Continuing our festive top 50 drivers theme, we thought we'd weigh up the best female challengers from the 2023 season across the wider world of motorsport.
Women have been successful in single-seaters, sports-prototypes, GTs and touring cars. Here are the standout 10, in alphabetical order.
Lena Buhler
2nd in F1 Academy
F1 Academy offered a lifeline to the 26-year-old Swiss. A difficult time in the Formula Regional European Championship by Alpine had followed her doing a respectable job in the Spanish F4 Championship of 2020, including outqualifying noted talents such as Oliver Goethe, Mari Boya and Josh Dufek to get on the front row at Jarama. With ART Grand Prix, she scored a brace of F1A victories at Barcelona and Monza to emerge in the championship runner-up position.
Jamie Chadwick
12th in Indy NXT
After three successive W Series crowns, British racer Chadwick crossed the Atlantic for her first full mixed-gender single-seater competition since she placed fourth in the 2019-20 F3 Asian standings and contested Formula Regional European in 2020. Indy NXT, which is to IndyCar what F2 is to F1, had a strong field this season in the upper teens. In her rookie season with Andretti Autosport, the 25-year-old twice qualified in the top 10 – at Road America and the Indianapolis road course – and scored a best result of sixth at Portland.
Sophia Florsch
11th in Macau GP; 23rd in FIA F3
The German, who has often argued against all-female series, returned to FIA F3 this year after two seasons away in sportscars. Under its new ownership, PHM Racing by Charouz was firmly anchored at the back of the field – 23-year-old Florsch qualified best of the team’s trio at four of the nine rounds, but only once in the top 20.
She scored a seventh in the bizarre wet-dry Spa race, but it was on her return to the Van Amersfoort Racing fold for the Macau Grand Prix that she shone. At the street circuit where she had her fearsome crash in 2018, Florsch finished 11th – less than half a second from the top 10.
Rahel Frey
2nd in WEC GTE Am
Swiss racer Frey, a race winner in German F3 in her youth, was usually the second best of the Iron Dames Porsche drivers in the WEC this season, except for a starring performance in the Le Mans 24 Hours in which her lap time averages far outpaced those of her team-mates.
More often than not it was Michelle Gatting (see below) who led the way for the Iron Dames in their 911 RSR although, when they tackled the four IMSA enduros in GT3 Lamborghini machinery, 37-year-old Frey had the edge on the Dane at Sebring and Watkins Glen.
Marta Garcia
1st in F1 Academy
Considering she proved capable of outqualifying Christian Lundgaard in her Spanish F4 career in 2016-17, and was fourth in the inaugural W Series, this former Renault F1 protegee had lost some of her momentum in recent seasons. But the move to Prema Racing for the first running of the F1 Academy series certainly put the 23-year-old Spaniard back on the map.
Garcia won seven times – only one of which was a reversed-grid race – and claimed five out of 14 poles to launch herself into Formula Regional European for 2024.
Michelle Gatting
2nd in WEC GTE Am
Silver-rated Gatting was the class act over Gold-standard Frey in the Iron Dames Porsche in the World Endurance Championship. The 30-year-old Dane was the quickest on the averages in six of the seven rounds, although was just under 0.5% slower than Alessio Picariello, the quick man in the sister Iron Lynx Porsche.
She wasn’t quite as convincing in the IMSA Lambo (two-all against Frey), but the big achievement was anchoring the WEC GTE Am runner-up position for herself, Frey, and Bronze-rated Sarah Bovy.
Katherine Legge
11th in IMSA GTD
Ex-Champ Car racer and multiple Atlantic race winner Legge is still battling away in the IMSA SportsCar ranks in the States. Now 43, she raced an Acura NSX GT3 in the GTD class.
At Long Beach, she set the fastest lap of the race across the GTD and GTD Pro divisions, and was third best on averages – ahead of several works pilots. It was tough to compare otherwise because the Acuras were few in number and generally without recognised leading drivers, but she comfortably outpaced fellow female NSX racers Sheena Monk and Ashton Harrison.
Doriane Pin
9th in WEC LMP2; 2nd in F4 SE Asia
Have you heard about the driver who went from GTs to sports-prototypes to single-seaters? In a reversal of the normal career path, that’s exactly what the highly rated French teenager did this year.
With a Trofeo Pirelli crown from the European Ferrari challenge under her belt at the age of 18, Pin was slotted into Prema Racing’s LMP2 line-up for the WEC. She was never the slowest of the six Prema drivers, and at the Bahrain finale was third on the averages – ahead of ex-F1 driver Daniil Kvyat… She was generally around 0.6% off the Prema pacesetter, usually Bent Viscaal but sometimes Kvyat or Mirko Bortolotti.
Pin also raced the Iron Dames GT3 Lamborghini three times in the IMSA enduros, and was significantly quicker than Gatting and Frey at the Petit Le Mans finale. She then finished the year with her single-seater debut in the F4 South East Asia series across two rounds at Sepang. A win came her way – albeit she was slower than her team-mates and found herself on the right tyres on a drying track.
Lilou Wadoux
8th in WEC GTE Am
After an encouraging season in LMP2, Ferrari factory driver Wadoux was placed in the Richard Mille AF Corse 488 GTE Evo for an attack on GTE Am honours in the WEC. Only at Fuji was the 22-year-old Frenchwoman closer to the Prancing Horse pace than the Iron Dames girls were to the Porsche standard.
Otherwise she generally sat adrift of Gatting, somewhere in the vicinity of Frey. Across the season she was 0.8% off the pace of Alessio Rovera in the same car. Also took a Silver podium in one of AF’s GT3 Ferraris in the GT World Challenge Europe finale at Barcelona.
Maya Weug
17th in Formula Regional European
The Ferrari Driver Academy protegee deserves immense credit for a purple patch in the middle of her rookie season in the Formula Regional European Championship by Alpine – one of the world’s most competitive series – after graduating from Italian F4.
Driving for minnow Finnish team KIC Motorsport, she qualified sixth at Spa from the 34-car field and scored a sixth and a seventh in the races, and started fifth next time out at Mugello before placing ninth. Weug, born 19 years ago in Spain to Dutch and Belgian parents, was also in the top-10 points-scoring positions at Paul Ricard (twice) and Monza. That all added up to third place in the Rookie standings.
Honourable mentions
Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky won the Extreme E title along with Johan Kristoffersson for Rosberg X Racing, and was often the fastest female driver in the series, but frequently trailed her co-pilot by around three seconds. She also dipped in for the last round of World Rallycross and was beaten by fellow Swede Klara Andersson, who took a best result this season of fourth.
Hamda Al Qubaisi claimed four wins on her way to third in the F1 Academy rankings with MP Motorsport, following a full ‘warm-up’ campaign in the F4 UAE series, two years after scoring a podium in the Italian F4 Championship with Prema.
Tatiana Calderon, who drove in IndyCar and Formula 2 last year, switched to the European Le Mans Series in the LMP2 class for 2023. The Colombian shared a Team Virage ORECA to a best result of fifth at Spa in the Pro-Am class. While comfortably quicker than amateur team-mate Alexander Mattschull, she trailed Ian Rodriguez, although it’s often forgotten that the underrated Guatemalan is a race winner in Formula Regional in Europe and the US, as well as in Italian F4.
There was a small field in TCR Japan, but Anna Inotsume became champion in both the Saturday and Sunday series at the wheel of her Dome Racing Honda Civic Type R. She also took in a one-off in Formula Regional Japan at Fuji, finishing in the top five in both races.
Fellow Japanese Juju Noda scored a win in Euroformula Open at Paul Ricard, but the series for the old philosophy of F3 car featured some controversy over a lower minimum weight limit allowed for female drivers. Once this was balanced, her Noda Racing team withdrew, although claimed other factors were behind the decision, and she went on to win Italy’s Formula 2000 Trophy title.
