Yahoo Finance Trailblazer Nabila Tejpar on her motorsport roots and the need for increased diversity
Few athletes would dare turn down a championship title, but Nabila Tejpar has made a career of defying expectations.
The Essex native is a third-generation rally river who grew up hearing tales of her grandfather, Abdulkarim Tejpar, encountering elephants as he raced through the wilderness in the heyday of the Safari Rally in Kenya.
Tejpar was 12 when she learned how to do hand break turns in a field with her father, Aziz, who himself once eyed a pro racing career. He’s always been a strong advocate for his 27-year-old daughter, who won back-to-back British Rally Championship Ladies Trophies in 2017 and 2018.
“I’ll be honest, it’s really hard to say it, [but] I hate Ladies Trophies,” she admitted.
“I hate the fact that I’m British Ladies Champion, I hate it because it feels to me like I got a trophy for showing up.
“Because there’s just not enough women doing it. So as much as obviously it’s helped me with my career, and it’s nice to say, it’s just sort of, like, is it necessary?
“At the end of the day, the competitions that I’m going to be in, they aren’t going to be all women.
“And my ability as a woman should not forsake my ability to drive a car competitively.”
It’s easy to appreciate Tejpar’s frustration when you check out the opponents in her cup-winning years. Aphoristic athletes often pinpoint themselves as their own biggest competition, but Tejpar was quite literally in a class of her own.
That wasn't the case on Friday when she took to the start line at the Orlen 77th Rally in Poland, the opening event of the 2021 FIA European Rally Championship (ERC).
The race represents Tejpar’s first chance to really test out her new ride, a Proton Iriz R5. The move into the four-wheel drive vehicle also bumps her up from a junior category to the more competitive Rally2, where she’s be joined in-car by driver-coach and two-time British rally champion Matt Edwards.
Tejpar “instantly fell in love” with rally at age 16, when a friend and fellow racer brought his car to her place. Hooked, she struck a deal with her mum: she could start competing as long as she finished uni first.
Even with her family pedigree, the business school graduate, who used to love going to the Goodwood Festival of Speed with her dad, never imagined a racing career was feasible.
She explained: “I think it happens in a lot of sports, especially for girls. If you’ve not started in that sport as a young girl, or if you’ve not seen it as being possible, and you’ve not seen a person doing it, then you sort of don’t ever think about it.
“And that’s a big thing in Asian culture I think, too. A lot of the reason we don’t see as many Asian sports people is there’s no role models for it, but [also] sport’s not viable.
“It’s considered something that you do for fun, it’s not a viable career path.
“My parents’ family friends literally tell my parents, ‘how do you let her do that? How is that a career path?’
“And my parents are like, A, this is what she wanted to do, B, she’s doing a good job at it, and C, hopefully she’ll change this.”
New competitions like the W Series and Extreme E are beginning to address the gender imbalance in motorsport, but the faces of elite racing remain overwhelmingly white.
Tejpar is part of the sophomore cohort of Unlocked, a cross-sport leadership programme for female athletes run by the Women’s Sport Trust.
And across the board, the group agreed that visibility was key, but change also needed to start at the grassroots.
“There’s just not enough women in motorsport,” said Tejpar.
“It’s not catered enough to them.
“It could be a mechanic, it could be an engineer, it could be a team boss…”
Or a driver. And if that’s the route a girl wants to take, well, there’s a reluctant Ladies Champion who would welcome a challenger.
