Yahoo Autos Meet the women who earned a spot on the winningest Porsche Carrera Cup racing team
Sabré Cook is no stranger to being the only female racing driver on the grid. In fact, she’s the first and only female driver in the Porsche Carrera Cup. But behind the scenes, she’s had a cadre of powerful, talented racing women supporting her rise from karting to Formula 3, and now in the Porsche Carrera Cup with the winningest Porsche team in history, Kellymoss Racing.
Cook won a spot on the Kellymoss Racing team last year after the team principal and one of the co-owners, Victoria Thomas, decided to cook up a shootout to find the next fast woman to take on both the professionals and the “gentleman racers” in the highly competitive Porsche Carrera Cup. Cook is the only female competing in the Carrera Cup in the 2023 season.
The Porsche Carrera Cup is what is known as a single-make race. It takes place at tracks across the country, usually ahead of larger, more well-known race events like the Miami Formula 1 race and Long Beach Grand Prix. It consists of Amateur, Pro-Am, and Pro drivers, all competing in Porsche 911 GT3 Cup race cars, which are based on the current 992 generation of the road car. The GT3 Cup cars make 510 horsepower from a water-cooled six-cylinder boxer engine and get the wide-body chassis of the 911 Turbo. There are a total of eight, 40-minute races that begin in March and continue through October. All are broadcast. According to Porsche, 2023 includes the largest field, with as many as 40 or more competitors in a single race.
A scholarship shootout for the fastest woman
The shootout came about as the brainchild of Victoria Thomas, a principal of Kellymoss Racing, and Lyn St. James, the famed racing driver, who is one of just five women to have competed in the Indianapolis 500 and the first woman to win Rookie of the Year at the Indy 500 in 1992 . Cook, now 28, says that St. James, who is known in racing circles for taking female drivers under her wing, took an interest in her when she was just 18 years old and competing in karting. St. James reached out to Cook after she became the first female to win in the SuperKarts! competition in 2012 .
Thomas says that the impetus for the shootout came when St. James called her up one day in 2021 and, according to Thomas, said, “You are a woman who runs a successful racing team, why am I only just hearing of you now?”
“Ultimately,” Thomas said, “the epiphany moment was the telephone call from St. James, and the recognition that, along with the rest of the world, that I was one of the people that didn't recognize the inequity, which was a huge wake-up call for me.”
Cook had approached the team in 2021 following a devastating injury she sustained in her second season in the W Series, the failed Formula 3 feeder series for women only. She was hit by a pair of competitors’ cars, and suffered a labral tear in her right hip and injuries to her low back and SI joint. She had expressed a keen interest in joining the team, but given her injury, Thomas told her to wait and recover.
As it turns out, Cook’s injury was fortuitous. During her year of recovery, she worked very hard to get back into racing shape and became a commentator for the W Series (and completed her college degree in mechanical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines ). It also gave the Kellymoss team time to raise funds and find sponsorships to create a scholarship fund to find the next fast woman to get behind the wheel of the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car.
Together, St. James and Thomas hatched the idea to run a first-ever all-female shootout to pit the few up-and-coming female racing drivers in the world against each other to win a single year of support for a spot on the team. Thomas and her team combed racing rosters and found a total of just 12 women who would be a good fit for the scholarship. Of those, just four fit the parameters that Thomas and her team and advisers, including St. James, race driver Katherine Legge, and Riley Dickenson, a star driver on the Kellymoss team, created for the scholarship. The initial process for narrowing down the field was simple enough: Thomas reached out to each driver and asked them to submit a video and racing résumé. The committee then narrowed the field from there and invited each to two days of testing.
