People · Betty Skelton · Chapter 7 of 9

Records Without End

Through the late 1950s and into the 1960s

Daytona is the headline, but it is nowhere near the whole story. Once Chevrolet establishes that Betty Skelton can turn a timed run into a publicity triumph, records become almost a routine part of her working life — and she keeps stacking them up across nearly every format American motorsport has to offer. A women's closed-course speed record at 144.02 mph. A speed record of 105.8 mph in the 200-to-249-cubic-inch piston displacement class. A 24-hour stock car endurance record, the kind of grinding, unglamorous test that has nothing to do with a single flying-mile sprint and everything to do with a driver's stamina and a car's reliability over an entire day and night.

She sets a transcontinental speed record driving from New York to Los Angeles in 56 hours, 5 minutes — a genuine feat of sustained concentration across a continent, long before interstate highways made that kind of run remotely routine. A separate South American transcontinental automobile speed record follows. Multiple further speed and endurance records come out of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, the spiritual home of American land-speed racing, where the ground itself is flat and hard enough to let a car find out exactly what it's capable of.

Taken individually, any one of these would be a career highlight for most professional drivers. Taken together — aerobatic champion, first industry test driver, Daytona speed record holder, transcontinental record setter, endurance racer, jet-car pilot at Bonneville — they add up to a career built on refusing to specialize. Skelton is formally credited with seventeen aviation and automobile records and firsts across her lifetime by several careful accountings, and with a far looser, more generous count sometimes cited in the hundreds once every class record and regional mark gets folded in. Either way, by the early 1960s she has quietly become one of the most decorated speed record holders, of any gender, in American history — on land and in the air alike.

Airplanes, sedans, stock cars, a jet-powered dragster. If it could go fast, Betty Skelton eventually found a way to be the one driving it.

And then, in 1959, an entirely different kind of test comes looking for her — one that has nothing to do with a stopwatch, and everything to do with what the human body can survive.