I grew up in a family obsessed with motorsport, but after seeing the movie Rush in 2013, I fell head over heels in love with Formula 1. After traveling around the world to see racing in far-flung countries, I forged a career writing about the intricacies of a high-speed sport packed with fascinating stories and scandals that date as far back as the very first vehicle. As a woman covering racing, I’ve been a bit of a rarity in the garages, which is why I’ve tried to emphasize the lesser-heard stories of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ racing community.
I wrote
Racing with Rich Energy: How a Rogue Sponsor Took Formula One for a Ride
Janet Guthrie completely changed the name of the game for women in motorsport here in America.
She was the first woman to compete in iconic races like the Indianapolis 500, and circuits even had to change their rules to allow women into the garage area because of her.
With a physics degree and a pilot's license under her belt, Guthrie changed the name of the game for women in motorsport—but her career fell short thanks to the restrictive nature of the 1970s.
Her autobiography sheds light on the pain and heartache she felt alongside all of her successes.
In this beautifully written book, Guthrie tells her story from the beginning. Nearly two decades in the making, Lady and Gentlemen captures the poignant detail of the complexity of the racing business. On a deeper level, she conveys all that she encountered along the way as a woman in the most testosterone-charged of men's worlds.
Hellé Nice had lived a full life before she ever sat behind the wheel.
A career as a model and dancer in Paris enabled her to live a life of luxury in the 1920s, but when she injured her knee skiing in 1929, she turned to a new career: Motor racing.
She went on to compete in races around Europe, setting world records behind the wheel of her bright blue Bugatti.
A freak accident nearly killed her in 1936, and the onset of World War II brought racing to an end. Nice's lush lifestyle saw her accused of being a Nazi collaborator, and records of her accomplishments were scrubbed from the racing world.
Miranda Seymour tracks down Nice's complex legacy and reports it in vivid fashion.
THE BUGATTI QUEEN is the beautifully illustrated story of an indomitable and fascinating woman, a pioneer of motorsport who revelled in danger. Born in 1900 in a tiny French village, Helene Delangle, aka Helle Nice, became a dancer and a stripper before catching the eye of Ettore Bugatti. Seduced by the combination of machines and speed, Helle Nice went on to have an unprecedented career, competing in numerous Grands Prix and becoming the only woman to drive on the treacherous American speedbowls in the 1930s. She set new land-speed records before a notorious accident which almost ended her racing days.…
The players are René Dreyfus, a Jewish racing driver, and Lucy Schell, a racing driver and American heiress.
As antisemitism crept through the continent, Dreyfus' successful racing career was choked out by the might of state-funded German engineering—at least, until Schell came along.
With her ample fortune and a home in Paris, Schell began funding her own racing team and immediately signed Dreyfus. Later, when the pressures of Nazi ideology threatened Dreyfus' life, Schell funded a "trip" to the Indianapolis 500 in America in order to help him start a new life.
Faster highlights the complex ways that politics, religion, money, and motorsport intertwine, told so compellingly that you won't want to put this book down.
Winner of the Motor Press Guild Best Book of the Year Award & Dean Batchelor Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism
For fans of The Boys in the Boat and In the Garden of Beasts, a pulse-pounding tale of triumph by an improbable team of upstarts over Hitler’s fearsome Silver Arrows during the golden age of auto racing
As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, three unlikely heroes—a driver banned from the best European teams because of his Jewish heritage, the owner of a faltering automaker company, and the adventurous daughter of…
Back when AAA sanctioned auto racing events in the 1920s, Black men were barred from racing at the highest competitive levels and were subjected to scathing remarks and racism at smaller local venues.
The Brown Bullet tells the story of Rajo Jack, one of the first Black drivers in America who broke down barriers just for a chance to show up at the track.
Even today, Black racers face undue prejudice when attempting to enter a predominately white sport; this book sheds light on the origins of that entrenched discrimination.
The powers-that-be in 1920s auto racing, namely the American Automobile Association's Contest Board, barred everyone who wasn't a white male from the sport. But Dewey Gatson, a black man who went by the name Rajo Jack, drove into the center of "outlaw" auto racing in California, refusing to let the pervasive racism of his day stop him from competing against entire fields of white drivers. In The Brown Bullet, journalist Bill Poehler uncovers the life of a long-forgotten trailblazer and the great lengths he took to even get on the track, showing ultimately how Rajo Jack proved to a generation…
Roberta Cowell made history as the first British transgender woman to undergo gender-affirming surgery, but that isn’t the extent of her story.
She was also a fighter pilot in World War II who survived five months in a prisoner-of-war camp and a race car driver.
Though she was able to find doctors willing to provide her with the surgery that would affirm her gender identity, she gave up so much in the process, including a race car engineering company and her motorsport career.
Her autobiography is a poignant reminder of how far we've come in the subsequent decades.
First published in 1993. The purpose of this book is to help those who help others. Research has consistently demonstrated that those in the professions, particularly helping professions, have significantly higher levels of stress and burnout. Studies have shown that the profession with the greatest vulnerability to these illnesses is teaching.
Formula 1 has long maintained a glitzy aura that masks strange goings-on in the background. With the 2019 season came a force louder than Formula One could dream of muffling: William Storey, the founder of British energy drink startup Rich Energy. Storey became a multimillion-dollar sponsor of the Haas Formula 1 team a year after records showed Rich Energy having a mere $770. He equated his doubters to moon-landing truthers and publicly mocked both the Haas team and the entities winning legal disputes against him. But where were actual cans of Rich Energy? In the six months between Storey’s first race as a Formula 1 sponsor and his public exit, he stole the spotlight with a loud mouth and an active Twitter account. This book uncovers the complete, bizarre story.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
