The #85 Iron Dames trio of Sarah Bovy, Rahel Frey, and Michelle Gatting finally scored a much-awaited WEC race win in the 2023 FIA season finale, the 8 Hours of Bahrain.
It was a race that saw class-leading pace, and a fine defensive drive to complete the victory, the all-pink Porsche 911 RSR’s crew then will go down in history as the first and so far only all-female class winning crew in an FIA World Championship, and as the very last winners of a GTE class globally.
The DSC Editor caught up with all three of the Dames post-race.
What was that like watching the end of that race from the garage?
Rahel Frey:
“Emotional, intense. Because like Sarah always says, I think it’s easier when you’re in the car, because then you’re in control of what you’re doing.
“When you’re watching the last stint from the other side, you are out of control. And being out of control is not a strength of any driver.
“But in the end, we trusted each other, we can rely on each other. I can just say, I’m very proud of all of us, we did not crack under pressure. And this makes me very happy
Sarah, you must have been happy with that opening stint?
“Yeah, the beginning of the race is always tricky here in Bahrain, because we never really know how the car will react towards the end of the stint, so I was careful.
“But at the same time, I had quite some pressure from behind. And, you know, we really wanted to do good. So at the end of the stint when the tires start to be a bit tricky, you get a bit of a snap, and you’re like, oh, I can not do – I’m not spinning today. This is not happening.
“I’m super happy that I could provide a good stint without mistakes but, you know, I was also so proud to watch them both in the car being so fast. Even if I think that the Aston for this race. when you see the final result, it says, us, then three Aston, I think they had a package that was really, really efficient.
“But we didn’t let that get us down. And we just kept fighting for it. And that’s what Iron Dames do, even when it seems impossible, we just go for it and see what happens.”
With Matteo (Cressoni) starting in the 60 car, he went by. We expected that to happen (it was Silver-ranked vs Bronze). But he didn’t drop you very quickly, did that actually help you to find something?
“Of course, I didn’t fight with him. Because there was no point in doing that. But after I let him pass, I decided that I was gonna try to see a bit where he was making time and I saw a few things I could try.
“It took me a few laps to understand how he was doing it but yeah, it helped me finding a little bit of pace.
Michelle, you gave us heart failure at the end of that race. We saw the Aston Martin was coming. And then we heard the radio message about Push to Pass not working. The gap was coming down, to almost nothing but then you pulled away a little again. Tell us about what that was like in the car?
“Going into my first stint I heard the gap was around 15 to 18 seconds. I was like, Okay, I was happy with that.
“And I thought going into the last stint it would be more or less the same. But unfortunately, it went from 18 seconds to 1.6 in a split second, at least that’s the way it seemed. I was like “Is that him?!!” and then he was in my mirrors. Whoa, where did he come from?
“Obviously he was he was really pushing to catch me. And at one point, I was maybe a little bit too calm in the car because I wanted to not to kill my tires too early. But to be honest, when I saw that he was very close. I also knew at one point there would be a drop for him. So when the gap was around 1.6 seconds, I started to push a bit more. And then he got a bit unlucky with traffic.
“And you know, in the end, I felt that I was more or less always in control of managing the gap to him. For sure. When David told me to use Push to Pass, I was like, Okay, is it coming down that fast? I mean, okay, it’s quite serious. And then I tried to use it and it was not working. So, yeah, there was a little bit more pressure on me for sure.
“But in the end, the team gave us a great car we could really push.
“I’m happy in the end that I increased the gap to almost six seconds, it just showed that he was pushing too much at one point. And his drop was too big. And I was the one being more or less in control superstars.
“We all wanted this so bad. We have wanted it the whole year. We’ve been close the whole year. And I think today, everybody just put in a great job from Sarah, the team, the pitstops and everybody around us. I mean, this was so important, and we did it.”
Important is a good word, isn’t it? And the two questions I wanted to ask all of you, as a group were one is about this programme, you’re clearly correctly intensely proud of it. We have four women in GT Am. You’ve all won this year. That’s quite something.
Rahel Frey
“Yeah, absolutely. I think this shows the female strength. And we know that we have a very strong crew female crew also behind us. Clearly, the drivers are always in the spotlight. But it’s not only about the drivers. We have strong females around us who put us there. We have our leading Dame with Deborah Meyer, she really believes in us and she keeps pushing the project.
“Clearly in the future, we also focus on the young ones to bring more Dames up. Because we need more we need more of us. We are proud and we need to pass the experience to others.
“We keep pushing, we keep working hard, I think we can still prove that we are one of the fastest out there. And this is exactly what we want. We want to show how performant or competitive you are to keep inspiring the next generation
Tell us a little bit about these cars because from the Ferrari you won with in the ELMS last year, to the Porsche you won in today, these have been very special haven’t they?
Michelle Gatting
“GTE has been amazing. I did a post today about I’ve been lucky enough to drive the GT cars for the last five years, four of them in the Ferrari 488. This was the first real GT car I got to drive when I joined the team five years ago. And it has been a great, great learning process.
“It’s been a car that I always really loved. Because I love the fact first of all, that there is no ABS because for me, that’s a proper race car where you can actually make mistakes by going on the brakes. And then the fact that okay, we don’t have as much downforce, of course, as the LMP2s and the hypercars. But there is quite a bit of downforce compared to GT3 cars as well.
“I just remember when we drove the Ferrari, we always said, hopefully, one day, we’re going to drive that Porsche because it sounds so good. And now we drove it for one year and that car has been an absolute pleasure. And for sure, it tops my list of favourite cars so far.”
