To celebrate female racers, we want to throw the spotlight on some amazing women in simracing. Let’s take a look at four women who prove that females can be just as skilled in esports racing as their male competitors in the first part of our “The most famous female sim racers” series.
SimRacingGirl
“Eat, Sleep, Simrace, REPEAT!” Sinem Temur who is better known under her alias SimRacingGirl has an expressive slogan on her YouTube channel – and seems to fully live up to this mantra. The 31-year-old influencer from Belgium is widely known in the scene, especially for her informative video content. She runs a YouTube channel with nearly 80,000 subscribers and produces all kinds of sim racing videos. Reviews of new hardware products, event reports or interviews with racing personalities, SimRacingGirl offers a wide range of informative content.
As she revealed in an interview with Porsche Motorsport, she came in touch with sim racing through her boyfriend. She quickly faced backlash from some friends who told her that sim racing was not suitable for girls and a men-only-domain. But Sinem proved them wrong and managed to establish herself as one of the most notable female drivers in the scene.
Jamie Chadwick
Jamie Chadwick is not exclusively invested in sim racing but also had success on the real tracks. The 21-year-old Brit currently competes in the F3 Asian Series and the W Series. She is pretty fond of sim racing and regularly uses virtual courses when she is not able to drive real circuits. For her, the mental and physical preparation are similar, as she explains in an interview with Driver61 on YouTube.
Chadwick is also quite outspoken about the lack of female drivers in the esports scene. In her speech at the final of the 2019 F1 Esports season, she said that “[i]t’s a shame we haven’t got enough women racing in esports” and states that there shouldn’t be any reason for for them not to take part.
Charlie Martin
Like Chadwick, Charlie Christina Martin is a female British racing driver and currently competes in the Ginetta GT5 Challenge. She also is a face of the Formula E “Race at Home Challenge” eSports Championship and a permanent guest driver. On top of that, she became the first transgender woman to participate in 24 hours of LeMans. In 2019, Martin became the ambassador for the initiative Racing Pride, which aims to promote LGBTQIA+ inclusivity within the motorsport industry.
The LGBTQIA+ activist was featured as special guest on our podcast Nitro Nights most recently. There she discussed the topic of diversity in racing and its development throughout the years. She inspired countless fans, as she is not only visible as a female in this male-dominated field, but also as a transgender woman. She explains that when she grew up, she never saw somebody like her in motorsports so it felt impossible to make a career. But she abandoned this belief and paved the way for more women and trans people to follow.
Emily Jones
The Australian Emily Jones completes our (much too short) list. The 25-year-old actively participates at sim racing tournaments and is part of the teams Trans Tasman Racing as well as Workplace Law Racing. Jones has the reputation of being the fastest female sim racer in Oceania and is also considered the most popular Australian sim racing streamer. She gathered over 9,000 follower on her Twitch-channel Emree, where she does not only entertain her fans with her skill but also with her charmful and happy nature.
Jones is another advocate of equality in motorsports. As she explained in an interview with Supercars, she likes racing because it does not matter who you are or where you came from. “As soon as you are strapped in a car or I guess online, as soon as you put the headset on, it doesn’t matter,” the racer explains.
Stay tuned for our next part of “The most famous female sim racers”!
Sources: Motorsports about Jamie Chadwick, Motorsports about SimRacingGirl, Supercars about Emily Jones
Photo credit: Jake Archibald / SimRacingGirl YouTube