On the gloriously sunny days in south Florida, she would strap herself into a small private plane, hit the ignition and watch the propellers turn. Excitement? Sure.
But 16-year-old Janet Guthrie wanted more.
She wanted to be an aviation engineer and an astronaut. And, for a time, she was headed in that direction.
She wanted to fix cars and build engines. And she did that, too.
There was always something special deep inside the heart of a young girl with big dreams and endless ambition. There was a yearning to go faster and farther.
"I always knew I wanted to race," Guthrie wrote in her autobiography A Life at Full Throttle.
So, for those who knew her then, it surprised no one on that on a May afternoon in 1977, Guthrie sat in a race car at the world's biggest race on the world's most famous track as the first woman to compete in the Indianapolis 500.
Just a few years earlier, women were not allowed into the press box at Indianapolis, much less the garage area or the pits.
"A woman on the track itself was unthinkable," she wrote.
But they didn't know Guthrie.
Born in Iowa in 1938 and raised in Florida, she knew all about speed. Her father, a pilot, had encouraged his daughter to pursue her goal of flying and Janet eventually did a solo flight for the first time at age 16.
She went on to study physics at the University of Michigan, worked as a research and development engineer and passed the first tests to be a NASA astronaut.
Racing? That was the hobby she yearned for. She had 13 years of road-racing experience, including building and fixing her own cars, before that ground-breaking day years later at Indianapolis, Ind.
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