NOTE: In September 2003 I wrote a story about two women pioneers in racing, Janet Guthrie and Lynn St. James. The story appeared in Trackside Magazine, which has since stopped publishing. Janet competed in NASCAR stock car racing so her part of the story is submitted here. Some things have changed since then and some things have not. For instance, Janets book has since-been published. She, too, is one of those characters that for me have over the years made racing so doggone interesting. Its not included here but I wrote in the article that like an old cigarette commercial said, Youve come a long way baby. For open wheel fans I may post the part of the story about Lynn on another part of the site. LD

Janet Guthrie was a serious racer and a pioneer in racing. Her beginnings includes racing in SCCA. She started out with a seven-year-old Jaguar XK 120M coupe and became involved in autocross.

I built my own engines, she said., did my own body work and slept in the back of the ratty old station wagons that I towed my Jaguar with. In 1972 I threw everything I had into the construction of a Toyota Celica for a professional road-racing series that was cancelled before the car was finished. I campaigned the Celica in SCCA through 1975 and won the North Atlantic Road Racing Championship. At that point I had no money, no house, no insurance, no jewelry, no husband, and I was deeper in debt than I cared to think about.

Not an unfamiliar place for just about anyone who has tried racing, but in 1976 Rolla Vollstedt invited Guthrie to test a car at Indianapolis.

What I did have, she said, was a reputation, so when Rolla Vollstedt decided that among his many other innovations he wanted to be the first team owner to bring a woman driver to Indianapolis, mine was the name he kept getting. I had never heard of him and when he called I thought he must be joking.

The following year she became the first woman to qualify for and compete in the Indianapolis 500. She finished ninth in 1978 with a team she formed, owned, and managed herself.

In 1976 she also became the first woman to compete in a NASCAR Winston Cup superspeedway race. The following year she set another precedent, becoming the first woman to compete in the Daytona 500, winning top rookie honors. She won top rookie honors in four other races the same year.

She has the distinction of qualifying in the top 10 and finishing in the top 10 in both the Indy Car and Winston Cup Series.

As a young woman Guthrie started flying airplanes, soloing at 16 and obtaining her private pilots license at 17, and had her commercial license and flight instructors rating by the time she completed college. Adventure was clearly an important part of her personality.

Once she realized racing was no longer a viable career, she turned her attention to writing a book about her racing adventures with the intent that it be her legacy, to women in particular, and to relate, how much nonsense there was out there about what women couldnt do, to try to make the reader feel the passion and complexity of the sport, and to tell what it takes for any driver to succeed. After 18 years of work its done and shes searching for a publisher.

Guthrie has tried to assist women interested in racing but hasnt found that special candidate who can take it over the top.

If asked for help I have given it, she said, (in the form of) advice, letters of recommendation and so on. Until a couple of years ago, I was able to do introductory on track instruction and always hoped that a woman with enough money to fund her own racing, as well as having the rest of what it takes, would turn up in one of my classes. A couple did, but neither was sufficiently gripped by the sport to continue very far.

Unquestionably, Guthrie said, there are more women on the ovals now. When I started there werent any. I think I took the initial heat in Indy cars and NASCAR and I think that the fact that (male) drivers (eventually) came to see me as a clean, competitive driver was important. My NASCAR team owner, Lynda Ferreri, and I joked ruefully at the beginning that if an accident happened within half a lap of me in either direction, it would be chalked up to my account. By the middle of 1977 that had changed.

Guthrie believes there is still a glass ceiling for women racers. She said, I think there is. No woman that I know of has been given so much as a private test by a top-running team in Indy cars or NASCAR Winston Cup. And if you dont have access to top equipment and personnel, youre highly unlikely to run up front. Sarah Fishers difficulty finding sponsors, even after she had qualified on the pole and scored a second place finish, says glass ceiling to me.

Guthrie faced a lot of the same kinds of obstacles many women do when the first attempt to move into a domain formerly considered all male.

In sports cars its probably still the same as when I started, she said. Being a woman wasnt an issue as long as you could fund your own racing. In Indy cars and NASCAR, I think nothing could resemble the initial furor and skepticism when I first got my chance. Accepted wisdom prior to my first race in each of those venues, endlessly repeated in the media, was that a woman couldnt possibly handle that kind of machinery. I think a woman still has to prove herself more than a man does. However, I think that men who are now in their twenties are far more accustomed to the idea of equality in difficult, challenging activities such as motorsports.

The biggest obstacle she encountered, which is still the same for anyone today, was money.

In sports cars, I didnt expect to find any obstacles except money, nor did I find any, except on a couple of occasions over 13 years. I became a real expert at disguising my relative poverty. I spent all of an engineers salary on racing but of course that wasnt really enough. There had always been women in sports car racing and it just wasnt an issue.

When I started to make a profession of it, the money became a bigger issue. I got turned down on so many sponsorship pitches but even so, it didnt occur to me until years later that big business might not be willing to support a woman driver. My Celica was supported in part by A-1 Toyota of East Haven, Conn., but they were a dealership, and I was competing against factory-backed Datsuns. Toyota USA turned me down.

Women drivers generally dont do much for a male executives need to be macho by association.

One money-related obstacle at the beginning, she said, was that since I couldnt afford a mechanic, I had to learn how to do all the work myself. At the beginning I knew nothing! And I had practically no tools and no garage. I assembled the short block of the first Jaguar engine I built in the back of my station wagon with a torque wrench borrowed from the gas station across the street. That was I 1964. Fortunately, the Jaguar shop manual was comprehensive and thorough. Unfortunately it was written in British. Still, that engine went 15 SCCA races in 1964, including the sixth overall and second in class in the first ever 500-mile National Championship race at Watkins Glen. Back then, SCCA Nationals were important enough to be written up in the New York Times.

About the future of women in racing and what she would do to make things different, Guthrie said, I think its going to be two steps forward, one step back for the foreseeable future. First, I would make certain that sponsorship was available to women, beginning where family money cant cover a competitive team. There are plenty of candidates down there in the lower ranks. Second, I would make certain that teams who were testing drivers for a possible spot tested women as well as men. Some day, a woman will win the Indianapolis 500 and a woman will win the Daytona 500. I wish I had had sufficient opportunity to be that woman. It was my objective. But when it happens, the sponsor of that driver will gain rewards beyond their wildest dreams.

Racing, perhaps more so than any other venue, asks nothing else of participants than to strive to be the best. Nothing else matters. Well, almost nothing else. There is still the small matter of money.