Back to Features Sweet Girls with a Sweet Tooth for cars… Sweetie Girl Racing is a Toronto based all-girl car enthusiast club. Sweetie Girl Racing first began in 1999 when a couple of girls decided to get together and create a team to promote female interest in the sport-compact car scene. We are currently at around 30 members, and all of who drive and enjoy the hobby of modifying cars. We also have many other interests such as getting together at a coffee shop and talking or going out dancing. The Growing Problem…Guys! It doesn’t matter what we do when we go out, all that matters is that we do it in a safe and responsible manner! Unfortunately, guys are known to be a bit irresponsible and the facts show it. We see first hand how many guys are driving and racing their cars after a night drinking at the bar. We see first hand how their drinking affects their capability to judge right from wrong. We see them racing up and down streets, doing burnouts or smoke donuts in front of crowds of people. The facts show: Males account for 87% of seriously injured young drinking drivers. A large percentage of young drinking drivers die or are seriously injured in crashes on the weekend (55% and 49.8% respectively) Of the fatally injured impaired drivers, 29.9% were male, aged 26-35;20.8% were male, aged 20-25. So males between 20-35 encompass over 50% of the impaired drivers! D.R. Mayhey, S.W. Brown & H.M. Simpson, “The Alcohol-Crash problem in Canada: 1999” (January 2002)[The Traffic Injury Research Foundation of Canada: Ottawa] Another deadly factor: Speed With the growing popularity of modifying sports cars, the combination becomes even deadlier. The need for speed has sparked a culture where cars are equipped with modifications and equipment for extreme speeds. Combine this with the deadly effects of alcohol and you end up with soaring numbers of incidences of fatalities and serious injuries in young male drivers. It HAS to stop!…Sweetie Girl Racing steps in We decided that we needed to do something and something soon! The perfect opportunity to educate the guys on drinking and driving was at car shows! The targeted audience for these sport compact car shows were indeed the 19-35 year old males who all share a love for cars. So we tried it! Sweetie Girl Racing set up a booth at the Import Revolution Show on August 17th at the International Trade Center in Toronto and at First Episode Car show on August 31st – September 1st at the National Congress Center in Mississauga. Along with displaying some of our finest cars, we hung up M.A.D.D. banners and handed out goodie bags with flyers. Our booths were definitely as success! Guys were impressed with our cars and came over to chat with us. This gave us the opportunity to talk to them about drinking and driving! We were so popular that by the end of two shows, we were already out of goody bags and flyers! Tie one on…for points! We talked with the judges for the First Episode show and told them about our mission to promote and raise awareness on drinking and driving. We asked that for all cars entered into show competition to be awarded an extra point if they had a M.A.D.D ribbon tied onto their car. The judges thought this was a wonderful way to promote and assented. Next we went around to all the competitors and asked them for a donation (with the added bonus that if they donated, a ribbon would win them extra points when their car was being judged). What resulted from this was a car show where practically all the cars in the show had M.A.D.D. ribbons tied on. (Think over 200+ cars!). What a huge success! Back to Features