WHITE CITY -- Shawna Wilskey would love to be called the No. 1 sprint car driver in the Pacific Northwest.

Just don't insert the word "female" anywhere in the sentence.

Wilskey is the only woman on the Northern Sprint Tour that kicked off its season at the Southern Oregon Speedway on Monday night.

And that makes her a media attraction at nearly every track she competes on. But Wilskey wants to earn her merits based on her ability behind the wheel, not her gender.

"I'm not a feminist or a person with an agenda," she says. "I just love to race and I like to think I've got a clue as to what's going on out there."

Indeed she does. Wilskey, who won her heat and was among the favorites in Monday's 30-lap main event, has been as successful as any driver on the Northern Sprint Tour. She won the points title two years ago in the tour's inaugural season and finished third last year.

"She gets the most out of her car every night -- without wrecking it," says her father, Dick Wilskey, who served as her crew chief until this season. "She has a great connection between her head and her body.

"If she's not the best sprint car driver in the Northwest, she's awfully close."

Wilskey was a standout soccer and softball player while growing up in Everett, Wash. But those sports took a back seat once she stepped into a mini sprint car at age 14 and won her very first race.

Dick Wilskey raced throughout the '70s and early '80s and was only too happy to become his daughter's mechanic once she was ready to compete.

Their partnership reached its zenith in 1996 when Shawna won the NST points title, but it ended last fall.

The reason? Shawna wanted to make a career out of racing while her father was content to have it remain a hobby.

"The setups I was putting on her race car were a little conservative," he says. "If you're going to get really fast and move up in this sport, you need to be on the edge.

"Because Shawna is my daughter, I wasn't willing to do that.

"But we had a lot of success together, a lot of fun, and there are no hard feelings whatsoever."

Shawna hopes to add another title or two on the NST and then join the World of Outlaws, the national sprint car racing tour.

"Racing is my life," she says. "I eat, sleep and breathe this sport and I want to make a career out it.

"It's the biggest adrenalin rush you can imagine, and every race car you climb into has an attitude of its own. I love every aspect of racing, even the traveling."

Wilskey already has had some success competing in outlaw races. She crossed the finish line in ninth place at an outlaw event in Elma, Wash., last summer and has had a couple of other top-20 finishes.

However, an outlaw race is also the site of her worst nightmare. She slammed into a cement retaining wall at a track in Eldora, Ohio three years ago and flipped a half-dozen times.

The crash left Wilskey unconscious for 10 minutes and demolished her car.

"It happened at the start of a race and I got too high on the track," she says. "I hit the wall at full throttle."

But Wilskey wasn't seriously injured and she was back in a race car the following week.

It was that sort of passion and dedication that caught the attention of Rod Fauver, Wilskey's new crew chief.

"On top of everything else, she's extremely intelligent," Fauver says.

Fauver says there has yet to be a driver from the Pacific Northwest who has made it big on the World of Outlaws circuit. Wilskey hopes to change all that, and wouldn't mind at all if race fans overlooked the fact that she's a woman in a sport dominated by men.