Vicki Wood, race car driver called 'the fastest woman in racing,' dies at 101

Vicki Wood, 101, called "the fastest woman in racing," who started driving stock cars for a kick while raising her stepchildren in Detroit, died June 5 in Troy, Mich.

While most female drivers competed in so-called powder-puff events, leaving the major races and speed trials to the men, Wood raced against "the boys" — and often beat them.

Soon after she began driving competitively in 1953, Wood became one of the first women to compete in NASCAR events. By the time she retired a decade later, in her mid-40s, she had won 48 racing trophies and set the record for the fastest run across the sand in Daytona Beach, Fla., reaching 150.376 mph in 1960.

"I got bounced around a little bit but never got hurt too bad," Wood later told an interviewer, without detailing the time that she flipped over another car at Flat Rock Speedway in Michigan. The accident sent her sailing over the wall, into the track's retaining screen and on to the hospital, where she was kept under watch for two days before returning to the cockpit a week later, with bruises but no broken bones.

After a less painful race a few years later, a male driver confronted Wood and vowed that he and the other men would "go on strike" if she kept at it. "How would you like to go to work the next day," she recalled the man saying, "and have them say to you, 'I thought you were a race driver? How come you let that woman run rings around you?' "

Wood kept driving almost to the end of her life. Her Florida license was revoked when she was 98. "The worst thing they could have done to me," Wood said.

Wood started racing at a time when most competitive drivers were amateurs and hobbyists, without the multimillion-dollar corporate sponsorships of today's competitors. She called herself a "typical housewife, mother and grandmother," and reportedly spent her time away from the track ironing her husband's shirts and making her own clothes.

Wood competed at short-track races in Michigan in addition to setting records at NASCAR speed trials, notably at Daytona International Speedway and what was then called Atlanta International Raceway.

Wood went on to receive special permission from NASCAR founder Bill France to try for a speed record at the newly opened Daytona speedway in 1959. She topped 130 mph in a Pontiac, setting a women's record.

Victoria Rose Raczak was born in Detroit on March 15, 1919.

Ian Holm, 88, a British actor whose roles demonstrated remarkable dramatic range, from Shakespeare dramas to a hobbit in "The Lord or the Rings" trilogy to an Oscar-nominated performance as a track coach in "Chariots of Fire," died June 19 at a London hospital.

The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease.

Holm was primarily a character actor, known for exploring roles that drew on his verbal precision and subtle psychological insights.

He had already won a Tony Award on Broadway in 1967, in Harold Pinter's "Homecoming," and had won many of Britain's top acting honors before he became widely known to a new generation in director Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, based on the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. Holm played Bilbo Baggins, the big-footed hobbit in "The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001) and "The Return of the King" (2003).

"I can tell you that I had a ball except when it came to becoming a hobbit, which was tough," Holm told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2002. He spent four hours in the makeup room before his scenes. "The fur on the feet itched so badly and the ears would fall off. I never got used to them."

He was astonished at the popularity of the "Lord of the Rings" franchise, noting, "I've had more fan mail and adoration from tiny tots than I've had for anything else."

Despite his background in the theater, Holm "unequivocally" preferred acting in film, in part because of severe stage fright that occasionally flared. During a 1976 production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" in London, he froze up in the middle of a monologue and went to his dressing room, where he was found in the fetal position.

Except for a production of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" in 1979, he did not appear in the theater again until the 1990s.

Meanwhile, he had no nervousness in front of the camera and appeared in scores of film roles, including science fiction, fantasy, comedies, police dramas and costume dramas; at 5-foot-5, he played Napoleon three times. His 1981 role in "Chariots of Fire" was based on the real-life coach, Sam Mussabini, who helped British runner Harold Abrahams overcome anti-Semitism and self-doubt to win the title of the world's fastest man at the 1924 Olympic Games.

Ian Holm Cuthbert was born Sept. 12, 1931, in Goodmayes, England. He was drawn to acting at age 5.

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