Rally champion, Molly Taylor, on extreme sports, resilience and learning from the best

Courier-Mail

17 hours ago

The Extreme E champion and trailblazing rally car driver on family legacy, resilience and visibility in motorsport.
You are an Extreme E champion and rally car driver, competing in electric off-road racing events in extreme locations. Tell us a bit more about your sport and how you got into it.
I got involved through my family. My mum is actually a co-driver. In rally, one of the biggest differences is that you have two people in the car - a driver and a co-driver. It's a bit more like if you imagine the Tour de France and all the different stages that add up over the course of a weekend or a week. We're in the forest, driving over various stages of forest roads rather than a race track itself. But Mum is a six-time Australian Rally Champion as a co-driver, she's the most successful co-driver in the history of Australian rally which is pretty cool.
Extreme E is a newer form of off-road which is a bit like a combination of rallycross. You're driving head-to-head, you've got five cars on the same start line and a shorter track with one driver in the car. It's like a combination of a circuit but it's off-road, so you're driving through the desert like in Saudi or gravel, rocky terrain like in Sardinia. You're driving head-to-head and then you switch drivers half-way through, so one male, one female co-driver sharing this big, two tonne all-electric, off-road SUV. Both are very different to Formula 1 and supercars and all of that, but the biggest difference is that everything we do is off-road and in the dirt.
Your mum, Coral Taylor, dominated the sport as a six-time Australian Rally Champion co-driver. How did watching her success in the sport shape your own ambitions and your understanding of what's possible?
Growing up, I was obsessed with horses. I went to rally events and loved it but didn't really think about getting involved. My Dad also rallied and he wanted us to go to a rally school that he was running on weekends just to learn car control and know how to drive a car well from a road safety point of view. That was when I got the opportunity to drive a rally car, so it was then that the penny dropped and I experienced how much fun it was.
I was 16 when I started which was late when you look at someone trying to make a career out of their sport. But the influence of Mum certainly had an impact that I didn't realise. Growing up, I always saw that that could be a path for a woman. So, when I did it and was like, 'Wow, this is really cool, maybe I should do this a bit more,' I didn't have to overcome that 'all I see are boys doing it' mentality. You still go through all the same struggles and it's not easy, but I think I had a massive opportunity in that my eyes were open and my mind was open from the very beginning.
Now, when we do an Extreme E or international-level event, you realise how important it is at a high level to have the visibility of what's possible because we only have less females now because we have even less females starting out at grassroots sport because young girls aren't seeing that that's an option. I don't think it's necessarily people saying, 'This isn't a sport for girls,' but if you're five or six and not seeing anyone else like you doing it, you just naturally don't gravitate towards it. There's a long way to go but it's kind of cool and I guess I just fast-tracked that because I always had an amazing role model.
What have you learned most from her - on or off the track?
I often joke when I did get started, 'Why didn't you push me into this and show me how fun it was?' But it's such a tough sport and there are so many highs and lows, it really requires sacrificing everything in pursuit of that and still the chance to make it through are so low that if that drive doesn't come from within you, it will never be enough to make it. If you've been pushed or are only doing it because your parents do, at some point it's going to get really hard and you're going to go, 'I don't want to do it enough.' My parents have really understood that and instilled that whatever we want to do, as long as we had a burning desire for something and chased it, but it was up to us to find what that was.
But in saying that, now that I am involved, it's awesome to share it with my parents because there are so many times you lean on them for advice or they've been through a similar situation and can say the right thing. I think in most family relationships, you're always telling your Mum that she's saying the wrong thing. Someone else can give you the same advice as your Mum and you'll take it, but when it comes from your Mum you don't listen. But I would say more often than not, it's amazing to have someone who has been there and can keep you on the straight and narrow when things are getting tough or you're in a tricky situation and they can keep you grounded and keep you focused on what's important.
In the car, you take on speeds of up to 200km/hr, make split decisions, and face cabin temperatures of up to 60 degrees. What does your physical training involve to handle such extremes?
It is extreme, we don't have air conditioning in the car or anything. In Extreme E the races are relatively short and in rally it can be up to 30 or 40 minutes at any one time but you might do ten stages during the day. If you look at the Dakar rally, you're in the car for 12 hours a day. We're sliding around a lot, so you need good core strength. But it's more about how you can be fit enough and strong enough so you can maintain 100 per cent mental clarity when it's 60 degrees in the car and you've been going all day, you've just had to jump out and change a tyre and jump back in and your heart rate is up. When you start to fatigue, the first thing you drop is your mental clarity. A lot of the training is more focused around not losing that focus and not getting distracted.
As a female, I spend more time working on strength and endurance than the average guy because it takes a bit longer to build that muscle mass. A lot of that is upper body and core. There's also cardio endurance, so running and biking.
Getting in the car is obviously the best training and it's a really weird sport in that it's like being a professional tennis player and you're about to go to the Australian Open, but in the months leading up to it you never picked up a tennis racquet, then the day before you picked up the racquet for an hour or two. For us, that's sort of what we do. You're out of the car for a month or two, then you hop in and have one practice session and then you're in the competition. It's wild how little prep time you get. But it's everything from whether you can do simulator, watch videos or do visualisation, whatever you can to practice those things. But the biggest challenge in our sport is getting the opportunity and putting together the resources to get seat practice. The more sponsorship and resources you can put together to get in the car, the more you practice and the better you can be.
Crashes and tough moments are an inevitable part of motorsports. When things haven't gone to plan, what mental tools or strategies help you reset and get back in the car with confidence?
I think in motorsport a lot of the time, if you look at the averages, it's probably not going to go your way a lot more than it will. It's really hard to perfect everything because especially in our environment, everything's always different and the road is always changing. It's very hard to nail everything perfectly and know there's nowhere to improve, so you're always chasing that. When you're trying to drive something right on the limit of grip and not go over it, when you're in that dynamic environment it's inevitable that you'll sometimes go over it. And if you never go over it or you never crash, then you're not going fast enough because you shouldn't have this huge buffer to always eliminate this risk.
When you do go over that, you try not to and you don't want to get yourself in that situation, but it is part of the process. I suppose in any other sport, the consequences aren't as big. How many goals do you kick in practice and you don't get them all in? As long as you understand what happened, how you can learn from it so you don't do it again, or change something or put something in place, it's just about going back and getting on. You just have to focus on the process and the moment you start thinking about other things, the more likely you are to get yourself in that scenario.
In 2016, you were then the youngest winner of the Australian Rally Championship - and the first (and to-date only) female champion. How did you stay focused and motivated after reaching such a massive career milestone so young?
We say young but I was 27, so it's kind of wild that in a lot of sporting careers you're getting towards the end of your sporting life. Rally is different like that. I started when I was 16 and that was my first year as a professional driver with Subaru, so it was 11 years of doing whatever I could to drive and get opportunities and pour everything I earned into making that happen. That was my first year of just doing it as a job so it was incredible for it all to come together. I think it just fuels the motivation, you don't just tick it off and go, 'Ok, cool, I'm done.' It's like, 'Now we're getting started.' It's a bit of a drug, really. The more you do, the more you want to do and that's the thing with motorsport. It's really challenging and the hardest thing, but along with the lowest moments you'll ever have come the highest moments.
In 2021, you won the inaugural Extreme E championship - a series that's as much about impact as it is about racing. Why was it important to you to be part of a series that's changing the future of motorsport?
When I saw what they were doing, it was incredibly exciting. Off-road is my wheelhouse and it was cool that this opportunity was coming up in this space. It had come off the back of competing overseas, losing my sponsorship over there, coming back and having the opportunity to be a professional driver with Subaru, then Covid happened and the rally program stopped and that was when this opportunity was just coming up. The whole philosophy behind it - you're taking Motorsport, which we've grown up loving and our passion - but it's such an integral part of the development of the automotive world, it's always been since they first built cars; they were racing them and what they learned on the track they were putting them into road cars. With the electrification and need for sustainability, how can motorsport help be part of that future and how can we use what we do and pushing things to the limits and racing each other, how can we use that and the platform of everyone who wants to watch that and the power you have through that to also educate and develop technologies.
It's about racing with purpose, and how you can use your passion to be part of something positive for the future and the evolution of not just the sport, but automatives and sustainability. It's pretty compelling when you think you grew up just loving driving and trying to drive as fast as you can, but now you can take that skill to be part of something as big as that which is a huge opportunity. From an equality side as well, to be given that opportunity with the 50-50 male-female driver split, not only for my professional development, but for the visibility and impact that can have on future generations, there were lots of reasons why it was a no-brainer to be involved.
Extreme E has made headlines for its gender-equal team structure, where men and women share driving duties equally. What was it like to race in a format where equality is built into the rules?
I think it's probably the best case study of how that can be done at an international level of motorsport. To get access to seat time and the resources to do that and the money that's involved, it's really difficult, so the more opportunities you're given, the more of a chance you have to improve and be better. These world-class international teams now have to invest in female talent, find the best talent, and it's in their interest to help develop the opportunities to drive because they're contributing 50 percent of the on-track time. Then you have your teammates. They're picking the world's best off-road male drivers, they are my teammates, these hugely talented drivers, so you also have the best mentor you could ever wish for to learn from. I think what's been really compelling about that whole thing is that in the first three seasons of Extreme E, the performance gap from the females to the hugely experienced male drivers has closed 70 percent. It just proves that if you provide the opportunity, the potential for performance is there.
I think keys to that are having that benchmark and competing with them, not separating it, means you're learning from the best and always know where you stand, and now we're seeing some laps where the females are faster so you can see what's possible. We still have more development to go but they took that opportunity and put their money where their mouth was and it's been cool to see what has happened and the impact of that for more young girls getting involved, too.
You've broken records, raced on almost every terrain imaginable, and continue to make history. What do you hope to achieve next?
The most immediate one is that now with Extreme E converting to Extreme H - so it will be the world's first hydrogen motorsport series - with that starting up this year, the immediate goal is to try and win that title as well. We did some rallies in the Australian rally championship last year, but to get back and do a full campaign, to get back to the top of the ARC has always been my dream for as long as I'm able to drive a car so I'd love to have another crack at that.
Originally published as Rally champion, Molly Taylor, on extreme sports, resilience and learning from the best