Helen Frances Taylour was born in Birr, County Offaly, Ireland, to a family of comfortable means. Her father Herbert Taylour was a colonel and district inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary. She was educated at Alexandra College, Dublin, and left school in 1922. After her mother's death in 1925, she used £50 of prize money from school to buy her first motorcycles.
Taylour moved to England and began racing motorcycles in the mid-1920s, competing in trials and grasstrack events. In April 1928 she attended the opening of the Leeds Post Hill speedway track and switched to speedway, finding it more spectacular and better-paying. She rapidly became one of the biggest draws in the sport on both sides of the world. In 1928 she paid £500 of her own money to travel to Australia and New Zealand, becoming the first European rider to compete there. She equalled the track record in her first Australian race and defeated the Western Australia champion Sig Schlam. She attracted crowds of over 30,000 spectators. Her popularity extended to cigarette cards, radio appearances, and her trademark scarlet racing leathers bearing an Irish flag. Her motorcycle career ended when women were banned from speedway racing in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
She switched to car racing in 1931. At Brooklands that autumn, driving a Talbot 105, she lapped at 107.80 mph in a women's handicap race. In 1931 she also won her first major car race in India, setting a course record for the Calcutta to Ranchi event. At Brooklands in 1932 she came second lapping at 113.97 mph, then drew a fine and disqualification for making several additional fast laps in excitement after the finish in a 2.6-litre Monza Alfa Romeo.
In 1934 she won the Leinster Trophy road race in Ireland in a front-wheel-drive Adler Trumpf — the only woman in the field. That same year she drove a works Aston Martin in the Italian Mille Miglia, again as the sole female competitor, and took part in the Craigantlet hill climb in County Down. She raced across Ireland, England, Italy, Sweden, and the United States. Her last major prewar race was in the 1938 South African Grand Prix, driving a Riley.
In the late 1930s Taylour joined the British Union of Fascists, becoming a follower of Oswald Mosley. On 1 June 1940 she was interned under Defence Regulation 18B, held first at Holloway gaol — where her suffragette aunt had once been imprisoned — then from 1942 in a camp on the Isle of Man. She was released in October 1943 on condition she live in neutral Ireland, where she continued to be monitored by MI5.
Taylour became the only prominent prewar woman racing driver to resume competition after World War II. She entered races in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, and Australia. In 1949 she moved to Hollywood, where she sold British cars and discovered midget car racing on American dirt tracks. During the 1950s she continued racing, including at Brands Hatch and Silverstone in a 500 cc Cooper, competing against a new generation that included Stirling Moss and Peter Collins. She retired in the late 1950s and settled in Blandford, Dorset. British security services closed their file on her in March 1976. Fay Taylour died from a stroke at Dorset County Hospital on 2 August 1983, having left her body to medical research.