Sitting around the Enumclaw Senior Activity Center on NASCAR Day, it’s clear Elizabeth Bartley knows her racing.

It was around 1965 at California’s Santa Maria Speedway when the then 35-year-old, Boeing secretary and mother of five took the driver’s seat, put her foot to the floor and raced around a clay, 1/3-mile banked oval.

“I loved internal combustion engines,” she said.

The now 82-year-old, who moved to the Plateau a couple years ago to be near family, doesn’t recall the speedometer reading as she hit the 60-foot straightaway or whether she hit the brakes for the 15-degree turns, but she remembers it was exciting.

“It was fun to drive,” she said. “Once a highway patrolman and I had a little disagreement about how fast I was going; he won.”

To hear Bartley tell the story, it wasn’t her intent to get behind the wheel to become one of the first female drivers in the area at the time, but as she was told at the time, “There ain’t no rule against it.”

Bartley said she and her husband were part owners in a drag strip that had to be relocated to make way for a housing development. They decided to try something different; they built an oval.

“As far as I know they’re still racing there,” she noted.

One day, she found herself helping a guy out by buying his car. She had no intention of racing, but to put the car on the track, it needed a sponsor, an owner and someone to drive it, Bartley said. She became all three.

Bartley’s No. 40 sounded like something from a Johnny Cash song. It had a Studebaker chassis, Dodge engine, a Ford braking system, and “the hind end I could not swear what it was,” she laughed.

Her pit crew where all volunteers – a highway patrolman, a body shop owner and a couple of other friends. She did have connections. From her days working for AAA – she knew all the body shops.

Being a lady had some advantages too.

“I carried my tools in a women’s purse so they wouldn’t get stolen,” she laughed.

One of the first things she did was make sure she invested in a good helmet. Years later, that investment paid off, she said, that helmet saved her son’s life when he was involved in a motorcycle accident.

She also had what she referred to as “gumption” to run with the big dogs.

“I could run, jump and spit farther than the boys,” she said.

She has great memories.

“One day we were hot-lapping before a race and there was a water truck out on the track in front of me,” she explained. She was working the wheel to get around it. With a grin, she continues. “I tooted my horn and went through the spray and the kids said, ‘Is the only car you can pass the water truck?’”

Her driving career wasn’t long lived.

“I got to a semi-main once,” she said. “It wasn’t for lack of guts, it was for a lack of money.”

But the biggest thrill in her racing world came later, she said, when she was invited to Daytona, Fla., as part of one-time NASCAR driver Patty Moise’s pit crew.

“I wasn’t part of the over-the-wall crew, but did her timing in the booth,” Bartley said. “It was a good experience; all my life I wanted to go to Daytona.”