Angelle Sampey and Karen Stoffer met at a motorcycle racing school in 1995, and a year later, they made their NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle debut at Bandimere Speedway near Denver.

More than a quarter-century later, they’re still fast friends; Sampey, as a three-time NHRA series champion, and Stoffer, the owner of the quickest quarter-mile time ever in their class. 

The fact that both women are still competing in the same class all these many years later brings smiles to their faces. 

“I remember when I first started, George (Bryce) asked me how long did I think I would race,” Sampey said. “I said probably five years. I was hoping to get five years in. That five years went by in what felt like five months. Crazy.

“In those five years I accomplished just about everything I set out to accomplish. My career got a great start from the beginning but the more I won, the more I wanted to win, so there was no stopping at five.”

Bryce was not only the owner of the motorcycle racing school where Sampey and Stoffer learned to race at a higher level, he was Sampey’s first NHRA team owner. Sampey’s first full season was 1997, and she notched her initial championship in 2000. She successfully defended her crown on the Winston-sponsored bike, then captured her third in a row in 2002. In 2001, her 19th victory made her the winningest woman in NHRA pro-category history, and she was in the midst of dominating the division: In those three seasons, she won 18 times in 24 final rounds, and she was a finalist in 57% of her starts.

The husband-wife team of Karen and Gary Stoffer, meanwhile, tested the waters in 1996 and found themselves in water deeper than they could manage.

“One of the things that I learned when I dipped my toes in in ’96 was that the water wasn’t ready for me – or I wasn’t ready for the water,” the 58-year-old from Gardnerville, Nevada, said. “We ran once or twice and said, ‘We really shouldn’t be out here, we don’t have the skills, we don’t have the equipment, we’re just out having a good time’ kind of thing. So we definitely took the toes back out.”

They returned in 2002 with team owners Doug and Debbie Johnson, and at Maple Grove Raceway that season, Karen lost to Sampey in the first all-female final in NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle history. In 2004, with GEICO as her sponsor, Stoffer earned her first victory at Houston.

After scoring a pair of wins in 2007, Stoffer didn’t return to victory lane again until 2011. She sat out the 2013-14 and 2020 seasons, and she plans to wrap up her Pro Stock Motorcycle career as a full-time competitor at the end of this year. She may consider racing in the Factory Stock Showdown in the coming years.

Sampey took a break during the 2009-13 seasons to start a family. She is now in her fourth season with Vance & Hines Motorsports on the Mission Foods Suzuki. She had high hopes of winning the 2021 Pro Stock Motorcycle championship, but couldn’t pull off the feat.

“Vince & Hines is the elite part of Pro Stock Motorcycle drag racing, but I’ve still got to drive the damn motorcycle, and I can sure find a way to screw it up,” she said. “I should’ve won the championship last year, but I managed to screw that up. It was not Vance & Hines’ fault.”

Sampey’s 2021 title hopes came to an end when she lost on a holeshot to eventual champion Matt Smith in the season-ending event at Pomona.

Back in 1996, Sampey and Stoffer didn’t compete on the big stage as the only women, as Stephanie Reaves made her PSM debut that same weekend. Sampey was originally slated to race at Rockingham Dragway in a Prostar-sanctioned event, but with a hurricane wiping out that event, Bryce made the call to head to Denver. It turned out to be a blessing for Sampey.

“I was glad (Stoffer and Reaves) were there because it took the pressure off of being ‘the girl’ out there,” Sampey said. “I don’t know how Karen and Stephanie were treated, but it was rough back then. There wasn’t a lot of confidence in me from other riders, not a lot of trust. There were things that were being said like they didn’t want to be in the other lane against me, they were afraid to race against me because I guess everybody just had this idea that I was going to crash into every other motorcycle there and kill somebody.

“Instead of it just being me, it was two other girls, and that made that a little easier. Karen and I actually did become really good friends over the years. I respect her and love her a lot. She is just a genuine, awesome human being. I’m so glad she’s still out here with me. … Overall, it’s just made it easier. If I had had to be the only female out here the whole time, I, quite frankly, don’t know if I would have lasted because of the treatment I was given.”

Their on-track fortunes have often run parallel in that when one is running well, so is the other. When one struggles, the other seems to fight an uphill battle, too. That bit of common ground has allowed them to celebrate or commiserate as circumstances dictate.

“If I come around the corner and had a bad run and she sees I’m sitting there discouraged, she’s like, ‘Girl, me, too. We’re in this together,’” Sampey said. “Then we end up turning it around at the same time. There’s been several races where neither one of us were qualified ’til the fourth round and we both got in at the very last minute. It’s like we were doing the whole thing together. Some way, Karen and I have been on the same wavelength our entire career, and I’ve just really appreciated it and hope she does, too.”

When Sampey began her NHRA career, she juggled her schedule around her duties a nurse. Stoffer was in the grocery business in high school and college, then went to work 29 years ago for Bently Nevada as a process and quality expert in a manufacturing facility. The firm builds computers for large-scale power generators around the world, she said. 

“Nuclear plants, warner plants, turbines, wind – anything that spins or turns or rotates, we make the equipment that captures the data and lets you know if it’s running at its efficiency or if there’s something out of balance or a temperature issue,” she said. “It prevents catastrophic failures. It also allows you to bring your power down so you can maintenance it. Power companies lose millions of dollars a second when their power goes out, and our equipment allows you to bring it down to the level where you can maintain it, sustain it and fix it, and then bring it back up.

“I work in the technology department. I’m one of the process leaders for our global technology department, so I work with engineers around the world, making their days easier, designing and making products, doing everything compliantly without letting them know it,” the 11-time NHRA national-event winner said. “I work with engineers in China, India, Brazil – three or four hundred of them around the world. If I can make an engineer smile because they can do their job and not worry about the bureaucracy as far as recording or not recording everything, that’s a good day.”

Sampey said she wasn’t always been easy to befriend at the track due to her intensely competitive nature. “I don’t care if it’s a monkey on the motorcycle in the other lane, I want to win,” she said.

“I was trying to survive out there and be competitive and fight off the men that wanted me to leave,” she said, “but I think (Karen and I have) come to appreciate each other even more as we’ve gotten older. She’s always been super, super nice and friendly to me. I wasn’t always … I wasn’t not nice, I just didn’t really go around and really associate with everybody like I do now.

“I think I had built up a wall around me because of some of the ways I was treated — not by her, by any means, or some other people — but there were people that hurt me pretty bad out there, so I just got to a point where I said, ‘I’m not here here to make friends.’ My slogan was actually, ‘If I want friends at the race track, I’ll bring them with me.’ Now it’s different, I’m out there to have fun and enjoy myself, I’m more relaxed and talk to everybody. I don’t know which way is better. I think maybe I need to go back to being mean.”

The “mean Angelle” would have come in handy had she not pursued a racing career, she said.

“There’s only one other sport that I would want to be involved in and that’s the UFC. I always said I think I would’ve been a good UFC fighter,” said Sampey, who is 51. “But now it’s too late for that. I’d get in there and try to fight somebody and break a hip.”