first several years of racing retirement, “I would have gone back in a heartbeat,” Guthrie says. The sponsorship issue still plagues women drivers today. Guthrie brings up Sarah Fisher, the first woman to earn a pole position in the start of a major IndyCar race and the youngest woman to compete in the Indy 500, in 2000 when she was 19: “She’s still trying, but she can’t get the money. She’s the insider’s favorite.” These days, Guthrie maintains a relatively low profile in high-profile Aspen, where she lives on a tucked-away street in a comfortable but modest split-level house that she and her late husband, Warren Guthrie, bought in 1987. She drives a ’91 Jeep Cherokee. “My car should start, go, stop in ice and snow, and carry a lot of stuff. That’s all I want,” she says. Her need for speed has subsided. Though she originally moved to Aspen so she could ski — “among the accessible sports, skiing is the closest to car racing,”— her time on the slopes these days is limited. Though displaying trophies has never been her thing, Guthrie does have a wall of photos and framed newspaper clippings from her racing days in a lower-level room, and looking at them is like getting an annotated primer on her career. One place in her living room has been reserved for her favorite photo, a close-up of Guthrie behind the wheel of her car in 1979 before a seasonopening race in California, intended, but never published, for the cover of Life. Her eyes, thoughtful and serious, are the only things visible other than her helmet. There’s story behind those eyes, though. That morning, Guthrie had just met the chief mechanic who would oversee her car and realized “the guy had no more business chiefing an IndyCar than the man on the moon. So I was sitting there, doing my best to look glamorous for this photographer, and what he caught was me thinking, ‘How in the hell am I going to get out of this?’” She did find a way out, managing to hire another mechanic in time for the race. Guthrie believes strongly in remembering and recording the impact of women racers, especially those who preceded her. “There were a lot of women in [early] racing history,” she notes, “but that history has been largely forgotten.” In that vein, she avidly supports the creation of the National Women’s History Museum in Washington, D.C. When she talks about her own impact, a bit of Guthrie’s old competitive fire comes through. “There’s nothing like cognitive dissonance,” she says in describing the original mindset of the male drivers she raced against. “There’s nothing like them saying, ‘Oh, this driver can’t possibly be any good and is going to kill me because she’s female,’ and then that driver blows your doors off and you sort of have to reorganize your thinking a little bit.” She gives a satisfied chuckle. “In both venues, IndyCar and NASCAR, one of my greatest pleasures was in seeing those attitudes change. That was very gratifying, indeed.”
A Fast Look at Women Drivers Despite multiple obstacles in a maledominated sport, numerous women have competed successfully in racecar driving. Here are a handful who have taken the sport for a spin:
SARA CHRISTIAN was the first woman driver in NASCAR history. Her first race was June 19, 1949, at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina. Her last race was just a year later in 1950. She was inducted into the Georgia Automobile Racing Hall of Fame in 2004. LOUISE SMITH raced from 1949 to 1956. She won 38 races in her career and became the first woman inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1999. PATTY MOISE raced from 1986 to 1998. She set numerous track records including one in 1990, when she broke the one-lap, closed-course speed record at Talladega with a speed of 217.498 mph. DEBORAH RENSHAW started her racing career in 1999 at the Highland Rim Speedway in Tennessee. She had numerous top-ten racing starts and finishes until her career ended in 2006, largely due to a lack of sponsorship. DANICA PATRICK (pictured above) became the fourth woman to compete in the Indianapolis 500, following Janet Guthrie, Lyn St. James, and Sarah Fisher. In 2005 she was named Rookie of the Year and, in 2008, became the first woman ever to win an IndyCar race.
Cindy Hirschfeld is a freelance writer/editor based in Basalt, Colorado. Her work appears in the New York Times and in travel and ski magazines. spring 2010 LSA n 17