Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Fastest Woman on Earth’ on HBO Max, The Thrilling and Tragic Story of Land-Speed Racer Jessi Combs

In 2013, professional racer and television personality Jessi Combs began a pursuit of the land-speed record. That same year, she set the women’s land speed record, earning her the nickname “the fastest woman on four wheels” — but her pursuit of history didn’t stop there. Her dogged efforts to break new records in racing–culminating in her death in a 2019 crash–are the focus of The Fastest Woman on Earth, a new feature-length documentary on HBO Max.

THE FASTEST WOMAN ON EARTH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Viewers around the world knew Jessi Combs for her presence on television–hosting or guesting on shows including Overhaulin’, The List: 1001 Car Things To Do Before You Die, All Girls Garage, and Mythbusters, shows where she demonstrated huge knowledge of everything automotive and little fear of any challenge. Off-screen, her ambitions were even larger: to set the land-speed record in a rocket-propelled car. Recruited by an amateur racing team to be their star, she quickly set women’s records, but her life would end in a tragic crash during a 2019 speed run. The Fastest Woman on Earth follows her from these early attempts to the very end, with footage from the time giving her a large on-screen presence here, too.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: HBO in particular excels at extreme-sports documentaries, and this reminds of some of the life-or-death circumstances in their recent miniseries Edge of the Earth, with a bit more Top Gear in the mix.

Performance Worth Watching: There’s important emotional and technical context given in contemporary interviews with Combs’ racing team members and family, including touching and insightful commentary from the late Ed Shadle, team leader of Combs’ North American Eagle Project racing team. But the core of The Fastest Woman on Earth’s success is how much contemporaneous footage there is of Combs herself–this doesn’t feel like an after-the-fact construction, it feels like we’re riding alongside her from the start.

Memorable Dialogue: “For the most part, I’m just a normal girl,” Combs herself describes, in response to a documentary filmmaker’s question posed before her death. “But I live a life that’s risky. I don’t live a normal everyday. I had a desk job once–it lasted six months. Because I don’t know how to be something I’m not. And when it comes to cars, when it comes to driving, I think it’s what I was born for.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The business of chasing land-speed records isn’t for the faint of heart. Technically, it’s just driving a car very fast. Practically speaking, though, it’s strapping yourself inside a missile and screaming it across a patch of salt-flat desert, an endeavor where a million things can go wrong and any one of them could prove catastrophic.

But Jessi Combs was never one to shy away from a challenge.

Motorsports is an overwhelmingly male-dominated world, but Jessi Combs unapologetically elbowed her way into it, building a career both on and off-screen building and racing cars.

“Everything she did, she did full-on, and when it was time for her to flee the nest, she did it, and she did it big,” Combs’ brother recalls of her leaving her South Dakota home at age 19 after meeting a biker at the Sturgis motorcycle rally.

Her mechanical acumen wasn’t some on-screen creation; Combs’ family reminisces fondly about her finishing in the top of her class at technical school, setting the tone for her future drive for success–to quote Ricky Bobby, “if you ain’t first, you’re last.”

Combs’ rise is shown in parallel with that of Kitty O’Neil a generation earlier–O’Neil a groundbreaking stuntwoman who set the previous women’s land-speed record before quitting extreme endeavors after seeing colleagues and friends die. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Combs meets with O’Neil and discusses the importance of their barrier-breaking work, receiving the elder daredevil’s blessing to attempt breaking her record. It’s clear in the scene that O’Neil feels a degree of concern for Combs, one that would prove well-founded a few years later.

HBO’s sports documentaries typically aren’t fluff or filler–they routinely present films that pick a compelling if-often-esoteric topic and give it a polished, well-produced and well-paced product. The Fastest Woman on Earth is no exception to this; even if you don’t know a thing about the world of high-speed racing, the film sucks you in, offering a presentation that walks the tightrope–it’s neither inscrutably insider nor patronizingly broad. In general, some of the best documentaries happen when the subjects aren’t fully aware of the story they’re telling at the time; that’s tragically true in The Fastest Woman on Earth, but it’s superb storytelling.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Even if you weren’t familiar with Combs’ extensive television presence, her story is one worth watching–compelling, tragic, and fascinating.

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky who publishes the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter.