'I’m here to say: We’re driving. We’re buying. And we’re not going anywhere': Meet the new gatekeepers of the motoring world

For most of the past century, the gates to motorsport, and cars more broadly, were fairly firmly closed to women. Some squeaked through, but they were the exception, not the rule. In Formula One (F1), no woman has scored a championship point since Lella Lombardi in 1975. Behind the pit wall, the numbers are barely better: even now, fewer than one in 10 professional engineers in the UK is female, and top-tier paddocks remain overwhelmingly a boys club. Until recently, a woman’s place in the world of four-wheels was predominantly ornamental: a ‘grid girl’ or the plus-one, not the driver, designer or decision-maker.

But a different picture is slowly coming into focus. From the racetrack to the boardroom to the private garage, women are taking the inside line into spaces that were once off-li