Woman on the Move

Most of the working women in London's Windmill Theater spend an extraordinary amount of time standing stock still. They have to. The Windmill is a burlesque house, and, by order of the Lord Chamberlain, nudes on the move are licentious; "living statues" are art. Among the Windmill's ladies, plump, brown-eyed Sheila Van Damm is a well-dressed exception. As the manager's daughter and part-time assistant, she is fully clothed during working hours, and even off duty she rarely stands still. Europe's champion woman motorist, Sheila spends every spare minute zipping across the countryside at the wheel of her sports car.

Last week, with a team from Britain's Rootes Motors, Sheila was in Munich, busily giving her Sunbeam sedan a last-minute going-over to get it ready for the grinding, 2,000-mile Monte Carlo Rally.* With her were 43 other teams from six countries, driving cars from 17 different factories. Fanned out across Europe--in Glasgow, Monte Carlo, Lisbon, Athens, Oslo, Palermo, Stockholm--nearly 300 other teams waited for the starter's flag.

Some started from Monte Carlo itself, wound north across France, and then back to the finish line. Once under way, if men and machines held up, they would wind steadily through the unusually harsh winter, push on for three days and three nights across the Massif Central and the Alpes-Maritimes toward Monte Carlo.

Snow-Happy Start. For Sheila, things started smoothly. Down the autobahn through Frankfurt and past Cologne, the icy concrete was well sanded, no challenge for veteran drivers and all-weather tires.

Then, as the route swerved through the traffic-clogged heart of the Ruhr, a blinding snowstorm covered the road with an eight-inch blanket of snow in a single hour. On the worst stretch, co-drivers had to run ahead to guide their partners through a maze of stalled and jackknifed trailer trucks.

Others found the going even worse. Two French teams, starting from Palermo, ran smack into an avalanche that piled six-foot snow drifts on the narrow Alpine roads. Drivers starting from Oslo and Stockholm shuddered through below-zero cold; inch-thick ice formed on windshields. British drivers leaving Glasgow fought snow, fog and black ice on roads that slowed them down so much that an unhappy few missed the boat from Dover to Boulogne.

Happy Birthday. As snow sifted down and rain froze into sleet, no driver seemed to enjoy the cross-country competition more than Sheila. Just as she left Munich, word was passed that it was her 33rd birthday, and for the next two days Rally officials celebrated. At the Hamburg control point, Germans rose to a man and broke into a gutteral version of "Happy Birthday to You." On the Dutch border, smiling customs guards waved her steel-grey Sunbeam across the frontier. All along the way well-wishers gave her flowers, which she tossed into the rear seat where one of her co-drivers, Mrs. Anne Hall, was trying to sleep. "If we have an accident, you'll look good in all those flowers," said Sheila.

Bone-weary from only six hours' sleep in three days, but having lost precious few points along the way, Sheila pulled into Monte Carlo along with 270 other finishers. There, after the long haul across Europe, the leaders put their cars through another ordeal: an exacting series of starts and stops, parking and braking tests, on the devilish Col de Braus, a steep circuit that climbs through the mountains behind Monte Carlo.

After the complicated scoring was all worked out, winner in the "General Classification" was the veteran Norwegian team of Per Malling and Gunnar Fadum who drove a Sunbeam south from Oslo.

Winner of the Coupe des Dames (women's division), for the first time in four tries, was Sheila Van Damm. Said she: "I got hot and tired--it was the toughest rally I have ever done and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it."

* Not a race but a test of a car's reliability and a driver's skill. Contestants cover each lap at a designated average speed (well within local speed limits), are penalized for passing checkpoints early or late, also lose points whenever they are forced to make major repairs.

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