‘Born adventurous’: Janet Guthrie was a NASCAR trailblazer. Now the sport honors her
Janet Guthrie, a trailblazer in both NASCAR and Indy Car racing, sums up why she kept getting behind the wheel of a racecar in the 1970s like this:
“I was born adventurous.”
In 1976 in Charlotte, Guthrie became the first woman to compete in a NASCAR premier series superspeedway race. Although she had never driven a Cup car before, she came to Charlotte for what was then known as the World 600 and finished an impressive 15th.
The NASCAR Hall of Fame induction Friday night in Charlotte will honor the three members of the Class of 2024 — Donnie Allison, Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus.
Guthrie will also be honored, as the recipient of the Landmark Award for Outstanding Contributions to NASCAR.
She won’t be able to attend in person, though. Now 85, Guthrie lives in Colorado and has made a habit of not getting on airplanes ever since COVID raced across the world in 2020. But she said in a phone interview she was very happy to earn the Landmark Award.
“I am surprised and delighted,” Guthrie said. “Obviously, it has to do with the ‘first woman’ thing. But it has caused me to remember that first NASCAR Cup race I ever drove Charlotte in the 600-mile race on Memorial Day in 1976. That was quite an adventure.”
That was right up Guthrie’s alley, because she loved adventures. Her father was a pilot for Eastern Airlines and several other members of her family flew airplanes as well. Flying was her first passion, and her desire to tackle potentially perilous experiences was in evidence early.
“I started out flying planes and soloed when I was 16,” Guthrie said. “I made a freefall parachute jump when I was 16, too.”
Eventually, Guthrie went to college, earned a degree in physics from the University of Michigan and worked as a research and development engineer. But after she bought a Jaguar and “saw what it could do,” she began racing that car in the minor leagues. By the mid-1970s she had worked her way up to running some of the most famous races in the world, including the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500.
Over the course of four part-time seasons in NASCAR Cup racing from 1976-80, Guthrie competed in 33 races. She had no top-5 finishes, but did finish in the Top 10 on five occasions, including a career-best sixth at Bristol in 1977. She would have raced more often, but then as now, sponsorships were extremely difficult to come by.
“Lack of sponsorship,” Guthrie said, “was what forced me out in the end.”
Guthrie also believes it is harder for women to get Cup sponsorships than men, and that it always has been.
Said Guthrie: “It is a very, very expensive sport. And I believe that women still have a more difficult time finding sponsorship than men do. I have always said that what the sport needs is a woman with all the stuff that it takes — desire, concentration, judgment, emotional detachment — plus her own fortune as well.”
Guthrie said she loved Cup racing, and that the experience itself of driving very fast each weekend was wonderful. The other thing she liked? When she had earned respect in the garage from the men she battled.
Guthrie said originally the other Cup drivers thought like this: “This driver is a woman and therefore this driver can’t be any good.”
When she beat some of them every week, though — sometimes the majority of them — that changed.
“Because when the no-good driver blows your doors off, what does that make you?” Guthrie said with a laugh. “So seeing attitudes change as they realized I knew what I was doing, that I knew my track manners and that I could give them some good competition — that was my biggest pleasure.”
