The First Lady Of CART Diane Holl is the lead engineer for the McDonald's team

When Diane Holl was nine years old and growing up in Guildford,
England, her father, Tony, and older brother, David, took her to
see her first Formula One race. "I was interested in ballet,"
she says. "I found racing boring." By the time she was 16,
however, Diane was ready to trade in her dreams of a career en
pointe for one in the pit and announced to her parents that she
wanted to be an auto racing engineer. Today, as the engineering
manager for the McDonald's Championship Racing Team, which
fields cars on the CART and Indy Lights circuits, Holl is the
only female lead engineer in CART, F/1, IRL or NASCAR.

Holl pursued her goal with the singular drive that has become
her trademark. In order to get an internship while she was
studying at University of South West in Plymouth, she wrote to
"every auto team in England--30 or 40 of them," she says. "I was
lucky enough to be hired at Reynard, which was very small at the
time, and I worked on fabrication and machining."

The only woman in a mechanical engineering class of 65 at South
West, she graduated with honors in 1987. Then she started
writing letters again, in pursuit of a full-time position, and
was hired first by Ferrari and then by Benneton as an F/1 design
engineer. She arrived in the U.S. in '94 as the lead
research-and-development engineer for Reynard. A year later she
joined Tasman Motorsports (now McDonald's) and became the first
woman to oversee a winning CART team when Adrian Fernandez won
the Molson Indy Toronto in '96.

Holl supervises eight other engineers--all male--and is
responsible for such facets as aerodynamics, data acquisition
and fuel strategy. More than her gender, it's her relative
youth--she's 34--that Steve Horne, president of McDonald's
Racing, finds exceptional for someone in Holl's position. "Even
a man would not get to that level until 40 because it takes a
while to build up experience," he says. "There are very few
people who have her kind of background."

Holl admits that being a woman in a position of authority in a
male-dominated sport changes team dynamics. "They haven't asked
me for a bobby pin to hold the chassis together yet," she says,
"but there is always the feeling that as a woman, you have to
prove yourself. But once you're accepted, there's no problem."

--Paula Hunt

COLOR PHOTO: DAVID TAYLOR/ALLSPORT