Asian Motor Sports

TOKYO : Japanese motorsport sensation and former “race queen” Keiko Ihara is set to use her second season on the British Formula Three circuit as a springboard into the elite men’s world of Formula One.

Ihara has been making her mark on the male dominated sport since becoming a driver in 1999, ending her days of parading in leotards and swimsuits around race circuits.

With promises of a better car, the 32-year-old is hoping to take the Formula Three podium for the first time since her debut there last year.

“If I constantly finish in the top 10, even when my machine is in bad condition, I will get an offer for F1 tests for sure,” said Ihara who would become one of only a handful of women to ever compete in F1. No other woman is lined up for the F1 or British F3 series this season.

“I definitely want to ride in F1 in the near future,” she said.

The Tokyo native had a reasonable but not spectacular debut last year in British F3, which has been a spawning ground for F1 greats such as Ayrton Senna and Mika Hakkinen. She finished in the top 10 in six of her 22 races with her best result eighth place.

“This year, I have been promised a better machine within the team,” Ihara said.

Trevor Carlin, the boss of Carlin Motorsports, which has signed Ihara for a second season, has promised her a “stronger system to back me up,” she said.

“I will definitely not bow to my teammates this year.”

Carlin said, “Keiko showed great determination and dedication last year and I am positive she will do us proud in her second year.”

The feisty Japanese driver also defended her debut, pointing out that it took the late Brazilian champion Senna three years to win the British F3 championship after his debut.

Her first F3 season, following six years of duelling with male drivers on lesser tours in Asia, Britain and France, proved to be a steep learning curve with a lot of body building to cope with the rising G-force.

“I crashed with a British driver early in the season and he shouted at me that an Asian woman doesn’t belong here,” Ihara recalled.

“I could not talk back. But I bumped him into a spin in the next race after securing my way out,” she laughed. “I had no more trouble afterwards because I was always ahead of him on the starting grid.”

“It is definitely a minus for being an Asian because it is a European-born sport. They didn’t see me as an equal. Besides they thought I would not finish a race because I was a woman.

“But now they treat me differently,” she said, gearing up for the year’s first F3 race on April 16.

Ihara regularly cycles for 50-100 kilometres every morning and lifts weights at a gym in the afternoon, near her base in Marlow, 50 kilometres outside London.

She stands 166 centimetres tall and weighs 56 kilos - no change on paper from a year earlier.

But she stressed “my muscles have probably increased by two kilos while my body fat percentage dropped by some 10 points to around 15.”

She cited her late entry at the age of 26 to driving as a reason for her success. Most of her male competitors were driving go-karts as children and she is anxious to make up for lost time.

Ihara was inspired to become a driver on her first day parading around a circuit as a race queen, which she said was an attempt to finance a career in competitive freestyle skiing.

Four years later in 1999, she raced in the national Ferrari 355 championship, working her way up the sport to compete in the British Formula Renault in 2000 and then the French F3 in 2001.

In 2002 she become the first woman in the world to triumph in a formula-car race sanctioned by the International Automobile Federation at the Asian Formula-2000 series.

She placed third overall in the Formula BMW Asian series the following year and went on to clinch a deal with Carlin for last year’s F3 season.

“I will probably not continue racing for 20 more years. But I will go on until I accomplish my goal, that is F1, to repay those who have supported me,” said Ihara.

Several women have competed in F1 in the 56 years of the championship, with only Italian Lella Lombardi posting a top six finish at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix.

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Cross Posted @ Full Throttle