Teen hopes to break long drought of female Supercar drivers as rookie shocks in qualifying

When 19-year-old Alice Buckley clears Mount Panorama at Bathurst and makes it to Conrod Straight, she wiggles her fingers and takes a deep breath.

As the only female driver in the Super2 series – one division below the Supercars championship – she has a little extra room in her gloves.

“Race gloves are made for men, so my fingers are quite short,” she said. “So I’m allowed to have [long] nails in my gloves.”

This weekend, Buckley’s nails are an iridescent pink, but sometimes they match her team’s colours. One day soon – if all goes according to plan – Buckley’s nails will match a Gen3 Supercar, an upgrade that would make her the first full-time female Supercars driver since 2019.

From the Gold Coast, Buckley drives for her family team, but almost did not get a start in the sport.

“I’ve got two older sisters and a younger brother, and when my younger brother was born, dad got flooded with messages from his old karting friends going, ‘You have a boy! You get to go back to the racetrack now, how awesome! You can take him karting!’” Buckley said. “Mum didn’t like that at all and pretty much said to dad, ‘You’re not living here if the girls don’t get a go’.”

While Buckley’s older sisters did not take to the sport, she did, leaving her brother to trail behind her on the racetrack.

“The older I get, the more welcoming the community gets,” Buckley said. “It’s getting better. When I grew up karting, there was three girls in the whole country that were racing in a go-kart and now there’s girls, whether they’re in a car or not, they’re all around. There’s team managers, engineers, all sorts of things now, so it’s very accepted, and I definitely don’t feel as much of an outlier when it comes to Supercars.

“Super2 – there’s really not any females working around really, but in Supercars there’s definitely more. So, it’s a bit of a weird one, where it’s like grassroots motorsports have caught up and Supercars have caught up, so there’s kind of a delay that I think I’m sitting in at the moment … There’s a few [Super2 drivers] that’ll talk to me and I think a few still think I’m this weird species.”

Buckley has learnt to embrace being an outlier.

“I have long nails, and everyone’s like, ‘How do you drive with those nails?’ I love doing my make-up and my hair and wearing sparkle shorts in the race. I just love those little things where it’s like, well, I am different so what’s the point of trying to hide my difference?”

Eventually, she hopes that point of difference will attract new fans and corporate sponsors to a world they may be otherwise unfamiliar with.

“I really want to try to target a group of corporate partners who I can bring to the racetrack because I feel like there’s a lot of females that are really interested in Formula 1 in Australia at the moment and they come to Aus GP and it’s like, ‘come to Supercars’,” she said.

“I think it’ll help make it more inclusive if there are beauty brands here at Bathurst. Could you imagine how big that would be?

“I really hope that one day I get to be a part of that and maybe have a make-up brand on my car or a hair care brand. It’d be so cool.”

Rookie shock in Bathurst qualifying

Supercars championship rookie Zach Bates shocked the crowd at the track on Friday, qualifying for the top-10 shootout on Saturday in first position – and did so by clocking the fastest lap of Mount Panorama in a Gen3 car. With a time of 2:03:9376, the 22-year-old is the only driver to complete a lap under two minutes and four seconds in this era of race cars.

Drivers are given 40 minutes to clock the fastest lap, with the top 10 on the start line again on Saturday.

After qualifying, Bates paid tribute to his mum and motorsport TV presenter Alison Drower, who died two weeks before Bates made his maiden Bathurst 1000 start last year as a wildcard entrant with veteran co-driver Craig Lowndes.

“It’s been a pretty average year for the whole family. Lost mum last year … so to be able to do this is pretty special,” he said.

New Zealand’s Ryan Wood was forced to sit out qualifying after crashing earlier in the day. Although Wood walked away uninjured, the Walkinshaw team was forced to withdraw the car after failing to repair it in time.

Returning Supercars champion Chaz Mostert and Brock Feeney, who finished second in last year’s qualifiers, both failed to make the top 10.

This masthead travelled to Bathurst as a guest of the Repco Supercars Championship.