With Extreme E mandating women drivers, and athletes like Yan Zhang and Klara Andersson competing on the front lines of Rallycross, electric car racing could be where female athletes finally find their foothold
“When I entered my first race, people told me I wouldn’t be able to do it. They said I wasn’t strong enough and that I should focus on becoming a wife or a mother,” says Yan Zhang, fresh from touring the paddock ahead of the hugely anticipated World Rallycross championship final in Hong Kong, which took place in early November. Her response to the cynics? “I just said: ‘Watch me’.”
Fast forward 15 years and Zhang has more than proven herself, making history as the first female Chinese driver to race in an international rallycross event, when she took to the cockpit of an RX2e car in the FIA’s European Rallycross Championship in Germany this August. Her chance of a podium ended a little abruptly, as she rolled her car in a breathtaking crash on the Estering track, but she shrugs off the defeat with the same nonchalance she shows towards those that doubt her: “The cars are tough, I was fine and it was still fun.”
For Zhang and the rare women like her on the front lines of motorsport, coping mechanisms like these are crucial for survival in a world that still reeks of prejudice. “The beauty of motorsport is that we really can compete on equal terms with men,” says Mikaela Åhlin-Kottulinsky, minutes before making her World Rallycross debut on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour track. And she’s right, racing is one of the only sports in the world in which physical differences don’t stand in the way of women competing against male counterparts. But just because it’s possible, doesn’t mean it’s easy. For women racers, the hill to climb is enormously steep, and even if they reach the summit, the pressure at the top can be crippling.