Go Speed Racer Go!

Interesting turn of events in Iran. As reported by The Guardian:

The fast and the furious
Laleh Seddigh enraged the establishment when she beat all the men to win a national motor-racing competition - perhaps because that nation is Iran, where male superiority is enshrined in law. She talks to Robert Tait

Her first name means tulip in Farsi, tulip being the flower adopted by Iran's Islamic rulers as a revolutionary emblem, symbolising martyrs' blood. But somehow it is hard to imagine Laleh Seddigh as the poster child whom the hardline conservative mullahs, renowned for their rigid views on female modesty and the separation of the sexes, had in mind when they tried to mould the country into a strict religious state after the 1979 revolution. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For Seddigh has not so much circumvented Iran's gender barrier as blasted her way through it. She has done so by surpassing a host of male competitors in a discipline at which large numbers of Iranian men excel - driving at breakneck speed with apparent disregard for the consequences.

Earlier this year, Seddigh, a 28-year-old PhD student in production management, was crowned the first woman champion in an otherwise all-male field in a national speed race championship at Tehran's Azadi stadium. To win, she careered round the track in a souped-up Proton saloon in lap times as fast as 68 seconds. That success followed an equally impressive triumph in a national rally competition. Doing her own wheel changes and engine repairs, Seddigh and her female navigator raced across a combination of desert and frozen roads in Iran's notoriously rough-hewn terrain to finish ahead of a mixed-sex field.

As the cracks start to show in the Theocracy. Lebanon is doin very well these last few months, Iran may soon follow.