Sask. Indigenous race car driver carving out place for women in the sport

Destiny and Stefan Klym unload matching race cars from identical grey trailers pulled by twin silver trucks into the middle of a small-town track.

The father-daughter duo trades off tasks in near-silence. They rev up a generator to charge the vehicles' batteries; check the tire pressure and torque them; make sure the cars are filled with antifreeze and that no bolts are loose. It's a rhythm perfected over a decade of racing together. 

Within an hour, they're zipping around the parched oval, churning up choking clouds of dust on the 27-degree dry July day.

Although she has roots in Opaskwayak Cree Nation in Manitoba, Destiny calls Saskatchewan home. She is the first Saskatchewan and Indigenous woman to compete in a Nascar-sanctioned race. She has competed in hobby stock, street stock and modified cars across the Prairies and in several states, taking home multiple championship trophies.

As accomplished as she is, this isn't a story about Destiny's accolades or her need for speed. It's about how a mutual love of racing brought a father and daughter together.

Stefan taught Destiny how to drive at a young age around the rural area near Carlyle, Sask. She grew up there, in the southeast part of the province, some 60 kilometres from the Manitoba border.

Neither anticipated she'd be racing before she (legally) hit the highway.

Stefan began racing in the early 1990s, and it didn't take long for his daughter, now 25, to tag along. When Stefan would haul his semi-trailer truck to races in the United States, he'd prop Destiny up on a briefcase on the seat beside him. They'd sing George Jones and Alan Jackson all the way to Nebraska and back.

Still, it wasn't Destiny who Stefan thought of first when he planned to show another family