NASCAR- Move over Danica Patrick! Female Canadian driver Maryeve Dufault will make her NASCAR debut on Saturday in the Nationwide Series Napa Auto Parts 200 at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
If she looks familiar, Dufault, who started racing in the ARCA Series this year, was a model on the Price is Right!
Dufualt has said that she used the money she earned from modeling to pay for tires and equipment so that she could go race.
Dufault, 29, has made 12 starts in ARCA in 2011 with one top 10, a 10th place finish at Chicagoland Speedway. She’ll be driving the No. 81 for MacDonald Motorsports and is one of four Canadian drivers entered in Saturday’s race in the series that is most commonly referred to as the AAA to the Sprint Cup’s Major League.
She will also become the first Canadian woman to ever compete in NASCAR. Wow! Jacques Villenueve (the son of Gilles Villeneuve), Alex Tagliani and Patrick Carpentier (all men, in case you didn’t know) are the other three Canadians entered in the event. It will be Carpentier’s final race before he retires.
And, guess who will be there to welcome Dufault into the world of NASCAR: the very popular and only other notable female racer, Danica Patrick! Patrick, who is running a partial Nationwide Series schedule this season before her anticipated move to the series full-time in 2012, is running this weekend’s event in Montreal.
And while it may appear that Dufault is just profiting on her good looks to break into NASCAR, she has more credentials than other female drivers who have raced in the Nationwide Series this year.
