TOLEDO OH (11-20-09) - When Deborah Renshaw burst onto the ARCA scene in 2002, the competition was reaching fever pitch. Development teams were coming out of the woodwork and Frank Kimmel was on fire. Despite an ultra-competitive arena, Renshaw excelled in more ways than one.
Renshaw, driving for Bob Schacht Motorsports, showed the most promise among her female counterparts of the day. In just a handful of ARCA starts, she was rarely outside the top-10 with finishes of 7th at Nashville Superspeedway, 8th at Kentucky and 9th at Chicagoland. Renshaw was also impressive at Talladega and Pocono with 11th place runs. She even made one short track start at Salem where she qualified third and was running third inside of 10 laps to go when she got caught up in someone else's wreck. Nonetheless, in a very short period of time, the well-spoken, well-educated girl from Bowling Green, Kentucky was turning a lot of heads. Given her impressive ARCA marks, there was every reason to believe that bigger things were still ahead.
Then, everything changed.