Full throttle: Singapore’s female race car drivers on what it takes to stay on the grid

While Singapore has hosted F1 since 2008, for aspiring drivers, the developmental pathways at home tell a different story. KF1 Kranji, where many young drivers first raced competitively, was the country’s only international-standard karting track. It closed this June after nearly 12 years, even as entries in its amateur races had grown from 20 in 2015 to as many as 85 a decade later.

For the women who raced before Kaur, the route was far less defined. They had to piece together a pathway of their own. Take Gladys Lam, whose introduction to cars came early, surrounded by enthusiasts in her teens. Once she got her driver’s license, she took every opportunity to get behind the wheel—including her mother’s company lorry and van. But she did not race competitively until 2019, when a last-minute opportunity put the then 24-year-old in a Proton Saga in the Malaysia Street Festival Series at Sepang International Circuit. She topped the women’s category on her first outing and placed sixth in the overall mixed-gender field, but rather than the thrill of winning, it was the prospect of getting better that kept drawing her back.

“Racing was like an endless problem I needed to solve,” Lam says. “I kept [going back to the track] to improve on one thing, but every time I did, I’d find five other things.” Over the next few years, however, racing became increasingly difficult to balance with her day job. In 2024, after years of juggling both, she left her role in event management to pursue circuit racing full-time. Today, she races with Singapore-based Shane Ang Racing and is set to compete in a Honda Brio in the 2026 PT Maxnitron Racing Series at the PT Songkhla Grand Prix this October.

Long before Lam made that leap, Claire Jedrek was already carving out space for women in Singapore motorsport in the early 2010s. Once Singapore’s only professional female race car driver, she has spent more than a decade immersed in the sport as a competitor, broadcaster, circuit operator and advocate. Drawn from the age of 13 to what she calls “the complicated emotions of competitive sport”, Jedrek first found her way into racing through karting, which also taught her to understand the mechanics and physics behind speed.

In 2013, Jedrek co-founded and helped run the temporary Changi Karting Circuit while also serving as the official commentator for the Singapore Karting Championship. Keen to understand the sport from the driver’s seat as well as behind the scenes, she began competing in local karting leagues herself that very same year. She then went on to race cars semi-professionally for several years, earning podium finishes in Malaysia, including second place in a Malaysia Championship Series race held during the 2015 Malaysian Grand Prix weekend. Alongside her racing pursuits, she pioneered Singapore’s first public electric go-kart track, The Karting Arena at Bukit Timah, in 2015, running the business for five years before selling her stake during the pandemic.

For Jedrek, securing a place on the grid had been only the first hurdle. Moving from karting into touring-car racing required funding she did not have. “I naively thought that, being in the world of media, I could hop into a car and market myself to pay for it,” she recalls. She eventually secured enough sponsorship to contest her first season with Malaysia-based R Engineering in 2014, driving a Honda Civic FD2 in the Malaysian Super Series. But it quickly became clear that getting into the car was only part of the job.

Jedrek estimates that 70 per cent of her time in racing went towards raising funds, negotiating business deals and developing campaigns for sponsors. “Unless you are able to hire an entire team of marketing, media, PR, management, you have to become that team and be involved in every aspect,” she says. “Sustaining a career in racing means treating it like a business from day one, or you won’t last.”

It is a reality Lam knows well. “Driving is the luxury,” she says. Between finding sponsors, creating content and managing race logistics, much of her time is spent simply making sure she can stay on the grid. “I spend more time trying to stay in the race car than actually sitting in it.”

For Kaur, some of that burden has been shared by a support system built around her from an early stage. Her parents have been behind her since her karting years, travelling to races and helping to anchor a demanding schedule. Commercial backing also came early: cybersecurity company Admin By Request supported her through her final competitive karting season and into F4. “To have a company identify and support a young girl on the karting track and then continue to back her as she pursues her dream of single-seater racing is rare,” she notes.

That circle of support has since widened. French automotive lubricants company Motul has come on board with technical support, resources and guidance. “It’s motivating to know that a company that has been around for so many decades believes in me and my potential, especially as a young female driver in a traditionally male-dominated sport,” shares Kaur, who has also partnered with Singapore fashion label Charles & Keith through its incubator initiative for emerging talent, with the brand documenting her 2026 F4 journey through a series of content collaborations.

Funding is only one layer of the challenge. Much of Kaur’s development has to happen overseas, with training and competition across Asia and Europe fitted around school. Her first full F4 season has been spent with Evans GP in Southeast Asia, where access to engineers, mechanics and coaches, alongside simulator work and data analysis, has helped accelerate her growth. “This makes a big difference to my development,” she says.

For Lam, Kaur’s experience points to a broader gap in Singapore’s motorsport ecosystem: what happens between a driver’s first exposure to racing and the point at which they are ready to compete seriously. As Lam plainly puts it: “We have simulators and we have sim racers (competitors who race in simulators rather than real cars), and then we have F1. What is missing is the middle.” She speaks from experience, having spent much of her own career competing in Malaysia and Thailand, where the circuits and championships needed to develop as a driver are more readily available.

Jedrek sees the same gap from an operator’s perspective. “The physical infrastructure has gone backwards,” she says, pointing to land scarcity and the difficulty of sustaining purpose-built tracks, which are often “the first thing to get repurposed when a lease ends”. Hosting a Grand Prix, in her view, has not changed that. “It’s a marketing win for the country but definitely not a developmental pathway.”

That lack of a clear pathway also shapes the question of who gets to stay in the sport. Getting more women into motorsport is one measure of progress; keeping them there is the harder one. Lam has seen female representation grow considerably since she began racing, but argues that visibility alone is not enough. “Opportunity and visibility are two different things,” she says. “Women still need more seat time, funding, training and opportunities.” Her concern is what happens after that first break. “We don’t want to see one girl, and then a year later she’s gone and another girl replaces her,” she says. “We want women to stay.”

The London-headquartered F1 Academy is one attempt to close that gap. Ahead of its 2024 season, the championship reduced the required driver contribution from €150,000 to €100,000 in an effort to lower the financial barrier to entry. For Jedrek, the series represents infrastructure that simply did not exist when she was racing (she stepped back from competitive racing around 2020)—evidence that some of the barriers around funding, entry points and role models are beginning to shift. “There is a small, but nonetheless visible, pathway that didn’t exist previously,” she says.

Jedrek also sees Kaur’s selection for the F1 Academy Rookie Test as significant in itself, noting that having a local female driver break into a globally visible series is a historic first for Singaporean motorsport. “It’s enough for us to always celebrate the wins like Kareen’s,” she says. That said, she remains cautious about what greater visibility will ultimately translate into. She initially questioned whether separating male and female drivers would accelerate the latter’s climb up the single-seater ladder to F1—or potentially delay it. “We’ll only know if we are able to see some of the other female drivers in the higher series in future.”

There are early signs of that progression. Three F1 Academy graduates have moved into the mixed-gender GB3 Championship, a higher-level single-seater series positioned as a step towards FIA Formula 3: British driver and 2024 F1 Academy champion Abbi Pulling, who moved up in 2025; Filipino racer Bianca Bustamante, who joined her that same season; and Brazilian driver Aurelia Nobels, who followed in 2026.

Lam agrees that something has changed—just not enough. “Now, there’s a lot more visibility,” she says. “More women racing, more women working in motorsport, more conversation.” For females interested in the sport, there are now examples to follow that simply were not there before—with Kaur quickly becoming one of those examples herself. Some girls, Kaur shares, have contacted her to say they started racing after seeing her compete. “It’s one of the most meaningful parts of my journey,” she says. “If seeing me race makes another girl believe she can do it too, that’s incredibly special.”

When it comes to her own career, however, Kaur is clear that visibility is not how she ultimately wants to be measured. “When the visor goes down, the stopwatch doesn’t care whether you’re male or female,” she says. “I want to be judged purely on my performance, my racecraft and my results.”

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