A need for speed: Racing driver Gabriela Jílková on women in motorsport, her love for driving, and electric race cars
As part of our series on women in typically male-dominated professions, we spoke to Gabriela Jílková, one of Czechia’s best racing drivers and currently a development driver for Porsche’s Formula E team. She follows in the footsteps of Eliška Junková, the first woman in history to win a Grand Prix event.
Women in motorsport may not be as visible as men, but they can share the same love for the speed, the noise and the emotions of racing. For Gabriela Jílková, who hails from Roztoky, just outside Prague, the draw of motorsport started at a very young age – so young that she does not remember it, but had to be told about it by her parents.
“I was on holiday in Croatia with my parents. Every time we went from the hotel to the sea, we would pass a go-kart track. I would see it from the car window and say that I would really like to try it, but my parents always said no. Maybe they also said that it was not for girls, I don't know. But after a while I managed to convince them, and when I got in the car and drove for the first ten minutes, no one could get me out of there, I just wanted to keep driving.
“It became such a tradition that every time we went to the beach, we had to stop there, and when we came back from the beach, we had to do the same. The owner of the go-kart rental noticed it and talked to my parents. He told them that he thought I had talent, that there were go-kart races and that maybe they could support me.”
From that moment on, Gabriela Jílková grew up rarely without a steering wheel in her hands. However, at that time, children were not allowed to race until they were eight. When she reached that age, she found herself on the starting grid of the national championship. She was not the only young competitor, but she was the best.
“I wasn’t the only girl, there were maybe two or three others, although it was a very small percentage of course. But I managed to win the title of Czech Republic champion four times. In fact, I was the first woman to win that title.”
As in so many sports, the big names in motorsport are men – Schumacher, Hamilton, Verstappen, Vettel, and so on – but women are very active in the field too. When asked whether her gender has put her at a disadvantage, Ms. Jílková had this to say:
“I grew up in this environment and I don't feel like anyone looked at me differently because I'm a woman or anything like that. No one made any comments or asked me what I was doing there or if I should be doing something different. I think my results have always spoken for themselves and that I'm where I'm supposed to be. But lately there's been more women in motorsport and of course there's more support than when I started and it's good to see the numbers growing.”
The skilled driver did, however, face financial hardships as she continued to progress in this expensive sport:
“It was no longer enough for my father to be a mechanic, and my mother to be supporting us. There had to be a team behind the scenes, a truck that had to go to the circuits, and so on. Everything was different and of course more financially demanding. Since I don’t come from a rich family, it was not possible for me to take this step.
“But there was a national competition called Formula Star, and anyone in the Czech Republic could try it. There were several hundred competitors and there were many categories to try out, there were physical tests, how to talk to the media, go-karts, something like slalom... The winner of the competition competed in the free season in Formula Glory, which is today something like Formula 4, a promotional formula. I won the competition, and so I could move on. And actually, in that first season, I won the title in the single-seater race, which made it easier for me to get sponsors and so on.”
Ms. Jílková’s journey in motorsport came to a sudden halt in 2014, when she was nineteen years old and racing in Austria in the Formula Renault 2.0 class, as she recounted to Radio Prague International:
“In 2014, I had a big accident at the Red Bull Ring, where two cars got stuck at the start. I was behind, and I didn't see them because I was behind another car that avoided them at the last minute. So, at 130 km/h, I crashed into one of the stuck cars. It was a serious accident. I don't even know how many vertebrae I broke, some doctors said seven, others said ten... Thank God I didn't have to have any surgery or anything like that, but we were in the middle of the season and I wasn't supposed to be able to race for the whole year.”
Surprisingly, she says that even after the accident, she does not feel afraid to continue racing on the track at hundreds of kilometres per hour. In fact, she says that it instead feels more dangerous to be on any highway in an ordinary road car. Even the unknown number of vertebrae broken in 2014 did not change that view.
“My first two questions after the accident in the hospital were about whether I would have to have surgery, and when I would be able to get back in the car. So I wasn’t afraid at all, I was really looking forward to racing again.”
Such serious accidents are surely worth it, when the thrills are so great:
“It is the best thing there is. I can’t put it into words. It’s everything: the start, the overtaking, outsmarting your opponent, driving for several laps under pressure from someone behind who is waiting for a small mistake to overtake you…”
However, the world of motorsport can be cruel and unforgiving. A few months later, when she had fully recovered, all the sponsors and supporters had disappeared. So, Ms. Jílková started competing in individual races in different categories, but without being part of any larger projects. Seven long years have passed, during which she has stuck with motor racing, such as through giving driving lessons.
It was during the Covid-19 pandemic that her racing career was reignited, through becoming part of the Matmut Évolution team. Since then, she has started working with the Porsche Formula E team, as their development driver for their electric single-seater race cars. She is, safe to say, very positive about this new stage in her career:
“Now that I’ve done two Formula E tests, I can truly say that it’s the highest level of motorsport I’ve ever experienced. I’ve never been part of a Formula 1 team, but I can imagine the level of professionalism with all those people behind me looking at the live data, telemetry, and so on. It’s an indescribable level of professionalism. For me it’s very interesting to see how much I know I still have to learn.”
What though is the difference between electricity and petrol power? Is the switch to driving for Formula E noticeable?
“The first thing that comes to mind is the performance. I remember the first time I came out of the pit lane, I pressed the pedal and I thought, ‘wow, this is accelerating!’ Of course, drivers can adapt quickly, so I had it under control by the second lap. You get used to it quickly. But the speed and the acceleration that a Formula E car has is something exceptional compared to other formulae. What other formulae have is more downforce.”
Touching again on the topic of gender, sex and motorsport, Ms. Jílková thinks that there is no physical reason why women cannot also excel in Formula E racing. In her view, the absence of women in the top class of Formula 1 is essentially a matter of statistics; women drive much less than men in general, and so it is more difficult for a woman to get into the elite of the world’s drivers, among whom only four women have competed in the entire history of the championship, which began in 1950. Is there then a reason to separate the sexes and have parallel competitions for men and women, as so many sports do?
“I've never competed in competitions where there were only women. I always wanted to compete in championships of the highest level. These are... well, I wouldn't call them completely male, they are simply the competitions that we know. In my opinion, you learn the most there, and that's what I want: to improve. So I never considered those categories where there are only women.
“But on the other hand, from a media point of view for example, these competitions bring a lot to women, and I think that some of the women who participated in the W Series or now the F1 Academy have a much bigger name. They are better known than if they were in some other championship. That's important for female drivers, and of course I'm glad that women in motorsport have more space than before.”
Gabriela Jílková and other Czech female drivers can follow in the footsteps of a true trailblazer. Behind the wheel of a private Bugatti car, Eliška Junková, born in Olomouc in 1900, became the first woman in history to win a Grand Prix event, which she achieved on the historic Nürburgring in Germany in 1927.
A year later, however, she came close to even greater success when she almost won the most important competition of the time: the gruelling Targa Florio race. Over 500 kilometres of winding Sicilian mountain roads, only stones, which she suspiciously hit on a blind exit on the last lap of the race, slowed her down. Despite driving a car with performance far below that of the official teams and with much less reliable mechanics, she unknowingly led the race. The minutes she lost changing a wheel damaged by the collision with those stones meant that she finished ‘only’ in fifth place, less than nine minutes behind the winner Albert Divo. Nevertheless, she was declared the winner of the private individual category and her performance made her an international sensation.
Unfortunately, just a month later, her husband and fellow driver Čeněk Junek tragically died in an accident during another race in Germany, after which Eliška decided never to race again. She lived to the grand age of 93, and died on January 5th 1994.
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