Full Throttle

Move over Michael. Here comes a former Japanese race queen raring to become a “racing” queen in the man’s, man’s world of Formula One.

Keiko Ihara, who swapped the model’s leotard and makeup for a racing suit and helmet in 1999 at age 26, declares her goal is to compete with Germany’s seven-time F1 champion Michael Schumacher.

After six years of duelling with male drivers on lesser tours in Asia, Britain and France, she is revving up for the the British Formula-3 series which has produced such F1 greats as Ayrton Senna and Mika Hakkinen. “I respect Michael Schumacher and always will. I dream of running on the same track with him but I don’t dare imagine myself overtaking him,” Ihara said ahead of her British F3 debut on April 2 at Donington Park.

“I am working to the limit in testing now and my machine and myself have been improving each day,” the 31-year-old told AFP by telephone from Marlow where she is based with the Carlin Motorsports team.

“Of course, women are totally different from men in terms of physical strength,” Ihara admitted. “I have also had difficulty many times on the mental side in a sense that motorsport still very much remains a man’s world.”

“But I don’t feel any handicap in the team, being a woman or a Japanese,” Ihara said, adding that she has seen courtesy from male colleagues. “On test days, my teammates go outside the transporter which we share when I change my clothes. They are all kind enough,” she said.

Ihara has come a long way since she started as a model to finance her career as a competitive freestyle skier when she was still an economics student at Tokyo’s Hosei University. On her first day on the track as a race queen, a model who promotes the high-octane sport, the sound of speed so enthralled her that she was inspired to learn how to drive and to become a racer one day.

After four years of saving money and finding sponsorship, she raced in the national Ferrari 355 championship in 1999. She competed in the British Formula Renault in 2000 and in the French F3 in 2001. Both high and low points of her career came in 2002 when she could not race at home as Japanese sponsors pulled out amid the throes of recession. It compelled her to make spot entries in the Asian Formula-2000 series and she won two races — becoming the first woman in the world to triumph in a formula-car race sanctioned by the International Automobile Federation.

Ihara finished third in the AF-2000 category of the 2002 Macau Grand Prix, the first woman to climb any podium in the event’s 50-year history.

In 2003, Ihara placed third overall in the Formula BMW Asian series. She competed as a regular on the national circuit last year before clinching a deal with Carlin for the 22-race F3 season, sponsored by a Japanese cosmetics firm. “We like breaking new ground and one day, there will be a successful female driver in F1,” Carlin team boss Trevor Carlin said. “Keiko is joining us to train herself for the higher formula, following in the footsteps of BAR driver Takuma Sato.”

Apart from Sato, the team has launched into F1 such drivers as Jenson Button, Kimi Raikkonen and most recently India’s Narain Karthikeyan. There have been several women drivers in F1 since the early years of the 55-year-old championship. But their results have been limited with only Italian Lella Lombardi posting a top six finish — sixth at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix.

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