Remembering History: Janet Guthrie races into motorsports history with celebrated 1977 Indy 500, NASCAR season

British professional race car driver Katherine Legge made headlines in February when Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing (RLL) announced she would race the team’s No. 44 Dallara-Honda for the 107th Indy 500. The news marks Legge’s third start in the iconic IndyCar race and her first since 2013.

Legge’s return also ensures at least one female driver will be in the field this year’s field, which was absent of women in 2022 for the second time in three years. The 2020 Indy 500 was the first contest without at least one woman in the field since 1999. Legge, whose team recently finished fourth in class at the Rolex 24 at Daytona in January, is one of nine women to have raced in the Indy 500, which is set for May 28 on NBC.

As On Her Turf continues its celebration of Women’s History Month, we take a closer look at the first of those nine women to race at “The Brickyard” — Janet Guthrie, who made her first of three career starts in the Indy 500 in 1977, during what turned out to be a breakout rookie season for the auto-racing trailblazer.

Born in Iowa City, Iowa, in 1938, Guthrie found the “need for speed” as a teenager growing up in Miami, Florida, where her family moved when she was 3. Both of her parents were pilots, and Guthrie’s father taught her how to fly as a teenager. She earned pilot’s license at 17, but gender barriers in the late 1950s prevented her from becoming a commercial airline pilot. That prompted her to head to the University of Michigan, where she graduated in 1960 with a degree in physics.

Guthrie began her career as an aerospace engineer with Republic Aviation in Farmingdale, N.Y., where she worked on programs that were precursors to Project Apollo. In 1964, she made it through the first round of eliminations