BY DREW HARDIN (^) I PHOTOGRAPHY BY FRED ENKE, JIM MCFARLAND AND ERIC RICKMAN, PETERSEN PUBLISHING CO. ARCHIVE
From the Archives
Pioneer Judy Lilly With Her Corvettes
a class win in this year’s drag fest. She did
so with a 105.00 mph run in only 13.
seconds.”
(Quick trivia detour: The other female
class winner at the ’65 Winternats was a
Rose Gennuso, who was driving a Deuce
roadster that belonged to her boyfriend,
Tom McMullen. Yes, that Tom McMullen,
and, yes, that Deuce roadster.)
Lilly repeated those wins a year later,
her Corvette now running in D/SP (at
the Winternationals) and E/SP (at the
Nationals). Dick Wells, covering the
Winternats in the March 1966 Hot Rod,
listed all the rounds of the various elimina-
tors at the meet, including Lilly’s success in
hen talk turns to pio-
neering female drag rac-
ers, usually it’s the two
Shirleys, Muldowney and
Shahan, who get most of
the attention. But they had a contemporary
who was making waves on dragstrips, too:
Judy Lilly.
Lilly is best known for the string of
Super Stock wins she notched in various
Chrysler-powered cars from the mid-1960s
to the mid-1970s, including four Super
Stock Eliminator wins in a row at the NHRA
Mile-High Nationals in Colorado. “Miss
Mighty Mopar,” as she was known, won
five Division Five championships and was
voted Car Craft magazine’s Super Stock
Driver of the Year in 1972, 1976 and 1977.
Yet, Lilly laid the groundwork for
all that success driving a fuel-injected
1961 Corvette. She began racing at
her local Colorado tracks in 1961, and
caught national attention when she won
the B/SP class at both the 1965 NHRA
Winternationals and the NHRA Nationals
at Indianapolis. Hot Rod magazine’s Bud
Lang, covering the stock classes at the
Winternats in the Apr. 1965 issue, described
Lilly as “sitting pretty after her class win”
when the magazine ran a photo of her
behind the wheel of her Corvette. Lilly
“became the second young lady to take
jacob rumans
(Jacob Rumans)
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