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“Janet Guthrie: A Life at Full Throttle”
Janet Guthrie’s own account of her racing adventures (Sport Classic Books,
May 2005)
is available online at
Amazon.com
or
for autographed copies, click on "Contact Us" at top.
"The year's best books took us deep into the psyches of competitors like...race
car driver
Janet Guthrie,
who wrote her own profile in courage...Guthrie turned
out an uplifting work
that is one of the best books ever
written about racing--and
establishes her as one of the
sport's most eloquent voices."
(Sports Illustrated,
December 19, 2005)
"Ms. Guthrie possesses a level of erudition rare among race drivers...you will find
that (she)
offers a
refreshingly literate voice from the sports world."
(The New
York Times, June 4, 2006)
* * * * *
Janet Guthrie is the first woman to earn a starting spot in the Indianapolis 500
(1977) and the
Daytona 500 (1977),
where she was Top Rookie. Her ninth-place finish
in the Indianapolis 500
(1978), with a team she formed and managed
herself, was
the best by a woman until 2005.
She set fastest time of day at Indianapolis on May
7 and May 22, 1977.
In her brief career at the top levels of racing, she earned top-ten starting positions
and posted
top-ten finishes in both
Indy-car Championship racing and in NASCAR Cup
racing.
Her fifth-place Indy-car finish at Milwaukee in 1979 was
the best by a woman
for 21 years.
Her sixth-place NASCAR Cup finish at Bristol in 1977 remains the best
by a woman in
NASCAR’s superspeedway era. She is the only woman to lead a Cup race.
She was
Top Rookie in five NASCAR Cup races.
A graduate of the University of Michigan (B. Sc. in physics), she was formerly a
flight instructor
and an aerospace engineer.
Her helmet and driver's suit are in
the Smithsonian Institution.
She is a charter member of the Women's Sports Foundation
International Women's Sports
Hall of Fame. She was inducted into the International
Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2006.
Updated April 2010
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