Oz's Hottest Racer!

Photos by Chris Sorgsepp

Now, we don’t mean to sound sexist, but stats have it that motor racing is a male dominated sport, or at least it used to be! It seems that Hayley Swanson, a country girl from rural Victoria, missed the memo and has been ruffling some feathers behind the wheel of her WRX track car. We caught up with her for a chat at a recent race meet at Wakefield Park Raceway.

PG: Did you enjoy the photo shoot?

Hayley: Yeah it was a lot of fun! It was really cool of you guys to come down and do the shoot at Wakefield in between races.

It was interesting to see a few of the race guys come into the garage to look for random tools when they don’t even keep their cars in there!

PG: How did you get into racing?

Hayley: I’ve grown up with my dad, he’s a petrol head into anything with a motor. I guess I picked it up off him – everything from motorbikes, to jet skis, and now cars.

I started coming down to the open track days at Winton Raceway a few years ago with dad’s road WRX for something different, and one day he’s like, ‘Why don’t I get us a track car for a bit of fun?’. He likes working on them and I love driving them, so it works really well.

PG: What do you love most about racing?

Hayley: Apart from the obvious adrenaline hit you get each time you line up on the grid, I love that it’s a great social sport! We’ve got a really cool group of racers at the track, everyone is always friendly, offering to help out and it’s so much fun getting out there on the track with them and bumping around!

PG: How long have you been racing?

Hayley: This would be my fourth year. I started with the Sprint series at Winton in 2009 and got into the door-to-door racing in 2010. I’ve been running in the Victorian Motor Racing Championships at Winton Motor Raceway and in the MRA NSW series in Super Tin Tops (class), as well as a few CAMS events here and there.

PG: What do you get up to when you’re not out on the track?

Hayley: I work in the ambassador team for Monster Energy during the week, which is a pretty cool gig, being able to drive the Monster truck around with the ‘fully sick’ sound system pumping, giving people drinks wherever we go.

When I’m not working and it’s good weather, I like to get out of the house and head to the beach with friends, catch up at the pub, go shopping – you know, fun stuff!

PG: Tell us a little bit about your car and what’s done to it.

Hayley: I race a white 1995 JDM WRX STI V2. It has coil-over suspension and assorted Whiteline suspension components, Intima D Spec pads running on RDA rotors with Subaru 4-pot callipers. We also recently installed a straightcut dog box with Exedy heavy-duty clutch.

The body has been trimmed for weight and it’s currently running Dunlop Slicks all round. Oh, and it has a pink roll cage in it.

The engine is mostly stock, as we’ve spent most of our efforts tuning the suspension settings and picking good tyres for the different conditions. We also put some graphics on it to make it look cool.

PG: What thoughts go through your mind when a race is about to begin?

Hayley: I often wonder to myself if I remembered to do up the pins on the bonnet, because that’s happened once before and it was pretty scary to have the bonnet fly up coming out to the start.

But it’s mostly just concentrating on the red light, checking out who’s lined up next to me, and also seeing what’s ahead – figuring out whether I should go left or right around them when I launch!

Since our photo shoot, Hayley has stepped it up and is now racing in the Auto One V8 Ute Racing series. She's been doing pretty well so far, although a bit of a mishap in Race 2 saw her off the black stuff for a little bit. Check out the video below.

Keeping her cool and grabbing another gear when the steering wheel falls off, now that's our kind of girl!