Jessica Hawkins

Jessica (centre) on the winner's podium in 2017

Jessica Hawkins was second in the John Cooper Mini Challenge in 2017. She was a multiple race-winner in her first really successful season, finally displaying the talent she showed in a kart.

As a junior, she won several karting championships, and featured strongly in some major ones.

In the face of a series of difficult sponsorship situations, she got onto the grid for the 2014 Renault Clio Cup. This was in part thanks to winning a testing shootout organised by the BWRDC, and was helped by some further experience in the car in the 2013 Autumn Trophy. In the end, she only seems to have driven in two rounds, at Brands Hatch, but she was third and fourth. Her team-mate was Jodie Hemming, recently returned to competitive action. Jodie was acting as her driver coach too.

Later in the season, she raced in the British Formula Ford Championship, at Silverstone, scoring two tenths, and an eleventh place. She was team-mate to Michael O’Brien, a fellow youngster.

In 2015, she chose the single-seater route, and entered the MSA Formula series. This was a transitional formula between Formula Ford and Formula 4, as it would become in 2016. It was a difficult season, and she just missed out on a top-ten spot at Rockingham and Snetterton. She was 23rd overall, after competing for just over half a season. She was part of a strong field, including Lando Norris, Dan Ticktum and Enaam Ahmed.

During the winter season, she raced in the MRF Challenge in the Middle East. She managed two fifteenth places at Bahrain. These were her only two races in the championship.

Part-way through 2016, she joined Team HARD Racing for the VW Racing Cup, and was ninth and eighth at Brands Hatch, driving a Golf. She did enter the third race at Brands but did not finish. This experience put her back on her original track of saloon racing, which would pay off.

Jessica’s first race in the 2017 Mini Challenge ended in a win from pole. She followed that up with another win from the front. She aimed for a clean sweep of the Snetterton meeting, but had to settle for third in the third race. She repeated this exactly at Silverstone: two wins, two poles, then a third. She won one more race at Rockingham and earned a further six podium places from eleven races. She could have won the championship if her early momentum had lasted, but she was still a strong second in what was her first full season of competition.

Her sights are now set on a career in tin-tops and she has completed the first year of a three-year plan, which will take her into the BTCC.

This plan had a slight setback in 2018, when she did not race very much, apart from a couple of guest appearances in the Milltek Sport Volkswagen Racing Cup at Snetterton. She spent most of the year working as a stunt driver.

In 2019, she returned to single-seaters, applying successfully to enter the female-only W Series. She sometimes found herself mixed up in on-track accidents during the season itself and had a best finish of seventh, at Assen and Brands Hatch. She was eleventh in the championship and therefore invited back for 2020.

W Series was cancelled in 2020 due to the coronavirus, but Jess went back to tin-tops and managed to take a big step forward in her career. She signed a one-round deal with Power Maxxed Racing to drive their Vauxhall Astra in the BTCC and raced at Snetterton. Her best finish out of her three races was 20th, but she had been running much higher than that when she was pushed off-track by Andy Neate. She also had to contend with significant ballast in her car due to starting the season late.

Before that, she had a guest drive in the Jaguar i-Pace eTrophy, alongside her partner Abbie Eaton. She was eighth and ninth at the Berlin street circuit.

She made three further BTCC guest appearances in 2021, this time driving a Ford Focus ST run by Racing with Wera and Photon Group. Snetterton was the scene of the action again and she finished all three races, narrowly missing out on a top-twenty placing once to finish 21st.

W Series beckoned again too, but it was not a stellar season for her and she only really got on the pace towards the end, earning a sixth and fifth place at Spa and Zandvoort. She was a backmarker for much of the eight-round championship and finished eleventh overall, meaning she will not be invited back automatically.

She was also announced as a Driver Ambassador by the Aston Martin F1 team. Although this is a non-competing role at present, she travelled with the team for several events in 2021. Her stunt work, which has included appearances in a James Bond film, continued.

Her third W Series season began with a second place at Miami, but it was soon eclipsed by her first win in the British TCR series, driving a SEAT Leon for Area Motorsport and FASTR. Her win, at Oulton, was her only one of the season. She had too many non-finishes to make an impact on the final leaderboard, but she did manage a fifth and sixth at Castle Combe. She was fourteenth in the championship.

Her W Series season was also inconsistent and she was ninth after the shortened seven-race programme. This proved to be her last W Series season as the championship folded at the beginning of 2023. 

Her competitive action was UK-based in 2023. She took part in the Praga Cup, driving for the University of Wolverhampton team with Teddy Wilson. They won one race and were second in the championship. Using the same car, she entered the Zeo Prototype Cup with Shane Kelly. They were frontrunners in that series too, winning their class in five out of six races to finish second.

Away from active racing, Jessica continued to work with Aston Martin and was even allowed to test the AMR21 F1 car in September. She was the first woman to drive a current F1 car for several years. The team also gave her a job overseeing their F1 Academy entry.

(Image from www.excelr8motorsport.com)