Off the End at 258 MPH: The Crash That Nearly Killed the Fastest Woman on Wheels | Paula Murphy

Video Description from YouTube:

Paula Murphy set a women’s land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats, ran solo laps at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway before any woman had ever qualified for the Indy 500, drove a nitro Funny Car after Don Garlits and Tom McEwen personally co-signed her license, and set a women’s closed course record at Talladega in a genuine NASCAR stock car. Sponsored by Andy Granatelli and STP for most of her career, she earned the nickname Miss STP and spent the 1960s and 1970s doing things no other woman in American motorsports had done in a Studebaker Avanti, a homemade jet car called the Avenger, an Oldsmobile 442, and a Plymouth Barracuda funny car.

In September of 1973 she climbed into a hydrogen peroxide rocket dragster at Sears Point Raceway in Northern California for what was supposed to be a routine 258 mile an hour exhibition pass. Both parachutes failed. She went off the end of the strip, through a gate, up a hill, and into the air before the car came down and rolled. This video covers her full career from a bored spectator at a 1956 Santa Barbara sports car race to Bonneville, Indianapolis, the NHRA licensing fight of 1967, Talladega, and the rocket car crash that nearly ended her life.

If you’re into vintage drag racing, land speed record history, NASCAR history, or the story of the first women to break into NHRA competition, this one covers a career that touched almost every corner of American motorsports in a single decade.