigan pole.

Sixth in ARCA points in 2000, on a schedule no woman had run in full before.

Her Winston Cup record is eight starts across two seasons. In 2001 she attempted six races in the No. 84 Michael Kranefuss Racing Ford Taurus. She failed to qualify at California Speedway, then made the field at Michigan International Speedway, the first woman to start a Cup race since Patty Moise in 1989, and finished 34th. Further attempts did not make the field, and the schedule was cut short by sponsorship problems. For 2002 she signed with BAM Racing to drive the No. 49 Dodge. At the Daytona 500 in February she qualified 36th and finished 24th, the second woman to start that race and, per Wikipedia, her best Cup finish. The season was unsettled: the team's sponsorship was thin, five different drivers rotated through the car, and she was released after the Pepsi 400 at Daytona in July. She ended the year 52nd in points and fourth in the rookie of the year standings. Wikipedia lists her among 16 women who have started a Cup Series race and among three who have started the Daytona 500.

• 2001 NASCAR Winston West: one race, at Las Vegas, retired while running third
• 2003 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series: three races, best finish 18th at Texas
• After racing: an interior design and furniture business, per the Wikipedia article

The old Racin.net kept a news section for ARCA, and one item from it, filed in a June 2000 folder under the address /arca/news/06-00/13-shawna.shtml, was about Robinson. The folder date places it in the middle of her full-time ARCA season, the year of the Michigan pole and the sixth-place points finish. This rebuild does not reproduce the original item; no text from the old site is reused anywhere here, and what that page said can only be described from its address and its date. What can be said is that a Cup results site thought a mid-season ARCA story about her was worth a page of its own, at a point when she was the only woman running a full national stock car schedule. The milestones below are the ones the Wikipedia article supports.