Fisher

It helps to understand how Sarah Fisher's parents met. It was at a go-kart race, and Dave got a face full of Reba's southern Ohio dust.

The fact that he married her suggests that Dave Fisher wasn't lacking in admiration for females who drive hard, pass on the curves and carry themselves confidently with a full head of helmet hair. This is a mechanical engineer -- Mrs. Fisher became a schoolteacher -- who put his daughter in a quarter-midget racer at the age of five.

"I grew up in racing," said Fisher, who will be driving in Sunday's Belterra Casino Indy 300 at Kentucky Speedway. "My uncle built engines. Grandpa owned a go-kart track. Me and my dad traveled all over for go-kart and sprint-car races.

"I was going 50 miles an hour at age 5, 120 at 10, 150 at 15, 180 at 18. In school (at Teays Valley, near Circleville, Ohio), I was an oddball. Can you imagine going to school with some girl who races sprint cars? I was definitely the weird one. But my parents did an awesome job of not letting me know that being a girl in this sport was weird. I had no clue."

It was never Fisher's gender that made her feel different as much as one thing or another. At first, it was the go-kart hierarchy, which she learned about when she was 12 at the World Karting Association national championships in Batavia, N.Y. What she remembers is showing up with her dad in their van and being asked to park away from the higher-touted big haulers, over next to the concession stand. What she remembers next is blowing by most of the field on the first turn and karting off the trophy.

Then it was age. There had been women before in Indy Racing -- Fisher was the third to compete in the Indianapolis 500 -- but there had never been a 19-year-old anything. That's what Fisher was when she ran in the 1999 IRL season finale at Texas Motor Speedway.

Nobody forgets that she is an open-wheel woman, but folks lose sight of the fact that Sarah Fisher is only 22. If she were a hotshot ballplayer, she'd be looking for a promotion to Triple-A about now.

	Fisher has one top-10 finish this season.

Instead, she finds herself searching for a way to stay in the game. In her business, they call it a ride. She doesn't have one yet for next year.

That's where Kentucky Speedway -- site of this past weekend's IndyCar race, in which Fisher finished 14th -- comes in. While she was around Cincinnati, Fisher might have done well to stop by the Kroger headquarters, Kroger having been her first sponsor as a head-turning teenager; but her best shot is to take advantage of the track where she always seems to run her best.

In 2000, driving for the Walker Racing team, Fisher finished third at Kentucky. She split from Walker when it was unable to secure a sponsor for her, but last year, for Team Dreyer & Reinbold, she returned to Kentucky and became the first woman to win the pole position in a major North American open-wheel race.

"I think of Kentucky as more or less my home track," Fisher said before the race. "My family will be there. My college friends. Friends of my college friends."

She is enrolled now at IUPUI, but most of her collegiate cohorts come from Butler University, where she began her pursuit of a mechanical engineering degree. It wasn't easy. The professors there weren't eager to work around the stop-and-go schedule of a race car driver. "I had a French teacher," she said, "who had lived in Indianapolis for five years and didn't know what the 500 was."

Committed nonetheless to education and engineering, Fisher has become an activist in Girls Go Tech, a Girl Scout program that encourages young females to stick with math and science. An obvious and willing role model -- twice voted the Most Popular Driver on the IRL circuit -- Fisher's marketability is such that her difficulty in obtaining a sponsor isn't easy to fathom.

It's a recurring theme, however. For a period of 2001, her car sat idle in an Indianapolis garage, stalled by lack of capital. She has since hooked up with AOL, GMAC and others, who will carry her No. 23 through the end of the year but can't assure that costs will be covered in 2004.

"With the economy and so forth," Fisher said Wednesday morning, with the patience of a driver waiting for a lane, "it's hard for people to take chances, to make a commitment on racing. Right now, the sponsors are probably just getting through these times with the teams they have. There are a lot of drivers out there who don't have rides."

She understands, also, that nothing speaks to a sponsor like winning. To that end, Fisher, currently 18th in the IRL point standings, is hopeful that her new Generation IV Chevy motor -- which Sam Hornish Jr. debuted with a close second place in Michigan and rode to victory at Kentucky on Sunday, and which she raced for the first time Sunday -- will rev up a career that appears to have prematurely pulled up at a crossroads.

Dave Fisher's precocious, 5-foot-3 daughter fervently believes that she is a smarter, better driver than she has ever been, and because of it there are bound to be answers out there. If the Gen IV isn't it, and if a major sponsor isn't forthcoming real soon, Fisher might even turn to stock cars -- one of the few four-wheeled racing vehicles she has never commanded.

"That's definitely one thing I'm looking at," she said. "We've talked about it this year. It's a lot easier for a sponsor to justify a NASCAR program, even though it requires more expense."

The bad news is that, historically, women have occupied only a token presence on the Winston Cup circuit. The good news is that, for Sarah Fisher, history began 17 years ago at 50 miles an hour.