Betty Skelton Erde is 82 and lives in a retirement community where many are content to putter about in golf carts. Not Erde: she drives a blazing red Corvette to match her red hair and really means it when she says, “I like fast cars.”
An auto racing pioneer, Erde (Uhr-Dee) once was the fastest woman on Earth, setting female speed records at Daytona Beach and Utah’s Bonneville salt flats half a century ago. On Wednesday, she reaches a new milestone as only the fifth woman inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in suburban Detroit.
She also becomes the 174th person honored; Erde will attend the ceremony in which Champ Car driver Michael Andretti and five other racing legends also are being inducted.
Dozens of firsts are attached to her name: the auto industry’s first female test driver, in 1954; the first woman to set a world land speed record in 1956 (145 mph at Daytona Beach); and then the world land speed record for women in 1965, hitting 315.72 mph at Bonneville.
One day, a man organizing a local airshow invited her to perform. She didn’t know any aerobatics, but learned to roll and loop a plane in two weeks.
“You really learned what excitement was then,” she said.
“She’s one of the women who really pushed the boundaries,” said Dorothy Cochrane, curator of general aviation at Washington’s National Air and Space Museum.
In 1953, the man who began the NASCAR circuit asked Erde to fly some auto racers from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. She and Bill France became fast friends.
In February 1954, at France’s invitation, Erde went to Daytona. She climbed into a Dodge sedan, went 105.88 mph on the beach — that’s when folks still raced on sand — and set a stock car record.
“I would venture to say there is no other woman in the world with all the attributes of this woman,” France once remarked.
But if Erde was aware of how different she was for a woman at the time — unmarried, without children — she didn’t show it.
“I had to do what I wanted,” she said.
Now living for a year in her retirement community, Erde still longs for the cockpit of a plane. But she gets her speed fix by watching Danica Patrick in the IndyCar Series and lives with the satisfaction that she helped open aviation and motorsports to young women.
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