Lella's Legacy
The 35th anniversary of ‘Lella’ Lombardi’s passing earlier this year brought with it an uncomfortable reminder that the sport – more than 130 years old now – is still yet to see a champion-grade, race winning female driver at the sport’s most elite level.
Maria Grazia ‘Lella’ Lombardi is famous, of course, for being the only female racer to ever have even scored championship points in Formula 1. Indeed, she was only the second female (after Maria Teresa de Filippis in 1958) ever to qualifiy for a Formula 1 Grand Prix race.
The diminutive Italian contested 17 World Championship Grands Prix events from 1974 to 1976, and she scored her historic points finish with a sixth place in the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix, ironically an event that was crash-shortened and thus only half points were awarded.
So, Lombardi has half a point to her name.
By then, Lella had come to the attention of promoters in Australia, brought here after a season of F5000 racing in Europe, to contest two rounds of the 1974 ‘Gold Star’ Australian Driver’s Championship, at Oran Park (which doubled as the Australian Grand Prix) and at Sandown.
Driving an already outdated Matich A51, Lombardi impressed with her speed and aggression, raced competitively, and ultimately finished third at Sandown after a mechanical failure at Oran Park.
Back in Europe, Lombardi’s sponsorship dried up and so her Formula 1 World Championship career ended, but she did go on to race in the British F1 series, and even had a single Winston Cup NASCAR season in 1977, though without ever troubling the scorer.
But that American campaign segways nicely into a female racer who ended her career in NASCAR, though her real success came prior, in Indycar.
Danica Patrick is arguably the most successful female racing driver of the past 50 years – I say “arguably” only because I can’t think of another but may have forgotten someone – and while she never attempted to compete in Formula 1, one wonders whether she could have.
Another woman diminutive in size, Patrick was certainly competitive in Indycar, famously being the first female to win a championship race at that level anywhere in the world, the 2008 Indycar 300 at Twin Ring Motegi (Japan).
That event was a full-on round of that year’s American Indycar Championship, and she won it against the best of them; a result that only enhanced a record that already included being the first female to ever lead the Indianapolis 500 (2005), finishing in the top 10 in six of her eight starts in America’s most famous motor race, and being named both Series and Indy 500 Rookie of the Year in that same year.
Patrick was also voted Indycar’s ‘Most Popular Driver’ from 2005 to 2007, and ultimately made 115 starts in the open-wheeler category, before switching to NASCAR in 2010.
There, she became the first woman to win a pole position in the NASCAR Cup Series, surpassed Janet Guthrie’s record for the most top 10 finishes by a woman in the series, and was one of just 14 drivers (of any gender) to have led laps in both the Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500.
However, unlike Indycars, a NASCAR win eluded her.
Patrick retired from full-time racing at the end of 2017, though she did a ‘farewell’ tour, contesting both the Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500 in 2018. She’s now a regular as an outstanding – though somewhat controversial – television pundit, most recently on Sky F1’s global coverage.
All of this is a rather long-winded way of saying that female drivers are yet to make a major impact in the sport in this country, with one possible exception.
Renee Gracie is the most successful female racing driver in Australia of the last 50 years.
Now, that’s a sentence I couldn’t have imagined writing five years ago. But the facts are there.
Gracie has been impressive in her ‘second’ stab at being a racing driver, contesting the GT World Challenge in an Audi R8 from 2023, winning her Trophy class in that inaugural year, and repeating that success in Pro-Am in 2025.
More significantly, Gracie stepped up to the top class of the series this year, sharing a Ferrari 296 GT3 with Will Davison. She made history at Queensland Raceway in mid-June, becoming the first woman to win a race of the GT World Challenge Australia outright.
In Gracie’s seasons in Super2 – 18th in 2015, 19th in 2016 and 23rd in 2017 – it looked too much too soon, only further emphasized when she was paired with Simona de Silvestro in an all-female driving line up at Bathurst, in 2015 and 2016.
De Silvestro was considered the best female racing driver to come out of Europe – since Lombardi – at the time, and was competitive, but for Gracie it was too big an ask and huge pressure to match that pace and experience.
Having then taken a break from the sport to build her adult film career, Gracie has returned and, frankly, shown impressive dedication, and rapid improvement. She’s quick, and aggressive, and now looks like the driver she needed to be in her stalled Supercars career.
By her own accounts, Gracie was unhappy about her time in the Supercars spotlight and what she saw as the sport not taking her seriously – which she put down to sexism.
So, it would be interesting to see how the more mature, experienced, and just plain faster ‘2026 Renee Gracie’ would go in a Supercar now.
Certainly, the Supercars category is in desperate need of a successful female racing driver, which would considerably enhance the marketability of the whole sport in this country, and broaden its appeal.
But Renee’s profession as an adult content actress would likely be a challenge for the sport commercially, and probably too much for the notoriously conservative elements of the sport’s administrators in this country.
I think, though, that her participation would generate a great deal of interest and might even meet with surprising success.
Few fans today would realise that the male exclusivity of motor racing in Australia was actually shattered very early in its history.
Joan Richmond, a Victorian-based horse racing trainer and rider, began competing in car trails in 1926, at just 21 years old, and in 1931 finished fifth in the Australian Grand Prix at Phillip Island, driving a Riley Brooklands.
Pairing up with two friends, Jean Beatson and Kathleen Gardiner, Richmond then drove overland from Melbourne to Italy in a trio of Riley Nines, to enable them to compete in the Monte Carlo Rally.
Her five-month trip is considered by history as the very first international overland tour to have begun in Australia.
Richmond then paired with Elsie Wisdom in a two-day, 1000 mile race at England’s famous Brooklands track – the world’s first purpose-built race track. They won.
She raced at the banked Brooklands a number of times and also competed in two Le Mans 24 Hour races, plus a total of seven Monte Carlo rallies.
If Richmond’s legacy is largely forgotten now, that’s not so for the combined and separate careers of Sue Ransom and Christine Cole (nee Gibson).
Together, the pair raced Touring Cars at Bathurst in the early/mid ‘70s and elsewhere, attracting a lot of interest; separately, they went on to have distinctly different careers.
Ransom continued to race Touring Cars here for a while before moving to America, where she competed with success in AA Top Fuel dragsters and even rocket-powered exhibition drag cars!
Cole also raced on here into the ‘80s and beyond in a variety of Touring Cars, and along the way drove for Harry Firth’s Holden Dealer Team and the Nissan factory team.
Another to make her mark, often quite literally, was Robyn Hamilton.
Diminutive and feisty, Hamilton began racing in 1976 in the one-make Holden Gemini Series and was immediately competitive, noted for her speed and aggression, and she won races.
She also took on the similar Renault “Newstar” series and won there too.
That led to a career in Formula Ford during which Hamilton changed her name by deed poll to “Charlie” to persuade Revlon cosmetics (makers of the perfume of the same name) to sponsor her Elfin 620B; it worked.
“Charlie” was fourth and fifth in consecutive Formula Ford Driver to Europe series before her career momentum stalled; a pity, as she was highly promotable, had speed, and could race hard.
Another woman to make her mark in Australian motor sport, and a significant one, was Terri Sawyer.
Sawyer, sadly recently deceased at just 57 years old, stunned the sport by winning the first-ever AUSCAR race at Bob Jane’s Thunderdome oval track, in February 1988.
Just 19 at the time, and a virtual unknown, Sawyer went on to race competitively in the category for several seasons, on and off, before two unsuccessful NASCAR Sportsman series starts in America.
Returning to NASCAR here, in 1991 she won again, also becoming the first woman to win in that category as well.
Formula Ford gave us the next Australian female race driver of note, Leanne Ferrier.
Starting in Karts in 1993, Ferrier moved to Formula Ford in 1998 with mixed success, before becoming the first female driver to win an Australian Formula 3 Championship race, in 2007. A year later she was in line to claim the championship crown when her engine blew in the last round.
There were various Supercar and Production Car starts too, before a return to Formula Ford in 2016 where she became the first (and so far only) female to win its prestigious national title, with five race wins that season.
By then we had also seen the advent of the ‘Castrol Cougars’, an initiative of Castrol to promote female drivers into Supercars competition.
First identified in a 1997 female talent search, ironically sponsored by Shell, Melinda Price teamed up with Kerryn Brewer in a Larry Perkins-run Holden Commodore, and finished 11th outright in the 1998 Bathurst 1000. It remains the best result by an all-female driver combination in the Mt Panorama classic.
That’s all history but have we learned anything from it? The jury is still out on that.
Chevrolet has officially gotten behind Alice Buckley and, certainly, she’s been competitive in several categories, winning the 2025 Toyota 86 Scholarship Series and scoring pole position and winning twice on debut in the TA2 series.
And she repeated that feat two months later, and then again earlier this year, at the same venue!
Racing those big, brawny V8-engined TA2 cars – which spend a lot of time going sideways – competitively points to her inherent speed, great car control skills, and not a little bravery.
Buckley’s big test, though, will come this season as she contests the 2026 Super2 Series, and how she fares will go a long way to telling us whether she can be truly competitive at the elite level of the sport here.
Recently, Summer Rintoule made headlines by becoming the first woman to win outright in GT4 Australia competition.
Paired with Jarrod Hughes, Rintoule scored her historic success at The Bend in May, the duo sharing a McLaren Artura for Method Motorsport. This success came on top of a series of podiums in GT4 last year.
Well presented and well spoken, the 19 year old appears have the skills off the track … time will tell whether that’s matched on the track.
Another prominent female trying to carve out a career in the sport at the moment is Tabitha Ambrose, whose famous father has her contesting events at the lower reaches of the sport.
Tabitha is into her second season of Formula Ford, the once traditional training ground for future champions – including Marcos himself – so time will tell. But if genetics are anything to go by …
Meanwhile, back on the international stage, Aussies Joanne Ciconte and Avia Anagnostiadis both contested the 2025 F1 Academy – the all-female series that supports the Formula 1 World Championship – but, sadly, neither was able to deliver results.
Ciconte is having another crack this year, competing in the all-female Kyojo Cup in Japan, with the long-term aim of a Super Formula seat, which is the well-established stepping stone to a career in Formula 1.
And globally, we have another possible contender for the title of the most successful female race driver in history, though she is not Australian.
British driver Jamie Chadwick is a three-time W-Series Champion (the all-female forerunner to the F1 Academy), became the first woman to win an Indy NXT series race in 2024, and last season raced an LMP2 in the European Le Mans series, where she was a regular front runner.
Significantly, this season she is Reserve Driver for the Genesis Magma WEC sports car program competing in the premier Hypercar class, turning laps at Le Mans last month as well as extensive testing and simulator work.
Chadwick’s career trajectory, though, does not seem to be taking her any closer to a Formula 1 drive, even though she is a regular in the paddock as a pundit on Sky Sports’ F1 coverage.
Lella’s legacy seems safe, in some ways sadly, for the time being.
Pics: Russell Martin / Dale Rodgers - Race Press / NASCAR/ Indy Car / TransAmAU
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