Shawna Robinson took the wheel of a NASCAR stock car not a lot of times throughout her career. However, the diversity that her career flaunts is perhaps unparalleled by most female drivers to this day. A trailblazer, role model, and entrepreneur, Robinson is an example for other female racers that this sport doesn’t need to be all about men.
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But it wasn’t easy. Driving during the 1990s and the mid-2000s, Robinson was the first woman to start a NASCAR Winston Cup race since Patty Moise did it back in 1989 and also the first woman to finish a Winston Cup race since Janet Guthrie in 1980.
Shawna Robinson’s father, Richard Robinson, was an amateur diesel truck racer, who worked on vehicles in his home garage. On his daughter’s 18th birthday, Richard taught Shawna Robinson to drive the 14,000 lbs diesel truck cabs, which he used to race as an amateur racer. And that was exactly when he planted the seed of racing in her daughter’s psyche.
Shawna Robinson’s racing career
Robinson’s career kick-started in the Great American Truck Racing (GATR) tours. She then drove at the Paul Ricard Grand Prix Truck Race in France in 1986 and finished as the runner-up in the Grand Prix of Trucks in Mexico City in the same year. The following year, Robinson sealed the deal at the GATR Big Rig 100 at Flemington.
She took to NASCAR when she was 23. Even there, she won the AC Delco 100 race which made her the first woman ever to win a major NASCAR Touring Series event. However, her debut as a stock car driver happened in the spring of 1988, when she finished 3rd in the Charlotte/Daytona Dash Series Florida 200 at Daytona International Speedway.
She also won her first-ever race in the Goody’s Dash series the same year. Besides that, she was voted the Most Popular Driver and Rookie of the Year in the NASCAR Dash Series. She won the award again in 1989.
Robinson’s post-racing career
Shawna Robinson’s career faced a major setback in 1994 when she crashed out at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Although she returned to racing in 1999 after a long hiatus, she wasn’t racing as frequently as before.
By 2002, Robinson had begun to feel that she had jeopardized her career because she was driving so few races. The constant search for sponsorships and the new faces at BAM Racing reduced her time in the driver’s seat even further.
Today, she serves as an established interior designer for an array of NASCAR luminaries such as Dale Earnhardt Jr. and sister Kelley Earnhardt Miller, Kasey Kahne, Martin Truex Jr., Clint Bowyer, and Ray Evernham.
