Alison Davis

Alison Davis was one of Britain's most successful female club racers and the first woman to win a club championship outright. 

She won the 1979 BRDC Production Sportscar Championship in a Ginetta G15 and also won races in the 1984 MG Metro Challenge. 

The first racing car that she owned was a Diva GT which she and her husband Roger bought from Frank Williams in 1970. Before that, she had done some hillclimbs and sprints in borrowed cars or her roadgoing Austin Healey. The Diva helped her to transition from speed events to wheel-to-wheel racing but it was replaced for the 1971 season by a Ginetta G15.

The Ginetta was her most successful car; it also gave her a string of class wins in the few-holds-barred Modsports championship 1971 and 1972. She was voted Driver of the Day at Brands Hatch in 1972 and won the British Women Racing Drivers’ Club’s Embassy Trophy for the best performance by a club member in circuit racing. This was one of a collection of trophies she earned that year.

Alison’s time in Modsports was supported by an unusual sponsor: feminine hygiene product Femfresh. She even appeared in 19 magazine as part of a promotional competition where a reader could win herself a Ginetta sportscar.

The Femfresh G15 was sold at the end of the 1972 season. Alison experimented with a number of different cars. She was a leading competitor in the BWRDC Shellsport Ladies’ Escort series, finishing second in the 1976 and 1977 championships with several wins. Two further standalone ladies’ races were held in 1978 and Alison won one of them. 

One of the cars she raced was a Fiat 124ST and it was this that she used on the 1973 Avon Tour of Britain. She was partnered by Sheila Scott, a pilot. They competed against eventual winner James Hunt, Graham Hill, Rosemary Smith and others.

Most of her outings during this time were in production saloons. She often competed alone, but sometimes teamed up with other drivers, including future Le Mans starter Juliette Slaughter, with whom she shared a Triumph TR7.

Coming back to a Ginetta brought her back to winning ways in 1979. Her new car was a yellow G15 that she and Roger converted from road spec. It always carried the number 33 and became a common and popular sight in parc ferme. Alison had the most successful year of her career in it, winning the BRDC Prodsports championship with a clean sweep of class wins. This was the first time a woman had won a British racing championship outright and she was awarded the BWRDC Wakefield Trophy, for outstanding contribution to motorsport by a woman. 

The trophy was not just the result of her BRDC Prodsports win. Her BRDC campaign was run in tandem with a strong attempt on the similar BRSCC CAV championship, finishing second ten times and setting three lap records at Silverstone, Castle Combe and Brands Hatch.

Although she did not win the championship again outright, she was joint champion in the DB Prodsports series in 1981, winning five times. In between, she scored two further wins and twelve second places in the 1980 season.

Despite her success in the Ginetta, Alison moved on to an MG Metro for the 1982 MG Metro Challenge. It was a steep learning curve for her and she crashed out of her first race. She made up for this by becoming a permanent fixture in the top six by the end of the season. This continued during the 1983 season while Roger and her team of mechanics got to grips with the Metro.

In 1984, she was offered a seat in Terry Drury’s Alfa Romeo GTV for the Tourist Trophy Six Hours at Silverstone. According to newspaper reports at the time, she had to embark on a funding drive to be able to take up her drive. She managed it, although she and Paul Everett were unable to finish the race itself.

For the Metro series itself, she was sponsored by the Melitta coffee brand.

Away from this disappointment, the team had finally got to grips with the Metro and Alison was flying at last. She won the first three races of the 1984 championship and cemented her reputation as a wet-track specialist with a victory at a rainy Silverstone. After her third win, a protest was lodged and she was accused of having an illegal car. A thorough examination by the scrutineers proved this allegation to be false and probably the result of wounded male pride.

Alison left motorsport on a high, as a leading driver in Metros and in Prodsports. She turned to showing Irish draught horses and entered the Horse of the Year Show on five occasions.

Her husband Roger points out that she would have been eligible for membership of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, but it would be another few years before that august organisation permitted female members.

(Thanks to Roger Davis for the information and picture)

Ann Moore

Ann leaps over her FF2000 car on Psalm

Ann Moore was a British showjumping champion who had a brief motorsport career in 1976, promoted by John Webb of Shellsport.

Ann won a silver medal in individual showjumping at the 1972 Munich Olympics, riding her horse Psalm. This made her the most successful of Britain’s female equestrians at a time when showjumping had a sizeable TV audience. She was voted the Sports Journalists’ Association Sportswoman of the Year in 1973, having been runner-up in the two years previously.

John Webb was the director of Brands Hatch circuit at the time. He was both sharp to the promotional value of female drivers and supportive of their abilities. He had one of his biggest successes the year before with Divina Galica, a former Olympic skier who would go on to attempt to qualify for a Formula One race in the same year that Ann Moore took the wheel. Ann’s public profile was far higher than Divina’s was due to the relative popularity of her sport. There was also a strong history of successful female drivers having first competed in equestrian events. Pat Moss was a showjumper like Ann, and another of the Webb protegees was Gillian Fortescue-Thomas, a former amateur jockey. The appeal to John Webb and his publicist wife Angela was obvious. Ann was signed up for what was referred to as the Webb “Charm School”.

Ann’s first race was in 1975. She was one of the celebrity racers hired to fill out the grid for the Shellsport Escort Ladies’ series, at Brands. Previous celebrity entrants had included TV announcer Linda Cunningham and actress and porn performer Fiona Richmond. The championship used the Shellsport fleet of Ford Escorts, which was kept at the circuit. Ann was eleventh after a spin. Divina Galica was the winner.

The next phase of her career was a move into single-seaters. It was announced early in 1976 that Ann would compete in “around 30 races” that year in an Elden Formula Ford 2000 car, arranged by the Webbs and sponsored by Rolatruc. She made her debut at the start of the season with two races at Brands, then one at Mallory Park in March.

Among her events that year was a charity single-seater race in aid of a sports-related cause. Ann’s car, complete with her livery and name, is seen being used by boxer Joe Bugner for training. 

The FF2000 car was perhaps not the best choice for a novice; Formula Ford 1600 may have been more suitable, or more outings in the Escort. Spectators of the time remark that Ann was slow and often spun her car. Her much-vaunted “professional” racing career came to a halt after only six races. 

A statement made to the press explained that she had not realised how much of her time would be taken up by motor racing, and that she would only take part in occasional celebrity races in the future. It is not clear whether she did appear in any more of Shellsport’s celebrity races, which usually used Escorts, but they were held throughout the season and there would have been plenty of opportunity.

Ann had already retired from showjumping two years previously, aged 24.

(Image by Nick Rogers, copyright Shutterstock)

Janina Depping

Janina (left) with Ina Schaarschmidt

Janina Depping was one of Germany’s foremost female rally drivers of the early 2000s. She is most associated with the Mitusbishi Lancer.

She took part in seven World Championship rallies during her seventeen-year career: three of them were the 2004, 2007 and 2011 editions of the Rallye Deutschland. The best of these for her was the 2011 Rallye, when she finished 38th overall but ninth in class, driving a Lancer Evo IX. Her earliest WRC experience was in 1997, when she was just nineteen. She competed in the Rallye Sanremo and the Tour de Corse in a Ford Escort and Skoda Felicia respectively. She would revisit these two rallies once more, finishing the 1998 Sanremo event in a Mitsubishi Carisma.

Earlier, she had been eighth in a pre-WRC Rallye Deutschland, in 1999. Her car was a Ford Escort RS Cosworth; she would have one of the best seasons of her career in it. That year, she was also fifth in the International ADMV-Pneumant-Rallye and seventh in the Van Staveren-Zuiderzeerally, as well as recording top-ten finishes in five other rallies. She was eighth in that year’s German championship.

The early success she experienced in her career came from having started young. Janina grew up around rallies: her father Bernd Depping competed in the 1980s when she was a child and her uncle Dieter Depping was a multiple German champion in the 1990s, sometimes with Janina’s aunt, also called Janina, as co-driver. She began rallying herself in 1996, at 18. Her first event was the Baumholder Hunsruck National Rally, held on the same military range as Rallye Deutschland. She drove the Escort, although she quickly switched to a Suzuki Swift for the rest of the year and some of 1997. 

Her only outright win came in 1999. She was the victor in the Hunsruck Junior Rallye, driving a Proton Wira.  

In 2008, she was runner-up in the Group N class of the European Rally Challenge, after a string of strong finishes. She competed in the Netherlands and Belgium that year as well as Germany, driving a Lancer Evo VII, a car she used for five seasons, including a second one in the ERC in 2009. Her best finish that year was a tenth place in the Lausitz Rallye. Sadly, her events in the Netherlands and Italy led to retirement. 

After a year off in 2010, she returned to the stages in 2011, and was 38th in the Rallye Deutschland in a new Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX. Later in the year, she was seventh in the ADAC Rallyesprint.eu, against 59 other drivers.

In 2012, she used the same car in a mixture of German championship rallies. She was second and fourth in the two ADMV Wedemerk Rallye events, ninth in the Sachsen Rallye and eighth in the Rallye Erzgebirge. This represented a return to form after a couple of years spent more on the sidelines.

In 2013, she continued to compete in German events, recording an eighth place in the Sachsen Rallye and a class win on the Grabfeld Rallye, twelfth overall.

Sadly, she died following an accident on the Wartburg Rallye, in which her co-driver Ina Schaarschmidt also perished. Janina’s Lancer Evo IX had hit a tree at high speed and caught fire. Ina died at the scene and Janina succumbed to her injuries four days later. The pair had been working together since 2011.

(Image copyright Sascha Dorrenbacher)