Episode 9: Breaking the Brickyard Glass Ceiling
Introduction
If you walk through the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, somewhere in the exhibits on the history of the race, you will find a helmet. It is dark colored, with silver and gold details. The name "Guthrie" is on it.
That helmet belonged to Janet Guthrie. On May 29, 1977, she wore it to the starting line of the Indianapolis 500 and became the first woman in history to race in the Indianapolis 500. There had been 60 prior runnings of the race. For 66 years, the starting command had been "Gentlemen, start your engines."
When Tony Hulman raised the microphone for the 1977 race, he said something different. He said: "In company with the first lady ever to qualify at Indianapolis, gentlemen, start your engines."
Janet Guthrie was 39 years old. She had a physics degree from the University of Michigan. She was a trained pilot and a former aerospace engineer. She had once qualified for an early NASA astronaut selection program. She had also, in February of that same year, become the first woman to qualify and race in the Daytona 500.
She was about to start 26th and finish 29th. Mechanical problems would knock her out after 27 laps. She would come back the next year, drive with a broken right wrist from a charity tennis match, and finish 9th. That ninth-place finish would stand as the highest finish by a woman at the Indianapolis 500 for 27 years.
Nine other women have followed Janet Guthrie into the Indianapolis 500 since 1977. This episode is about them. About the door Guthrie kicked open, about the women who walked through it, about Sarah Fisher who became the first woman to own her own IndyCar team, about Danica Patrick who set the highest finish record that still stands, about Paretta Autosport in 2021 with a mostly-female crew, and about what comes next.
Janet Guthrie and 1977
Janet Guthrie was born in Iowa City, Iowa, on March 7, 1938. She is, as of this recording in 2026, still alive, 88 years old (Britannica, 2026).
She did not start her life as a race car driver. She started as an engineer and a pilot. She earned a physics degree from the University of Michigan in 1960. She got her pilot's license at age 17. She worked as an aerospace engineer in the early 1960s. She qualified for one of NASA's early astronaut selection programs but ultimately pursued her passion for cars instead (Racers Behind the Helmet, 2022).
Guthrie bought her first car, a 1953 Jaguar XK120 M coupe, shortly after graduating from Michigan. She started racing in 1963. She raced for nine years as a part-time amateur and a working engineer before turning full-time professional in 1972. By the mid-1970s, she was racing competitively in sports cars and was beginning to look at the highest levels of American motorsports.
Her path to the Indianapolis 500 went through a man named Rolla Vollstedt. Vollstedt was a longtime IndyCar owner and mechanic. He invited Guthrie to test one of his cars at Ontario Speedway in early 1976. She passed the test. She became the first woman ever named to drive an Indianapolis 500 entry. But the 1976 attempt did not produce a qualifying speed. She did not make the field that year (IMS Museum, 2025).
She came back in 1977. In February, before returning to Indianapolis, she qualified for and raced in the Daytona 500, becoming the first woman to do both. She finished 12th at Daytona with engine problems in the final 10 laps. She was Top Rookie of the Daytona 500 (Automotive Hall of Fame, 2025).
Three months later, she was at Indianapolis. She qualified 26th in Vollstedt's car. On May 29, 1977, she became the first woman to start the Indianapolis 500.
The reception was mixed. Some drivers and team members were openly hostile. There was no women's restroom in the garage area at the time. Critics questioned her right to be there. But her actual qualifying speed silenced most of the skepticism. She had earned her place on the grid (NPR, 2018).
The race itself did not go well. Mechanical problems forced her out after 27 laps. She finished 29th.
She came back in 1978. That year, despite driving with a broken right wrist from a charity tennis match earlier that week, she finished 9th. She finished ahead of Mario Andretti, Johnny Rutherford, and Rick Mears, three drivers who would collectively win the Indianapolis 500 nine times. She finished just two positions behind A.J. Foyt. That 9th-place finish would stand as the best by a woman until 2005, 27 years later (IndyCar, 2019).
She raced one more time at Indianapolis, in 1979, and did not finish due to mechanical problems. In total, she made three Indianapolis 500 starts. She made 11 IndyCar starts overall, with a best finish of 5th at Milwaukee in 1979. She also made 33 NASCAR Cup starts, with a best finish of 6th at Bristol in 1977 (still tied today, with Danica Patrick, as the best NASCAR Cup finish by a woman in the modern era).
In 2006, the Smithsonian Institution recognized Janet Guthrie's racing helmet and her uniform as nationally significant artifacts. They are displayed today at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., along with the helmet at the IMS Museum.
She kicked open the door. Nine women have followed her through.
Lyn St. James and the Long Climb
There was a 15-year gap. From 1979, when Janet Guthrie last raced at Indianapolis, until 1992, no woman started the Indianapolis 500.
In 1992, the second woman arrived. Her name was Lyn St. James.
She was born Evelyn Cornwall in Willoughby, Ohio, in 1947. She legally changed her name to Lyn St. James, having taken the surname from the actress Susan Saint James. She got into racing through drag racing in the 1960s, after a friend in Louisville, Kentucky, lost a heat and challenged her, in jest, to do better. She did. She won the heat (Encyclopedia.com, 2026).
Through the 1970s and 1980s, she built a sports car racing career. She won the GTO class at the 1990 12 Hours of Sebring. She had two class victories at the 24 Hours of Daytona. In 1985 she became the first woman to drive a closed-course race lap at over 200 miles per hour, recording 204.223 mph at Talladega Superspeedway in a Ford Mustang Probe GTP (Wikipedia, 2026).
In 1991, Ford curtailed its road-racing program and dropped her as a driver. She decided to switch to IndyCars. After attending personal development seminars and pitching corporate sponsors hard, she got J.C. Penney, Agency Rent-a-Car, Goodyear, and Danskin to back her in IndyCar. Notably, the three J.C. Penney executives who approved her sponsorship were all women (Encyclopedia.com, 2026).
She qualified for the 1992 Indianapolis 500. She was 45 years old. She started 27th and finished 11th, the only rookie to complete the race that year. She was named 1992 Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year, the first woman to receive that honor. Her record as the oldest Rookie of the Year stood for 30 years until Jimmie Johnson won it at age 46 in 2022 (Wikipedia, 2026).
St. James went on to make 7 starts at the Indianapolis 500 between 1992 and 2000. Her best qualifying position was 6th in 1994. In 1995, during qualifying, she ran a lap at 225.722 mph, setting a closed-course speed record for women that stood for many years (Wikipedia, 2026).
She never finished higher than 11th in seven starts. She had her share of trouble. In 1997, she was running 9th with 11 laps to go when another car took her out in a crash. Her final Indy 500 start in 2000 ended when she tangled with rookie Sarah Fisher, ending both of their races.
St. James did something equally important off the track. In 1994 she founded the Women in the Winner's Circle Foundation, which promotes women in the automotive and motorsports industries. She personally mentored the next generation of women drivers, including Sarah Fisher and Danica Patrick (Automotive Hall of Fame, 2025).
In a 2022 interview with IndyCar, St. James reflected on her role: "I spoke from the heart, from the reality that if you want to change something, you've got to do something. If you want a different result, you have to do something different. The sport wasn't wanting to do anything different." (INDYCAR, 2022)
The sport eventually changed. Lyn St. James was, in her own words, "the Lone Ranger" for much of her career. By the time she retired in 2001, that was beginning to change. The next driver was already arriving.
Sarah Fisher: Driver, Owner, Pioneer
In 2000, the same year Lyn St. James made her seventh and final Indianapolis 500 start, an Ohio teenager named Sarah Fisher made her first.
Sarah Marie Fisher was born in Columbus, Ohio, on October 4, 1980, and raised in Commercial Point, Ohio. She started racing at age five in quarter-midgets. She moved through karts and dirt-track racing through her teens. In 2000, at age 19, she became the youngest woman ever to start the Indianapolis 500, and the third woman overall, after Guthrie and St. James (Wikipedia, 2026).
That first season set the tone for what came next. Later in 2000, at Kentucky Speedway, Fisher finished 3rd, behind Buddy Lazier and Scott Goodyear. That was the first podium finish by a woman in IndyCar history. The next year, 2001, at the Infiniti Grand Prix of Miami at Homestead, she finished 2nd, behind Sam Hornish Jr. That second-place result was the best finish by a woman in IndyCar history at that point. It would not be surpassed until Danica Patrick won at Twin Ring Motegi in Japan in 2008 (Wikipedia, 2026).
In 2002, Fisher took the pole position at Kentucky Speedway, with a track-record qualifying time. That was the first pole position by a woman in IndyCar history. The track record she set, 221.390 mph, still stands. Her Indianapolis qualifying record for a woman, 229.439 mph from 2002, also still stands (ESPN, 2015).
But Fisher's most lasting contribution to the sport may have come away from the wheel.
In January 2008, she founded Sarah Fisher Racing. She was the first woman to be a driver-owner in IndyCar history, and the youngest team owner in IndyCar at the time (Wikipedia, 2026). At first, she relied on fan funding to keep the team alive. She and her husband Andy O'Gara, a former tire changer and mechanic, ran the team out of a small shop in Indianapolis.
The team grew. In 2010, they ran two cars, with Jay Howard and Graham Rahal joining the lineup. In 2011, after Sarah Fisher retired from driving to focus on family (her daughter Zoey was born in September 2011), the team continued to race. With co-owner Wink Hartman of Hartman Oil and later partner Stuart Reed (co-owner of Fuzzy's Vodka), the team became CFH Racing in 2014.
In 2015, CFH Racing won the Indianapolis 500 with driver Juan Pablo Montoya. Sarah Fisher had built a team that won the Indianapolis 500 (ESPN, 2015).
In all, Fisher made 9 starts at the Indianapolis 500 between 2000 and 2010, the most of any woman in history. Her best Indianapolis 500 finish was 17th in 2009. She won the Most Popular Driver award three years in a row from 2001 to 2003. In 2016, IndyCar hired her to be its pace car driver, a role she held through 2020. She returned as honorary pace car driver for the 2022 Indianapolis 500 (Wikipedia, 2026).
Sarah Fisher's career arc, from teenage rookie to championship-winning team owner, set a template for what was possible. The pole position, the podium, the team ownership, the Indianapolis 500 win as an owner: each one was a first by a woman in IndyCar.
Danica Patrick and the Highest Finish
In 2005, the woman who would become the most famous race car driver of her generation arrived at Indianapolis.
Danica Patrick was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, on March 25, 1982. She grew up in Roscoe, Illinois. She started karting at age 10. At 16, she moved to England to race in the European junior open-wheel series. She came back to the United States and signed with Bobby Rahal's team for the 2005 IndyCar season (Racers Behind the Helmet, 2022).
Her Indianapolis 500 debut, on May 29, 2005, was a phenomenon. She qualified 4th. That was the best qualifying position by a woman in Indianapolis 500 history. During the race, she led 19 laps, becoming the first woman ever to lead the Indianapolis 500. She finished 4th, two positions short of her qualifying position but well ahead of every previous woman's finishing position at Indianapolis. She was named 2005 Rookie of the Year (Wikipedia, 2026).
The 2005 race was the most-watched Indianapolis 500 broadcast in years. Patrick's name and face were on every newspaper and every magazine cover that month. She was a national sensation.
In 2008, at Twin Ring Motegi in Japan, Patrick became the first woman ever to win an IndyCar Series race. The Indy Japan 300. Her win came on the last lap after the cars ahead of her ran out of fuel, but she had positioned herself to be the beneficiary. The win was historic. It was a long time coming, and many had begun to question whether it would ever happen (Wikipedia, 2026).
In 2009, she made her breakthrough at Indianapolis. She qualified 10th. She raced steadily through the field. She finished 3rd. That was, and remains 17 years later, the highest finish by a woman at the Indianapolis 500 in the 115-year history of the race (Femalesinmotorsport, 2021).
Patrick made 8 starts at Indianapolis between 2005 and 2018. Her last Indianapolis 500, in 2018, was her last race of any kind. She had moved to NASCAR full-time in 2013. In NASCAR, she became the first woman to win a Cup Series pole (Daytona, 2013) and made history multiple more times. By her own choice, she retired from full-time racing at the end of 2017, with her last race being the 2018 Daytona 500 and her actual final career race being the 2018 Indianapolis 500.
Patrick's place in motorsports history is debated, mostly within fan circles, but the basic facts are not. As of 2026 she is the most successful female driver in Indianapolis 500 history by finishing position. She holds the records for highest qualifying position (4th), most laps led, first IndyCar Series win, and most laps led overall. Six of her eight Indianapolis 500 starts produced top-10 finishes.
In 2009, the same year she finished 3rd, Patrick was also the first woman to qualify for the Brickyard 400 NASCAR race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, joining a list of 19 drivers who have competed in both the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400. In 2025, Katherine Legge became the 19th driver to do both (Wikipedia, 2026).
The 3rd-place finish in 2009 still stands. As of this episode's recording in 2026, no woman has finished higher. The next woman to break it, whoever and whenever, will set the record that has held since Patrick set it.
The International Wave and Paretta Autosport
The years from 2007 to 2015 were the high-water mark for women in the Indianapolis 500 in terms of representation on the grid.
In 2007, for the first time in Indy 500 history, three women started the race: Sarah Fisher, Danica Patrick, and Milka Duno. Milka Duno was a Venezuelan-born driver with four master's degrees and an early career as a naval engineer. She made her IndyCar debut at age 24. She made three starts at Indianapolis: 2007, 2008, and 2009. Her best finish was 19th in 2008 (Femalesinmotorsport, 2021).
In 2010, four women started the Indianapolis 500: Danica Patrick, Sarah Fisher, Ana Beatriz, and Simona de Silvestro. A fifth, Milka Duno, attempted to qualify and failed. Patrick finished 6th. de Silvestro, a Swiss driver in her rookie year, finished 14th and won Rookie of the Year (Wikipedia, 2026).
Ana Beatriz was a Brazilian-born driver sometimes called "Brazil's Danica Patrick." She started the Indianapolis 500 four years in a row from 2010 to 2013. Her best finish was 15th in 2013.
Simona de Silvestro made five Indianapolis 500 starts between 2010 and 2021. In her rookie year (2010) she won Rookie of the Year. She raced 2010 through 2013, then took several years away from IndyCar to race in Formula E and as a factory Porsche sports car driver. She returned to Indianapolis in 2021 for one specific reason: Beth Paretta.
Beth Paretta is a motorsports executive who in 2011 became the first woman to direct the performance and motorsports operations for an automaker, at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. She led the Dodge SRT Motorsports program that, with Team Penske, won the NASCAR Cup Series championship in 2012. She had tried in 2016 to assemble an all-female team called Grace Autosport for the 100th Indianapolis 500, but the team was unable to acquire a car and never made it to the track (RACER, 2021).
In 2021, the picture changed. Roger Penske had purchased the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the IndyCar Series in 2020. One of his early initiatives was the "Race for Equality & Change" program. Paretta reached out. The result was Paretta Autosport, a new team owned by Beth Paretta, driven by Simona de Silvestro, with a technical alliance with Team Penske, sponsored primarily by Rocket Pro TPO.
Paretta Autosport qualified for the 2021 Indianapolis 500 on Bump Day, the final day of qualifying, beating out 2018 Indy 500 champion Will Power for the final spot in the 33-car field. Their pit crew over the wall during the race included four women: Madison Conrad, Caitlyn Brown, Amanda Frayer, and Mallorie Muller, the first time multiple women had gone over the wall in an Indianapolis 500 (Sports Illustrated, 2021; Paretta Autosport, 2021).
In the race, de Silvestro completed 170 of 200 laps before brake trouble on a pit entry ended the day. The team did not win. But Paretta Autosport had done what Janet Guthrie did in a different way in 1977: open a door that had not been open before. The first team in Indianapolis 500 history owned by a woman, driven by a woman, and significantly crewed by women had completed an Indianapolis 500.
The team continued in modified forms in subsequent years. The model, a women-led ownership structure with serious technical alliances and corporate sponsorship, has become a template for how more women can move into top motorsports roles.
Two other women drivers have completed the picture in recent years. Pippa Mann, a British driver, made seven Indianapolis 500 starts between 2013 and 2019, with a best finish of 16th in 2019. In 2014 she drove a Susan G. Komen pink car for breast cancer awareness. Katherine Legge, another British driver, made starts at the Indianapolis 500 in 2012, 2013, 2023, and 2024. In 2025, she became the 19th driver to compete in both the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400 (Wikipedia, 2026).
Two Episodes, One Story
Last week in Episode 8, we covered women in IndyCar engineering, ownership, and pit crews. Maude Yagle, the 1929 winning car owner who had to use her initials "M.A. Yagle" to disguise her gender. Anita Millican, the first woman to receive credentials and go over the pit wall in 1980. Diane Holl, the first woman to win an IndyCar championship as a race engineer in the late 1990s. Angela Ashmore, the Purdue Mechanical Engineering Master's graduate who in 2022 became the first woman to win the Indianapolis 500 as part of a winning team's race-day crew.
Episode 9 has been about the drivers. Janet Guthrie in 1977. Lyn St. James in 1992. Sarah Fisher in 2000. Danica Patrick in 2005. Simona de Silvestro and Paretta Autosport in 2021. The two episodes are halves of the same story.
Here is what the combined picture tells us.
For the first 66 years of the Indianapolis 500, from 1911 to 1976, women were essentially excluded from racing as drivers. They could own cars (Maude Yagle did in 1929, but had to hide it). They were not credentialed in the pit area until the 1970s. The first female reporters were not allowed in the pits until 1971.
Janet Guthrie raced in 1977. Lyn St. James raced in 1992. Between those two starts, 15 years passed with no woman in the field. Between St. James in 1992 and the 2000s ramp-up, change accelerated. By 2010, four women started the same Indianapolis 500. By 2022, women were working on all three top-finishing teams' engineering staffs. By 2024, women were lead race engineers on Chip Ganassi Racing IndyCars.
The pattern is not linear. It is also not finished. In 2020, no woman entered the Indianapolis 500 for the first time since 1991. The COVID pandemic killed the sponsorship pipeline for Pippa Mann that year, and there was no other woman ready to take that seat. Progress can stop. Progress can reverse.
And one record has held longer than anyone expected. Danica Patrick's 3rd-place finish from 2009 has now stood for 17 years. The next breakthrough is still ahead of us, somewhere.
For Indiana high school students, the takeaway is this. The world of motorsports has more roles for women now than it has ever had. Driver. Engineer. Pit crew. Owner. Strategist. Tire specialist. Mechanic. Spotter. Marketing director. Operations chief. Medical staff. Broadcaster. The path to each of these roles runs through different educational and athletic pipelines, but the doors that were closed in 1976 are open now. The women on this episode kicked them open one at a time, sometimes 15 years apart.
There is more work to do. There always is. But there is also a clear, demonstrable, in-the-historical-record case that the pathway is real.
Wrap-up
Here is what I want you to take away from this episode.
When Janet Guthrie qualified for the 1977 Indianapolis 500, more than a thousand reporters were on hand to cover it. Some of them were rooting for her. Many of them were not. Some of the drivers refused to speak to her. Some of the spectators booed. There was no women's restroom in the garage area. The whole structure of professional racing had been built on the assumption that women would not be there.
She finished 9th the next year, driving with a broken wrist. That ninth-place finish was a quiet message to everyone who had doubted her. It said, simply: I belong here. And by extension: the women who come after me belong here too.
Each of the 10 women who has raced in the Indianapolis 500 has made her own version of that argument. Lyn St. James in 1992. Sarah Fisher in 2000. Danica Patrick in 2005. Simona de Silvestro in 2010. Each one took the inheritance of the women who came before her and made the case in her own way.
Each of those women also benefited from the women who did the parallel work off the track. Maude Yagle. Anita Millican. Diane Holl. Cara Krstolic at Firestone. Kate Gundlach and Danielle Shepherd and Angela Ashmore at Ganassi. Beth Paretta as a team owner. Mari Hulman George, who served as chairman of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from 1988 to 2016 and who gave the "Drivers, start your engines" command for many of those years.
The story is, in a deep sense, an Indiana story. The races take place in Indiana. Many of these women lived in Indiana, work in Indiana, are remembered in Indiana. Sarah Fisher built her team in Indianapolis. Angela Ashmore went to Purdue. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where every one of these milestones happened, sits in Speedway, Indiana, surrounded by neighborhoods where Indiana kids grow up watching the race every May.
The next woman to win the Indianapolis 500 is, statistically, alive right now. She is probably between the ages of 5 and 25. She might be reading this transcript, or listening to this episode in a high school classroom in Indianapolis, or in Bloomington, or in Fort Wayne, or in Muncie, or in Terre Haute. She might already be in karts. She might not have started yet. She might come from somewhere else and end up in Indiana like Janet Guthrie did, like Sarah Fisher did, like Angela Ashmore did.
Whoever she is, the door is open. The infrastructure exists. The mentors are alive and working. The path is real.
Sources
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Automotive Hall of Fame. (2025). Lyn St. James inductee profile. Retrieved from https://automotivehalloffame.org/honoree/lyn-st-james/
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ESPN. (2015, May 15). How Sarah Fisher could make a name for herself at Indy again. Retrieved from https://www.espn.com/espnw/news-commentary/
Femalesinmotorsport. (2021, May 27). Meet the pioneering women who have raced in the Indianapolis 500. Retrieved from https://www.femalesinmotorsport.com/
Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum. (2025). Janet Guthrie Hall of Fame profile. Retrieved from https://imsmuseum.org/fame_inductee/janet-guthrie/
INDYCAR. (2019, May 28). Documentary traces Guthrie's battle to prove she's 'Qualified'. Retrieved from https://www.indycar.com/News/2019/
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INDYCAR. (2022, March 25). St. James continues to blaze trails for women in racing. Retrieved from https://www.indycar.com/news/2022/
International Motorsports Hall of Fame. (2020, September 24). Janet Guthrie. Retrieved from https://www.motorsportshalloffame.com/inductees/janet-guthrie/
MEL Magazine. (2022, June 12). Under 10 percent of IndyCar engineers are women. She's one of them. Retrieved from https://melmagazine.com/
NPR. (2018, May 27). Indy 500 pioneer Janet Guthrie savors the day she made history. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018/05/27/
Paretta Autosport. (2021, May 30). History made as Paretta Autosport competes in the Indianapolis 500 with mostly female crew. Retrieved from https://www.parettaautosport.com/news/
RACER. (2021, January 19). De Silvestro to make Indy 500 return in Penske-aligned Paretta entry. Retrieved from https://racer.com/2021/01/19/
Racers Behind the Helmet. (2022, May 29). Indy500: The women of the fastest race on the planet. Retrieved from https://www.racers-behindthehelmet.com/
Sports Illustrated. (2021, May 30). Indy 500: Paretta, Simona De Silvestro unite and inspire generations. Retrieved from https://www.si.com/
Wikipedia. (2026). Janet Guthrie. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Guthrie
Wikipedia. (2026). Lyn St. James. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyn_St._James
Wikipedia. (2026). Sarah Fisher. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Fisher
Wikipedia. (2026). List of female Indianapolis 500 drivers. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Indianapolis_500_drivers
Wikipedia. (2026). Paretta Autosport. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paretta_Autosport