MOLLY WHO?

She’s officially rated as the fastest female rally driver on the planet. But Molly Taylor doesn’t want to be seen as merely the best woman in the world of rallying – the 25-year-old is aiming for the very top of the World Rally Championship.

WHAT’S HER STORY?

Molly Taylor was born into Australian rallying royalty. Her mother, Coral, is a four-time Australian rally champion co-driver; her father, Mark, has enjoyed a long career in top-level rallying as a driver and, more recently, an instructor.

Yet despite the handy motorsport pedigree, Molly’s first love was horses rather than horsepower. As a teenager she developed into an accomplished rider in equestrian events. But then fate intervened.

“I used to go and watch mum compete in rallies,” she says. “I loved going to the events, but I never really thought about driving myself until I was put in the car.

“About the time I was getting my road licence, my father was running the rally school. I worked for him on the weekends and got to have a drive at the end of the day – my dad wanted my sister and myself to be competent drivers when we went on the road. But I started to want to drive more and more, and then I just fell in love with it!”

She was also pretty good at it.

Two years later she won the F16 class in the Australian Rally Championship, backing the victory up with a title defence in 2007. With that, Taylor packed her bags and headed overseas to try her luck on the international rally stage.

Notwithstanding her parentage, it was a big step for a 19-year-old with only a handful of years’ experience under her belt. But Taylor had already proven a quick learner, and that process only accelerated once she relocated to the UK. She won three of the six events she contested in the 2009 Suzuki Swift Sport Cup, becoming the British ladies rally champion in the process.

This immediate success was rewarded with a place on the Australian Motor Sport Foundation’s International Rising Star program (a funding and mentorship program aimed at helping young Australians in international motorsport competition – among the drivers the AMSF’s International Rising Star has provided assistance to is current F1 star Daniel Ricciardo).

Taylor's progression through the junior European ranks continued. Off the back of her Suzuki results, she won a place in the FIA World Rally Championship Academy. Pitted against 18 other young rally aspirants in a special shootout challenge, she made the final six and won a funded drive in the one-make Ford Fiesta class in the 2011 World Rally Championship.

By any measure, Molly’s rise through the ranks has been meteoric. No doubt the collective experience of her parents has helped her avoid the odd rookie pitfall, but Taylor has also benefitted from the assistance of her mother’s rally driving partner, four-times Australian rally champion Neal Bates.

“I’m very lucky to have someone like Neal so close to home, with all he’s achieved and is still achieving,” Molly says. “I’ve learned so much from working with him at track days – his ability to jump from one car to another, to pick up the differences in the characteristics and the handling of the cars and to be able to push hard on the first lap. In rallying this is an important skill because the grip level is always changing, so you have to really feel the car and judge the grip level so you know how hard to push, to be both faster and safer.”

Bates himself is a big fan of Taylor’s. When asked whether or not she has what it takes to make it on the world rally stage, he answers without hesitation: “Yes. If you look at what she’s done so far in the junior categories, she’s been very competitive.

“When you entertain the thought of the WRC, you’re talking about people like Sebastien Loeb and Sebastien Ogier, and they are very, very special. But I think Molly has the determination to actually do it.”

The last two seasons have seen her contest selected rounds of the European Rally Championship (in a Citroen DS3 R3T) as well as the world championship with co-driver Seb Marshall. She was competitive throughout, taking several class victories as well as the ERC Ladies Trophy last year.

What happens next is the big question. “I’ve got another year eligible for the junior WRC and I’d love to do that again,” she says. “The other option is the Drive DMACK Trophy. It’s a new one-make series, and the prize for winning that is a five-round program in a four-wheel-drive car in the WRC the following year.”

It all depends on funding. Being part of the AMSF Rising Star program (she is also an ambassador on Rexona’s #IWILLDO campaign) provides crucial assistance, but more is needed if she is to ever land a factory WRC drive.

“Any young driver’s goal is to be at the top of the WRC,” Molly says, “and that’s my top ambition. But that’s a very long road and it’s also a very expensive road. Realistically, without the security of big backing over the next few years, it’s going to be very difficult.”

Money is the perennial problem for any young Australian motorsport competitor trying to make his or her way internationally; a race or rally driver must put up hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding just to be able to buy a drive, and thus be given the opportunity to hopefully impress the right people. It is a slightly different proposition from the equipment needs of your average rising tennis star or footballer. “I just love driving. If I can get paid to do it, that’d be perfect.”

WHO’S SHE LIKE?

Her driving style can be described as smooth, Neal Bates says, but making a direct comparison between Taylor and some of the stars of the WRC is difficult because the WRC3-class car she currently drives is so dynamically different from a four-wheel-drive WRC car. In any case, Bates reckons that trying to rate her against other drivers is to overlook her greatest strength – which is that she is different.

“For a 19-year-old girl to move to England, and live in a barn because she wanted to go rallying – how many other 19-year-olds have that burning desire and ambition and are willing to make the kinds of sacrifices she has to go rallying? In that sense, she’s probably not like anyone.

“I’m actually very surprised that she hasn’t already been picked up by a WRC team, given that she’s doing so well, and that she’s got something different from the others in the sense that she’s female. But I can tell you, she wouldn’t just be the token female.”

WHAT DO THEY SAY?

Neal Bates: “Molly’s still got improvement to come, but she’s incredibly determined and also a very quick learner. So if she’s struggling with one area, by the end of the day she’ll have got it, because she’ll just work on it until she’s learned it.”

Seb Marshall: “She’s made some huge sacrifices to get to where she is. Whether trying to attract sponsors or working on her driving technique, improving set-up knowledge or developing her pace note system, her enthusiasm and desire is both infectious and relentless!"

- By Steve Normoyle