It’s the eve of January’s Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in Florida, and the Iron Dames are craving sleep. The next day, at 1:40 p.m., the four of them will take turns driving a Lamborghini Huracán at high speed around a 3.5-mile track—mostly oval-ish, with some intricate twists and turns thrown in for good measure—and they’ll keep doing that until the clock turns 1:40 again the next afternoon.
“The first 12 hours is about surviving and taking care of the car, not taking too much risk,” says Rahel Frey, 36, the most experienced of the Dames, between careful bites of chicken at a Latin-Caribbean fusion restaurant in the Holly Hill neighborhood of Daytona Beach. “The second half is more intense—and the last six hours is just pure racing.”
As the expression goes, the Iron Dames—here tonight with some team management and a smattering of executives from Lamborghini, their car sponsor—are here for a good time, not for a long time. (Michelle Gatting, 29, Sarah Bovy, 33, and Doriane Pin, 19—all of them, in short order, resolutely saying no to dessert and coffee—round out the driving team.) Soon, they’ll pack off back to the track, where they’ll bunk up together in a motorhome, get as much sleep as possible, and wake up early to begin the day’s preparations.
Joining the scrum at the 24 Hours will be 60 other teams, each of them trying to do the same thing: drive faster, make fewer and faster pit stops, and complete more laps than the other teams. Winning the thing has been a feather in the cap for Formula 1 and IndyCar drivers, NASCAR legends like Jeff Gordon, and scores of other men since the 24 Hours was first raced in 1962.
Here’s the thing, though, in case their name didn’t already give it away (or the fact that they race a hot pink Lamborghini wearing hot pink racing suits): The Iron Dames are founded, managed, and raced by women—the only all-female lineup in endurance racing history. Founded by former racer and entrepreneur Deborah Mayer in 2018, the Iron Dames set out to ease women’s barriers to entry into a sport which has, since its inception, been populated almost entirely by men—many of whom were introduced to motorsports by their fathers. As it turns out, those fathers have daughters too.
Pin, sitting across the table from Frey, has been racing for nine years. “My dad organized go-karting events, so since the age of three I was always by a track.” (Pin grew up near Paris and now lives in Nice.) “When my dad bought a go-kart, I practiced on it for six months at different tracks in different conditions and different weather, and I improved a lot really fast. I won the French championship in 2019—competing against 100 boys and two other girls.” I ask her what in retrospect seems like an absurd question: Was it extra satisfying to beat so many boys? Pin looks at me with an expression of utter bafflement. “Yes!” she exclaims, bursting out laughing. “Of course!”
On race day at the 100,000-plus capacity Daytona Motor Speedway—most famously, home of Sunday’s Daytona 500 NASCAR race—I’m taken via golf cart inside the complex, through a tunnel bored underneath the track and to the infield, crammed bumper-to-bumper with trailers and RVs (parking passes for these coveted spots are treasures passed down generations) and a crude, hand-lettered sign that reads: HAPPY HOUR: 1:40-1:40. RACE? WHAT RACE?
But if the spectator experience is for 24-hour party people, the racing side of things is the opposite. Inside the Lamborghini team trailer, racing legend and former Formula 1 driver Romain Grosjean (his harrowing fiery crash and seemingly impossible escape at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix is the emotional centerpiece of Season 3 of Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive) is finishing his breakfast. In addition to racing IndyCar this season, he’s signed on as a Lamborghini factory driver and is competing here for the Iron Lynx team—like the Iron Dames, in a Lamborghini Huracán GT3. As might be expected from a driver who, for more than a decade, worked with women engineers and mechanics during his motorsports career, Grosjean has welcomed the Iron Dames to the racing family. “They’re our teammates—their car is pink, but that’s the only difference that I see,” Grosjean says. “For me, they’re race car drivers as we are. We’re one of the very few sports in the world where there’s no difference between our physical capacities.”
Of course, not every man in motorsport has rolled out the welcome mat the way Grosjean has. For Gatting, who’s been hooked on driving since she first drove a go-kart at the age of seven while on holiday with her family in the South of France (she grew up in Denmark, where she still lives now), racing has often been a battle on multiple fronts. “When I was growing up, boys getting beat by girls was very hard for them to accept, so I had a lot of fights on-track, a lot of fights off-track,” she says. “There were guys who couldn’t accept it, so they’d push me off-track for no reason. I ended up being the most-feared driver in the paddock—people were afraid of me because I wasn’t going to let anybody push me around. But it’s getting better. We’re still not there, but it’s getting better. Respect comes with results, and we’ve shown that we can win races, we can win pole positions. In this sport, you have to prove yourself in terms of lap times and being a fighter on the track; that’s how you get respect.”
A couple hours before the start of the race, I’m standing at the side of the track when Gatting comes roaring to a stop next to me in what I guess we can call a practice Lamborghini. I hop in and buckle up; Gatting, looking like she’s making a quick run to the supermarket in a backward baseball cap and sunglasses, nods, asks me if I’m ready, and then floors it. My adrenaline spikes and my body and head are pinned to my seat as we hit the tall banked curves—and, more thrillingly, the tight infield turns—of the speedway at upwards of 140 miles per hour. When Gatting drops me off back where I started, I’ve undergone the sort of thrill ride I’ll remember forever; for her, our little spin was a casual stretch before a marathon.
And then: the marathon. Out on the track at 1:40 p.m., the cars are off. If the 24 Hours of Daytona can appear as a blurry, high-speed jumble of scores of cars in multiple classifications and configurations, the Iron Dames’ screaming-pink Huracán sticks out—by design. “10 or 15 years ago, I would never have raced in a pink car,” Frey (who grew up between Bern and Zurich) had told me at dinner. “But when we started Iron Dames, we understood very well that having a pink car increases the awareness of us and what we’re doing—it’s part of our identification. Our slogan is ‘Women driven by dreams.’ Dream big and work hard for it, and the dream can become reality.”
Hour after hour, lap after lap, the Iron Dames chase that dream relentlessly, each driver taking a shift of an hour or sometimes two while the others rest in the pit and (sometimes) sleep in the motorhome parked nearby on the infield. Early mechanical problems cost them some painful minutes with the car in the garage rather than on the track but, then again, in a race this brutal, simply finishing the full 24 hours is its own kind of victory. By the time the midnight fireworks show at the speedway concludes in a rousing, kaleidoscopic fusillade, the crowds have dwindled from screaming thousands to dwindling dozens.
Back in the pit on the final morning, about 20 hours into the race, Gatting is exhausted but resolute and optimistic. “We had to put the car into the box for some technical issues, but we’re still going,” she says. “I’ve driven around four hours in two different shifts, and”—she has to pause for me to hear her as a string of cars roar by—“I’ll drive another hour in a bit.”
Bovy, meanwhile, having driven six hours over three double shifts—“a lot of hours in a very short amount of time,” as she describes it—is now merely waiting out the finish. “I went to sleep at about six in the morning and our engineers told me I wouldn’t be needed to drive any more. I try to watch my nutrition and my rest. We have bruises everywhere—it’s tough on the body and the mind.”
In the end, the Iron Dames merely finish the 24 Hours of Daytona. For the first big race of the season, that’s a victory. They’ll continue to hone the car, work on their racing strategy, and fight the long fight. From Daytona, Bovy will fly to Spain for a precision-driving job for Lamborghini. “Basically, if you see a commercial with a Lambo in it, there’s a good chance I’m the one driving it,” she says. “After that, we’ve got tests in Sebring, Switzerland, Barcelona—and that’s just until the end of February. It’s a crazy life, but I love it.”
As for the naysayers, the critics, and the chauvinists, she takes the high road. “There are always going to be people, both inside and outside of motorsport, who disrespect what women can do,” Bovy, now back in the Lamborghini hospitality trailer, says. “There will always be people who will be a bit stupid about this, but I don’t think there are more people like this in motorsport than in, say, business. I mean, yeah—I get that it can be difficult for a man to see a woman be faster than [him], but I like to talk it through with the guys. I think it’s better that way—to just ask: ‘Why is it so hard for you to accept that I can be faster than you?’ I think we can make little steps in the right direction.”