Ten years after her death, de Filippis remains F1's first female driver—not a footnote, but a racer who qualified on merit in the late 1950s when the cars were barely controllable and the sport had no patience for anyone outside the old boys' network. She started three GPs, scored at Spa, and did it in machinery that would make modern safety advocates weep. The real story isn't that she got to race. It's that it took seven decades for the grid to move past her.

Harry Gant's No. 33 Skoal Bandit remains the benchmark for late-career performance in Cup history. The man won races and took poles well into his fifties—a record that stands because modern NASCAR doesn't produce that kind of driver anymore. When he finally hung it up, the template went with him.