Underpants. The most important conversation I had during the 2024 Women in Motorsports (WIM) Summit at Dirtfish Rally School in Snoqualmie, Washington, was not with guest of honor Michèle Mouton about her incredible Pikes Peak triumph in 1985, or how she doesn't drink alcohol unless it's champagne. Nor was it with WRC commentator Becs Williams about how she discovered motorsports at a relatively late age and made a stunning career out of reporting on it. The conversation that really stuck with me was about underpants. Don't get weird about it.
Dirtfish Rally School is famous for its dirt-clod-flinging driving classes and founder Steve Rimmer's envy-inducing Group B Rally car collection, but the company also promotes rally racing with a team of photographers and writers and hosts a yearly meet-up to celebrate and support women in racing. The WIM event was Josie Rimmer's idea. Dirtfish's head of strategy, she felt that while there were plenty of women involved in rally racing, they weren't often in spotlight. "I'd grown up around rally and have seen countless women in the service park occupying all sorts of roles," she said. "It became quite clear quite quickly that those women weren't being written about or invited to sit on podcasts. No one was shouting their names from the rooftop the way they should have been. We wanted to be the ones shouting from the rooftops, 'Hey! You really can do this too!'" Rimmer thought it might appeal to a few folks if she put together a panel of speakers and some hot-lap ride-alongs and invited some local women-run companies to get together at Dirtfish for a day-long event.
In 2022, Dirtfish hosted around 100 rally fans (men and women) to talk about racing and listen to Rhianon Gelsomino, Lia and Lucy Block, Emma Gilmour, and Sara Price talk about their experiences behind the wheel or in the co-drivers seat. In 2023, Rimmer brought even more women to the table, including the only female driver to win a World Rally Car victory, Michèle Mouton. Some 400 people attended that year, including me, and despite being nearly struck mute with hero worship (Mouton is . . . wow), I noticed how the audience responded, eager to hear the details of these women's experiences and to ask questions about starting their own motorsports journeys.
For 2023, Mouton returned, along with Pernilla Solberg, recently named president of the World Rally Championship Commission, and journalist Becs Williams, as well as a trio of younger racers, FIA Top Fuel dragster driver Jndia Erbacher, Trans Am Mustang driver Michele Abbate, and motorcycle endurance rider Vanessa Ruck. It was at dinner with these three that conversation turned to the subject of skivvies. They were chatting about crashes and fires and all the things race-car drivers casually talk about while the rest of us think about how the height of our own bravery was removing the gopher that the dog brought in and put on the couch. (Hey, it was not initially clear that it was dead, so I do think I deserve a medal.)
Unlike me, race-car drivers are actually brave, and they do dangerous things, like deal with brake failure at high speed in a road race or engine explosions in nitro dragsters. Both of those things came up as Erbacher and Abbate shared stories with Ruck. When Abbate got to the part in her tale of a 2023 crash at Road America where the car caught on fire and the suppression system didn't work, Erbacher and Ruck were all sympathy and no small amount of horror. This led to a discussion about fireproof underlayers, which caught Ruck's attention. As a motorcyclist who recently has been exploring four-wheel motorsports as a Bowler Works driver in the U.K. Defender Rally series, she was less familiar with the options for women's safety gear—bike riders generally worrying less about fire than impact. "I had no idea there were fireproof sports bras and knickers," she said. "Oh, it's really new," Erbacher told her, describing the somewhat itchy process of developing a workable sports bra with her safety gear sponsor. Abbate and I jumped in with horror stories of what synthetic fibers and underwires can do in a fire (you do not want hot metal and melted plastic next to your skin). Ruck was taking notes, and not even a week later posted on her Instagram account about being fitted with new fire-resistant layers.
It may seem like a silly or even lurid topic of conversation, but it's exactly the sort of small detail that might keep female drivers from pushing forward in a motorsports career. Sure, it's embarrassing to talk about the details of your fire shirt being see-through, or your briefs bunching up, but comfort and security in a race car can play a part in how eager you are to get back in it. It's unlikely that a wedgie has ever cost a driver the race, but feeling confident and safe puts everyone in a better headspace to win. It was nice to hear from Erbacher that there were some new options out there. When I spoke to Acura drivers Sheena Monk and Katherine Legge at the 2023 Long Beach Grand Prix about this subject, there were just starting to be options for female racers. Even now, although several safety equipment companies like PXP, Stand 21, and Simpson offer fire-retardant ladies' undergarments, it's not exactly a smorgasbord of choice.
I even checked in with some other racers I knew after the event to see if there was some secret stash of flame-fighting undies that the rest of us didn't know about, but the answers were similar to those from the summit. Funny Car driver Alexis DeJoria says she gets her layers custom made from Stand 21, and Top Fuel driver Ida Zetterström says she mostly resorts to fitted cotton undershirts, as there aren't many available off-the-shelf sizes. The fact that Ruck didn't know she could be protected from a brand-hot metal bra strap, or even needed to be, highlighted the reasons why Rimmer started the WIM Summit in the first place. If we want to see more women in racing, there need to be places for active participants to network, to share knowledge, in the hope of encouraging more women to race and for those racing to continue to higher levels.
As we head out of International Women's Day and Women's History Month, it's thrilling to see companies like Dirtfish who are doing more than posting a social media shot of the few women they can dig up to highlight. Dirtfish has women in management, women in instructor roles, and this growing yearly event to offer women in motorsport the spotlight—and the microphone. Vanessa Ruck will leave and race with better safety and more confidence, and she'll pass that information on to the women racers she meets, until eventually, we're all properly supported.
If you want to hear the Mouton Pikes Peak story, and believe me, you do, I recommend the WRC Backstories podcast episode where Becs Williams asks her about that, and many other fantastic topics. The WIM Summit will return to Dirtfish in 2025; tickets will be available on the Dirtfish website.
Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver’s license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story "A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2." In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story "In Washington, D.C.'s Secret Carpool Cabal, It's a Daily Slug Fest" was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.
