Lilou Wadoux Becomes the First Woman To Win an FIA WEC Race

In Hypercar, today's FIA World Endurance Championship round at Spa-Francorchamps was another dominant win for Toyota and their dominant GR010. In GTE-Am, however, a 19-year-old driver made history. Lilou Wadoux took a class win alongside AF Corse teammates Luis Perez Companc and Alessio Rovera, becoming the first woman to ever win a race in any class in the FIA World Endurance Championship.

Wadoux is in her second year competing in the championship, but first in GTE-Am. She finished third in a French domestic spec Alpine A110 championship in 2021 before jumping to LMP2 alongside WRC legend Sebastian Ogier last season. While Wadoux and the part-time Ogier did not secure a podium in that season, Wadoux was given the chance to drive a Toyota GR010 in a post-season young driver test and become the first woman to drive an LMP1 car in a sanctioned event in over a decade.

Wadoux, Perez Companc, and factory Ferrari driver Rovera had already found success in GTE-Am, bouncing back from a roll-over in the season opener at Sebring to record a second-place finish at Portugal earlier this month. That strong run now continues with their first win as a team, beating out the factory-run No. 33 Corvette Racing entry that had won both previous rounds of the season by 17 seconds at the line.

The victory is the first for any woman in the relatively young FIA WEC, but women have been successful in other top-level sports car championships, too. This is particularly true in America, where Janet Guthrie won Sebring in her class in both 1967 and 1970. More recently, Christina Nielsen won both the 2016 and 2017 IMSA GTD championships in a Ferrari. Katherine Legge, a four-time IMSA winner in the same class and a current full-time racer for the Gradient Racing Acura NSX program, came just four points of repeating the same feat in 2018.

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