Dorothy Levitt Edwardian speed queen

By breaking records, winning titles and defeating her male adversaries, one fearless racing driver became a founding mother of women's motor sports. RACHEL HARRIS-GARDINER explores how Dorothy Levitt built her legend, both with her achievements behind the wheel and as a media sensation

The usual quiet and calm of Brighton’s seafront was shattered on a July day in 1905 as racing cars thundered down a newly laid stretch of tarmac, later named Madeira Drive, to the cheers of the long lines of spectators. One of the races in the inaugural outing of the south coast town’s Speed Trials was in its final stages, contested by Algernon Lee Guinness, driving a 100-horsepower Darracq, and a 23-year-old woman called Dorothy Levitt, piloting a green 80-horsepower Napier.

Guinness may have hailed from the famous brewing family, but behind the wheel, he was no match for Levitt. Reaching 79.75 miles per hour, she set a women’s land speed record on her way to winning her class, as well as the sweepstakes and a trophy. Levitt’s victory made her one of the first women to triumph at a motor race ahead of the male competitors; a “a great many professional drivers”, as she recorded it in her diary. Yet it was just the latest of her achievements as a racer, of both cars and motor boats – and it would not be the last for the fastest woman of the Edwardian age.

Between 1903 and 1908, Levitt drove in all manner of events, including hill climbs, long-distance trials, races, and speed-record runs, in the UK, France, and Germany. She set a record for the longest continuous drive by a woman by motoring from London to Liverpool and back in two days, accompanied not by a mechanic but her near-constant companion, Dodo, her Pomeranian. At the taxing Herkomer Trial in Germany, where she competed in 1907 and 1908, she won a silver plate for completing all the sections without incurring a penalty and even made it back in time to upstage her female rival, Frau Lautmann, by appearing in a vivid green dress.