All forms of motorsport enjoy the involvement of female competitors, with varying degrees of success. But drag racing is the one category where they enjoy the greatest impact. Whether it be from the heady realms of Top Fuel and Funny Car competition or all the way down to the hobbyist ranks of off-street racing, girls have often fought their way to the top. But if you want a drag racing niche which involves the highest level of ‘driving’ then you need look no further than the stick-shift days of the sedan-based Super Stock wars of the 1980s and ‘90s, when the sport here was at its apex; the numbers were high and the competition at its toughest.
And those were the days when a young mother from South Queensland, aided by the mechanical skills of her husband, Steve, beat the best blokes in the nation time and again. That was when Donna Sizmur became a multi-time Australian champion.
“I can recall when I was about 12 asking my dad what he was doing whenever he was working on a car,” Donna told us, “what are you doing now? How does that work? How does the clutch work? I was constantly hounding him. I just loved cars.”
When Steve and Donna met they were both still teenagers and Donna was already car crazy, especially for fast cars. She’d gone round to Steve’s workshop with her boyfriend to see about repairs to his car. The boyfriend was mechanically illiterate, but here was this young mechanic sitting amongst all the pieces of the engine doing the repair… Donna knew she’d found a kindred spirit. To get the boyfriend to his work the next morning, Steve loaned him his own car. For the next fortnight, which was how long it took to get the parts together for the repair, Steve had to walk everywhere, but by the end of it he’d swiped the guy’s girlfriend!
Steve was a recently graduated surveyor whose skin didn’t tolerate the sun. As a result he had been forced into life as a motor mechanic. Donna was a young legal secretary. “I spent most of my courtship hanging around in Steve’s workshop,” she recalls.
She was happy to engage in a bit of street racing if somebody put up a challenge, and Steve was amazed, and happy, to sit in the passenger seat and just give her advice on when to change gears while she focused on staying in her lane and out in front. Formal drag racing seemed a natural progression.
The pair began that track racing with Donna’s Cooper S in 1976 and later her street registered LJ Torana XU-1 at the Surfers Paradise track. Steve also began to exercise his need for speed in a triple-Webered 202 red six-engined EH Holden that ran 14.1s after being driven to the track, as well as in Donna’s Mini. The Torana had been fitted with a 205-cid six cylinder with the carbs and head off the EH. As it was still street registered they would drive it to the track, drop the muffler and bolt on a set of slicks. They were racing it in H/MP (Modified Production) class, a niche designed for six-cylinder sedans with upgraded versions of parent-manufacturer engines (ie: Holden engines in Holden vehicles). This ideally suited cars like Toranas and was widely popular around the nation.
From January 1978 to the end of 1980 the Sizmurs battled away, honing their skills as they moved towards what would be their Torana’s best of a 13.1 at 101mph in 1980 against a class national record of 12.95 seconds. An event win at Surfers in July 1980 indicated that they had things coming together. They celebrated by taking the $250 winner’s cheque and putting it on the bar at the nearby Bartlett’s Barn pub.
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