Speedy Sara
At an age when work means baby-sitting or flipping burgers, 16-year-old Sara Maloney sells ad space on a race car — her own.
And if you are a potential sponsor, there’s no better place for getting noticed than on the car of a female racer in an otherwise male-dominated sport.
“Racing is Sara’s passion. It’s her destiny,” says her dad, Mike Maloney, a UAW Local 863 member and material control worker at the ZF plant in Batavia, Ohio.
To satisfy his daughter’s “need for speed” at 3 years old, Maloney outfitted a golf cart with wooden blocks on the pedals and barriers to keep her from falling out. She moved up to a riding lawnmower at age 6, go-kart racing at 9 and Chevette racing at 13 before graduating to late model racing at 15. Sara’s car is basically a chassis and a 355-horsepower engine surrounded by sheet metal attached to steel tubes to resemble a Chevrolet Monte Carlo.
Every Saturday night from April to October, the B+ student from Batavia High School is found on 3/8- or 1/4-mile oval and tri-oval tracks in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, racing against men two and three times her age.
On the way to what looked like a personal best, second-place finish toward the end of this season, another driver clipped her rear end and sent Sara crashing into the wall at 90 mph.
“I knew I was going to hit. I let go of the steering wheel so I wouldn’t wind up breaking my arms and then I closed my eyes,” Sara recalled. She escaped with a broken nose and a concussion, but that won’t stop her from putting the pedal to the metal.
About the only thing that can keep Sara out of the race is lack of sponsors. But she’s working on that. Several regional businesses have signed on with her, but she’s got her eye on the national spotlight.
“Being 16 and female, I get a lot of publicity wherever I go,” she said.
When she’s not behind the wheel she likes to hunt, draw and play basketball
on her high school team. She also plays drums.
That sounds pretty well-rounded, but it’s obvious that “driving
anything with a motor that goes fast” is Sara’s favorite pastime.
For more information, check out her Web site at www.saramaloneyracing.com.
