Unbelievable: Meet the Woman Who Defied All Odds to Join the Porsche Carrera Cup’s Unbeatable Dream Team!

Sabre Cook is no stranger to being the only female racing driver on the grid. In fact, she is the first and only female driver in the Porsche Race Cup. But behind the scenes, she has had a cadre of powerful and talented racing women supporting her rise from karting to Formula 3, and now into the Porsche Carrera Cup with the winningest Porsche team in history. Kellymoss Racing.

Cook earned a spot on the Kellymoss Racing team last year after team principal and one of the co-owners, Victoria Thomas, decided to stage a shootout to find the next fast woman to take on both the pros and “racers”. gentlemen”. in the highly competitive Porsche Carrera Cup. Cook is the only woman to compete in the Carrera Cup in the 2023 season.

The Porsche Carrera Cup is what is known as a one-make race. It is held at tracks across the country, usually before bigger and more well-known racing events such as the Miami and Long Beach Formula 1 race. Big prize. It is made up of amateur, professional and professional riders, 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 starting in March and continuing through October. They are all broadcast. According to Porsche, 2023 includes the largest field, with up to 40 or more competitors in a single race.

A scholarship shootout for the fastest woman

The shootout came as the brainchild of Victoria Thomas, the head of Kellymoss Racing, and Lyn St. James, the famed racing driver, who is one of five women to compete in the Indianapolis 500 and the first woman to win the title. for Rookie of the Year at the Indy 500 in 1992. Cook, now 28, says St. James, who is known in racing circles for taking female drivers under her wing, became interested in her when she was just 18 and racing karting. st. James contacted Cook after she became the first woman to win in SuperKarts! competition in 2012.

Thomas says the impetus for the shooting came when St. James called her one day in 2021 and, according to Thomas, said: “You’re a woman running a successful racing team, why did I just hear from you now? ”

“Ultimately,” Thomas said, “the epiphany moment was the phone call from St. James and the recognition that, along with the rest of the world, I was one of the people who didn’t recognize the inequity, that it was a big wake-up call for me.”

Cook had moved closer to the team in 2021 following a devastating injury sustained in her second season in W Series, the failed women-only Formula 3 feed series. She was struck by a pair of competing cars and suffered a labral tear in her right hip and injuries to her lower back and sacroiliac joint. She had expressed great interest in joining the team, but given her injury, Thomas told her to wait and recover.

It turns out that Cook’s injury was fortuitous. During his recovery year, he worked very hard to get back into racing shape and became a commentator for the W Series (and completed his college degree in mechanical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines). She also gave the Kellymoss team time to fundraise 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 of ​​holding an all-female first shootout to pit the world’s few up-and-coming female racing drivers against each other to win a single year of support for a place on the team. Thomas and her team reviewed the career listings and found a total of just 12 women who would be eligible for the scholarship. Of those, only four fit the parameters that Thomas and his team and advisers, including St. James, racing driver Katherine Legge and Riley Dickenson, a star driver for the Kellymoss team, created for the scholarship. The initial process for narrowing down the field was fairly simple: Thomas reached out to each driver and asked them to submit a video and career resume. The committee then narrowed the field down from there, inviting each to two days of testing.

Pushing female racing drivers to the limit

The shootout took place at the Putnam Park speedway in Indiana in the summer of 2022, with the field shrinking from four women to just three: Cook said it was both exciting and difficult to compete against two of her friends.

“I was very lucky that we were all very close about it,” Cook said. “And at the end of the day, I tried to see it as a super awesome opportunity. Who else can drive a cup car with two of his good friends on a normal day?

Day one consisted of a fitness assessment conducted by Jim Leo of PitFit. PitFit is a well-known training gym in Indiana focused on optimizing motoring human performance. Cook had moved to Indiana to be closer to the heart of racing, rebuild his body from his injury and find more racing opportunities. Cook is a PitFit client and said he knew how difficult the test would be. The women then had to do interviews and demonstrate their media savvy, a vital part of the racing rubric because media appearances generate more sponsorship dollars.

On the second day, riley dickenson ran the course. She set a benchmark time and gave the women information on how to be fast on that particular track. Each driver then had to run the course on her own, and the competitors were not allowed to look at each other while running. Then they each had to do more interviews with Lyn St. James, Katherine Legge and racing journalist Jeremy Shaw.

With the event completed and the results recorded, Kellymoss’s team and their advisers sat down to determine the winner. Thomas says it was a tough decision and not everyone agreed on the winner, at least at first.

“The fact that Sabré had an engineering background and could articulate and talk to drivers, and she was just a physical beast, like she was a beast. So to me, it was very clear,” Thomas said. “There were a couple of our team members who said I think we need to take a little bit more time and make sure.”

After deliberations, the entire committee agreed to award Cook the scholarship, and he went from 26th to the top 10 in the last three races. His teammate Dickenson has won all three races this year. The next Carrera Cup takes place at Watkins Glen at the end of June.

‘We all love motorsports’

As the first and only woman to compete with the winningest Porsche team in Carrera Cup history, Cook says that deep down, she just wants to be a racing driver, untethered by gender. It’s especially poignant as she spent two seasons competing in the W Series, a series that was unable to complete its second season due to financial issues and has been criticized for separating female athletes from their male counterparts, much like the new Formula Academy. 1. Cook says her experience competing in both has highlighted the contrast and pointed out where some of the all-female series are lacking and how they somewhat disadvantage female racing drivers due to the competitive dynamics.

“Season one, when it all started in 2019, was a very refreshing thing to be a part of,” Cook said of her seasons on W Series. on the grid, we all love motorsport, we are all working incredibly hard to be there, and we all respect each other for that.It felt like it was such a unique situation where everyone was happy to be there and happy to encourage each other.”

Cook continued: “Running with everyone is what I was used to: being the only woman or one of maybe two, and that’s very much my comfort. I’m used to it, I like it. And I feel like, honestly, I feel like I can be more myself and just be as completely aggressive as I would naturally be. With the W series, honestly, sometimes I felt like we were all like a women’s soccer team. As if we were all in each other’s space. You would want it to be cohesive, obviously, to keep that situation positive, but at times I felt like maybe I wasn’t as aggressive with them as I would have been with the men. I feel like it’s easier than if a guy is your friend, even on court, to be aggressive with him because he expects it, and you understand it, while women say, ‘But you’re my friend.'”

Thomas says that although Kellymoss’s scholarship is only for one year of competition in the Carrera Cup, he hopes Cook can continue with the team for years to come with a little help from sponsorship and an increase in awareness of the pioneers. what Cook has done in space.

“My hope is that we bring half [of the funding] next year and have Sabré bring half,” Thomas said. “I think he’s putting himself out there as a spokesperson, and he’ll be able to split half, and we’ll be able to bring in half next time.”

He continued: “Saber and I are fighting for more than just winning races. It is a battle for inclusion and diversity in all motorsports.”