Before she began racing, she was a passionate player of fastpitch softball, with an ability to throw to home plate from center field.
[4] Like many early racers, including Shirley Muldowney, Shahan got started by street racing, beating local boys in her father's Studebaker pickup.
She and her husband (who served as flagman {starter} for the Visalia drag strip on weekends[4]) owned and raced two Chevrolets, one a 1955, later a daily-driven 1956 with a (then-new) 265 cu in (4,340 cc) small-block V8.
[4] She entered events at all the local tracks, including those in Bakersfield, Fremont, Madera, Santa Maria, and Half Moon Bay.
[4] In 1959, Shahan won the first March Meet (at Bakersfield) in her Super Stock 1958 Chevrolet, beating forty men,[2] among them professionals "Dyno Don" Nicholson, Hayden Proffitt, Tom Sturm, and Arlen Vanke.
[6] The Chrysler deal forced her to learn to drive an automatic transmission for the 1965 season, over her objections;[4] previously, she had always driven a stick shift.
[5] Shahan quickly learned to use the tachometer and the automatic transmission, and soon began winning at Division 7 events from Oregon and Washington to Utah and Nevada.
[8]) She had been preceded by the likes of Roberta Leighton, Bunny Burkett, and the first woman to win at an NHRA national event, Carol Cox, who won in Stock in 1962.
switched the Impala from carburetors to fuel injection, as well as moving the rear axle forward,[4] precursor to the technique used by Funny Cars.
[12] She reached the semi-final at the 1971 AHRA Gateway Nationals, being eliminated by the 1970 Dodge Charger of event winner Tom Haller.
got two AMCs into the Pro Stock field, hers in the thirty-first slot; both were eliminated in Round One, Shahan losing to "Fast Eddie" Schartman's Mercury Comet.
[2] In 1966, while match racing around the U.S., Shahan was a contestant on "Hollywood Squares" and "To Tell the Truth" (where, she confesses, Bill Cullen guessed right she was a drag racer).
[5] Her daughter, Janet (the eldest), and her husband operate a Lucas Oil-sponsored tractor puller called Git-R-Done.