Growing up in Guildford, a small town in England located just southwest of London, Sophie Fox didn’t have a lot of exposure to drag racing early on, but the gearhead bug managed to find her anyway.

“I would always watch Top Gear and Fifth Gear with my dad, and kept up on F1 and MotoGP,” she recalls. “I quickly figured out that I was never going to be rich enough to be able to race in Formula One, but it really got me interested in competitive motorsport. My dad’s from the States and he eventually moved back to Oklahoma to a town called Noble. A short while later I moved out there as well, and I soon discovered that our house was about a mile away from Thunder Valley Raceway Park. At night I could hear the Top Fuel cars, and I wanted to know more about what was going on over there.”

In their inaugural season traveling with Street Car Takeover, the new series saw more than 80 women compete throughout the course of the year. A quarter of them had no previous track experience going into it.

In high school Fox started going to events at Thunder Valley to spectate and quickly fell in love with drag racing. “The different classes and formats fascinated me, and I started wanting to know more about the NHRA and everything they do. It snowballed from there. When I turned 16 I got an S197 Mustang and immediately headed to the track with it. It was a stock V6, but I didn’t care – I just wanted to get the seat time.”

Fox started making friends in the local car community and soon saw an opportunity to bring more women into the fold. “I wouldn’t say that women weren’t represented in drag racing in Oklahoma before this, because there are some phenomenal female drag racers out here,” she explains. “But there wasn’t really a community at the grassroots level. It felt like there wasn’t really a good entry point for women who were new to the sport.”

While Women & Wheels has attracted newcomers and experienced racers alike, one of the organization’s core goals is to make drag racing more approachable for those who haven’t been on track before. Fox says that having staff on-hand to answer questions on the fundamentals can help take some of the pressure off.

Now a digital community specialist for Holley Performance, Fox has spent the past few years heading Women & Wheels as well, an organization she designed to address that while also giving back to the larger local community. “The idea came about in 2018, and we started operating in a more official capacity in 2019,” she says. “That’s when we started doing things like car wash fundraisers, canned food drives combined with car meets, trunk-n-treat events for the kids on Halloween – that kind of thing.”

She adds that the organization has three main goals. “The first is to get more women behind the wheel in drag racing. We also want help young girls pursue educations in non-conventional STEM career paths – automotive and motorcycle technical programs, etc. And we still thoroughly believe that giving back to the community is hugely important.”

The group recently partnered up with Street Car Takeover to create an all-female drag racing series as well. Using a Pro Tree, quarter mile bracket-style format, the series immediately found interest amongst veteran racers and newcomers alike. “My husband Tanner put everything aside for me and this crazy dream I had,” she tells us. “When I told him we had the opportunity to travel the country with Street Car Takeover, he just about had an aneurism trying to figure out how the heck we were going to afford it. We put everything on hold and invested everything, and I spent months trying to secure sponsorships. I talked to hundreds of companies and I got hundreds of "no" responses. But one by one we secured enough sponsorship to make it happen, and we had the best year of our lives traveling from track to track. We had over 80 women competing throughout the season and gave away more than $5000 in prize money. More than 20 of those women were totally new to drag racing and had never been on-track before.”

Women & Wheels has also created a scholarship program for those who’re interested in pursuing a career in the auto industry. “This is something we’re incredibly proud of,” Fox says. “In high school I was discouraged from taking an automotive technical program and I was felt like that held back my technical experience. I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to any other girls, so here in my home state of Oklahoma we offer two different types of scholarships to young ladies who’re interested in non-traditional STEM career paths in the automotive, marine, motorcycle, and aerospace programs. This is a fairly new thing for us, but we’ve already received a lot of support from local businesses and a ton of applications.”

The bracket format helps to level the playing field between racers in stock or near-stock production cars and those in purpose-built monsters, and Fox says that making drag racing more accessible is one of the organization’s top priorities. “It’s something new and it’s a chance to meet other like-minded women. It also breaks down some of the barriers. We have a great team that helps me put these events on – folks who will sit down with new racers and explain this style of tree, how to line up the car, and so on. It takes an immense amount of pressure off of the people who are just getting started in the sport.”

Fox also notes that the drag racing program is continuing to expand going into 2022. “This year we’ve doubled our events and we’ve doubled our payouts, and we’ve also added a points series. And at the last event of the season we’re also introducing the Queen of the Track event, which is a heads-up race. We’re hoping to have between three and five thousand dollars up for grabs in that one race. This whole thing is just getting started.”

Fox says that the help of family friends has been instrumental in the success of Women & Wheels. “Our friends Payton and Chris traveled over 10,000 miles to put on nine women’s classes across the country. If it wasn’t for them and my husband Tanner, we would not be where we are today.”