Newbury Park resident Belinda Endress is motor sports

 champion.

By Wayne Harrison Acorn Sports Writer

As a teenager, Belinda Endress, a Newbury Park resident who previously resided in the San Gabriel Valley, decided to drop out of school.
"I pretty much sat down for about a week and prayed about it," Endress said. "I prayed really hard about it, wondering what I wanted to do with the rest of my life."
She now believes her prayers were resoundingly answered.
"The conclusion that I came up with is that I wanted to go to the racetrack." At that time it was the horse racetrack where Endress worked as an exercise-rider for more than seven years.
Spending much of her time "rehabilitating horses," Endress eventually could not reconcile the treatment of the horses with her job riding them. "I got really tired of what they were doing with the animals," she said.
That led to a reevaluation of her path, and after becoming a professional wrestler - she broke into the sport as "Tornado Red" - the relatively petit, youthful, thirty-something Endress gradually became enthralled with various types of road racing.
Although she loves motorcycles (she rides a Honda CBR 600 F-2) - "I got a motorcycle and had a ball with it and I'm on my fourth motorcycle right now" - she knew that racing those competitively was potentially hazardous.
"I knew riding them, it was such a personal challenge for me, that I wanted to race," she said. "But there's no way I was going to race a motorcycle. I've just seen too many things happen."
That did not stop her from becoming a road racer.
Endress gradually became "hooked" on the speed of racing cars, and for more than two years, she has prospered as one of the growing number of professional female race car drivers.
Last year, Endress steadily proved she is a force to be reckoned with in the world of racing, finishing second three times in the Women's Global GT Series and finishing the year in third place overall.
The road, if you will, to becoming a race car driver, included wide-ranging experiences in addition to her years as an equestrian and later a wrestler. Endress did modeling work from the age of 14 and she worked as a stuntwoman in movies as well as an actress.