Mary, Quite Contrary
Kim Kardashian may have recently swerved Martin Brundle on the Monaco grid, but Mary McGee stopped him in his tracks. As Le Mans returns this weekend, we revisit the life of a motorsport original who raced cars, conquered Baja and made history on two wheels.
By Emily S
In the high-octane world of motorsports, where grease-stained overalls, roaring engines and desert dust were so often treated as a man’s domain, Mary McGee carved out a path that still feels faintly ridiculous to read back. She raced sports cars. She raced motorcycles. She became the first woman to compete in motorcycle road racing in the United States, the first woman to race motocross in America and, in 1975, the first person, man or woman, to complete the Baja 500 solo on a motorcycle.
Not the first woman. The first person.
Mary Bernice McGee was born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936 and moved through motorsport with the sort of nerve that makes most modern “barrier-breaking” language feel a little underpowered. Long before wider recognition finally arrived, Mary had already spent decades doing things very few people would even attempt. She was not a mascot for women in racing. She was a racer, and a very serious one.
Her route into the sport began on four wheels. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, McGee competed in sports car racing with the California Sports Car Club and the Sports Car Club of America, driving machines including a Porsche Spyder and producing results that made people pay attention. She was quick, technically sharp and brave enough to belong in rooms that were not built with women in mind. This was an era when the idea of a woman racing competitively still made officials pause, stare, object or ask her to prove herself twice. Mary did not appear to spend too much time waiting for permission.
Motorcycles entered the story almost by accident, buying her first bike in 1957. She purchased a 1956 Triumph Tiger Cub, and later rode a Honda to work while employed as a parts manager. The more serious switch came when Porsche dealer and former motorcycle racer Vasek Polak suggested that riding motorcycles could improve her car racing. McGee’s response was a casual “Okay. Why not?” as though she was being asked to try a new sandwich rather than enter one of the toughest and most male-dominated sports in America.
When she did try to race motorcycles properly, the gate didn’t exactly swing open. The American Federation of Motorcyclists required her to prove she could handle herself before allowing her to compete. She passed. In 1960, wearing a pink polka-dot helmet and riding a 125cc Honda CB92, McGee became the first woman to road race motorcycles in the United States and the first American woman to hold an FIM licence. It was not a symbolic outing. It was the start of another chapter.
Then came dirt, desert and Steve McQueen. The Hollywood star, who was deeply involved in racing culture himself, encouraged Mary to leave road racing behind and try the desert. According to accounts of her career, he told her she needed to get off the “pansy road-racing bike” and come out to the desert. The line sounds absurd now, but it did the job. McGee entered off-road racing at a time when the sport was hard, raw and brutally physical. She rode alongside men on bigger bikes, through cold, snow, dust, rocks and the kind of terrain that does not care how historic your presence is.
By the late 1960s, McGee was racing in Baja California, where motorsport stopped being neat and became survival. In 1968, she became the first woman to finish the Mexican 1000, now known as the Baja 1000. In 1975, riding a 250cc Husqvarna, she completed the Baja 500 solo, passing 17 two-man teams along the way. The Baja 500 is not a charming little loop with a nice medal at the end. It is hundreds of miles of off-road punishment across desert, rock, heat and isolation. McGee later described Baja as the hardest thing she ever did, recalling that there were no doctors, no phones and very little comfort if something went wrong. She carried painkillers in case she had to ride injured to reach help.
That story alone should have made her globally famous. It did not, of course, because motorsport has never been especially good at remembering the women who made it more interesting. McGee became known and loved within racing circles, particularly among those who understood what it took to race off-road, but her name did not travel in the way it should have. She kept racing, then stepped away, then came back decades later to vintage motocross after moving to Nevada. Her last race was in 2012, when she was in her seventies.
Recognition did come, eventually. McGee was named an FIM Legend in 2012, inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2018 and inducted into the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2023. In 2024, her story reached a wider audience through Motorcycle Mary, a 22-minute documentary directed by Haley Watson and executive produced by Lewis Hamilton and Ben Proudfoot. For many viewers, it was an introduction not only to McGee herself but to a chapter of American motorsport history that had largely gone untold outside racing circles.
historic
That same year, Mary appeared at the Canadian Grand Prix, where Martin Brundle met her during one of his famous grid walks. For anyone outside the Formula One bubble, Brundle’s pre-race strolls have become a genre of entertainment in their own right: part journalism, part endurance event, part social experiment. Over the years he has been blanked by celebrities, brushed aside by entourages and left gamely talking into the void while trying to grab a few seconds with whoever happens to be standing on the grid.
Kim Kardashian’s awkward Monaco snub became a viral moment recently, prompting endless online jokes that she had just ignored one of the most important men in motorsport. Megan Thee Stallion’s security famously blocked him and Cara Delevingne’s clipped responses sparked headlines. Through it all, Brundle has remained very British about the whole thing: dry, mildly unimpressed and generally unwilling to treat celebrity status as something sacred.
Which is what made his encounter with Mary so viral. Sitting in her wheelchair, sharp, funny and understated as ever, she was not another famous face being chased for a soundbite. She was someone Brundle seemed genuinely delighted to meet. The clip quickly circulated online because it felt refreshingly different from the usual grid-walk chaos. Rather than a celebrity awkwardly dodging questions, it was one motorsport figure recognising another. Mary was not there as a novelty. She was there as a pioneer whose career had stretched across cars, road racing, motocross and desert endurance, and whose list of firsts made almost everyone around her look like a newcomer to the sport’s history.
Mary died on 27 November 2024, aged 87. The timing was striking. Her death came one day before Motorcycle Mary was released globally on ESPN’s YouTube channel (watch here.) For many people discovering her for the first time, the introduction arrived just as the chance to celebrate her in life had passed.
Still, Mary’s story does not belong solely in the past. Its impact can still be felt today for that. It belongs in the same conversation as the women making history in motorsport now, from young drivers in single-seater pathways to endurance racers arriving at events such as Le Mans with their own stories, pressures and expectations. Hong Kong driver Denise Yeung, a 50-year-old mother, entrepreneur and racing driver who is competing at Road to Le Mans this week, is part of that wider picture. So too are the drivers coming through programmes such as F1 Academy, the all-female single-seater series launched in 2023 to increase opportunities and visibility for women in motorsport, and initiatives such as More than Equal, the research-led organisation founded to identify and develop the first female Formula 1 world champion. Different generation, different discipline, different road in. The link is not that women in motorsport all share the same story. It is that the ground beneath them was made a little less impossible by people like Mary McGee.
admiration
This extraordinary talent raced in a world that did not expect her, then stayed long enough for the sport to start admitting what she had done. Mary was not simply an icon because she was first. She was an icon because the facts of her career still sound unreasonable.
First woman to road race motorcycles in America.
First woman to race motocross in America.
First woman to finish the Baja 1000.
First person to ride the Baja 500 solo on a motorcycle.
A true trailblazer.
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