Danielle Murphy striving for success as a woman in a man’s world

You don't know Danielle Murphy. You don't know drift racing. It's probably best then that we begin with the second unknown, just so we can explore what it might tell us about the first.

Drift racing is the fastest-growing motorsport in the world. It is, in Murphy’s elegant phrasing, “basically figure skating in cars”. It is a form of car racing where precision driving is the key skill, although speed obviously doesn’t go amiss either.

Uniquely, it is a judged sport – points are awarded for everything from the line and angle you take into a corner to the amount of smoke you generate with your tyres as you drift around it.

The cars are brutish, clanking hunks of metal, all spitting gearboxes and ear-melting exhausts. Yet the best drivers corral them into a kind of a thrash-metal ballet, gliding across asphalt like it’s a frozen pond and sling-shotting around hairpin bends as though on elastic. To make it, you have to mix strength with style, like a cage-fighter who uses little love hearts to dot the i.

So what does that make Danielle Murphy? She is the only daughter of a haulier from Saggart in south west Dublin. She grew up with two brothers but, she says, was a tomboy before either of them came along. She is a two-time Queen of Europe champion in the sport and last year finished fifth in the King Of Europe, the male equivalent. And if she wasn't doing this, she'd be doing something like it.

“I didn’t know any different growing up. It was normal for me to be hanging around garages on freezing cold nights watching my dad fix an engine on a truck. It was just something we did. I got into horses then and competed in showjumping as a teenager but as soon as I started driving, I realised that one horsepower wasn’t going to be any good to me.”

Drifting is well named. To get into it, you’ve got to put in the miles. The hotbeds are in Eastern Europe, in the US and Japan, where it originated. Murphy is better known in small pockets of Slovakia and Hungary than she is here and her success against bigger and better-funded operations has set her apart in the sport.

“It’s literally just me and my mam. I built the car from the ground up, I’ve done all the development on the car. I am going out competing with teams that have six-figure sums to spend on development, teams with full sponsorship packages that mean they can arrive at an event with a full 10-man support team to back up a driver.

“Whereas with me, it’s me and Mam travelling Europe in the van with the trailer hooked up to it. We sleep in the van and sometimes by the end of a trip, we’d have a fiver between us and a long conversation over what to do with it on the way home. That’s the reality of it.”

Making do

It’s a hardscrabble existence, a life of making do. You could say it was a love of the sport that led her to build her own car but the truth is a lot less dewy-eyed. She built her own car because she is a team of one and if she didn’t do it, she’d have nothing to race in.

“When you blow an engine and you have no one to help you fix it, you learn! That’s really how it was. You break things, you learn by fixing them. You break a gearbox, you either find a new one or fix the one you have or you don’t race.

“I blew the engine at one event in the UK and I had another event the following weekend and I had no support so it was either find a way to fix it or that was that. So a guy let me use his garage and I stripped the engine down and built it up again using diagrams I drew myself. I made notes and took photographs and put it together again with the help of Google. That was the first time – ever since then, you learn as you go. You do what you have to do.”

And she has done it in a sport that predictably enough, hasn’t always made much of an effort to welcome her. Like all motorsports, drifting is an almost exclusively male preserve. At times, being a woman has helped. When she got her break doing some stunt driving at the Toys For Big Boys exhibition in the RDS in the early 2000s, the fact that she was female marked her out and gave her a leg up that she probably wouldn’t have got otherwise.

But for all the heights she has reached in the sport itself, women are second-class citizens. The King of Europe competition has prize-money, the Queen of Europe – which she won in 2013 and 2015 – does not. Murphy feels this will change as more sponsors get involved and the sport moves to come under the umbrella of the FIA, the world motorsport governing body. But there's a long way to go.

“The sport is still a little bit sexist in that regard I think. That’s probably the wrong thing to say but it’s true. The women’s championship didn’t have any financial return but the two men’s championships did. It’s like flogging a dead horse here in a way.

“The amount of times I have sat down and said, ‘Jesus, what am I even doing this for?’ Everyone gets hit with that brick wall. It is tough. I am paddling my own canoe. It is just me and my mam. I work on the car myself, prepare it, fix it, transport it all by myself. To then get to the event and win it, I’ve defied all odds to get to where I am. There’s no other way to describe it.

“So when you see that there’s not a lot in return from a financial point of view, you do have to wonder. But my outlook on it is that I’ve done it now for eight years. I am coming into my ninth year. I am the woman who has made the most impact in the sport and who has made a statement across Europe as a woman.

“If I decided now to take a break from it or to go and do something else because I’m tired of constantly fighting the odds, you can nearly guarantee that it would be the one year that some other woman would come in and make a big splash in the sport.

“She would come and take advantage of everything I’ve worked for and get all the glory and all the sponsors and everything. So basically, I’ve worked too hard to get to this point. I’m afraid of what I’ll miss out on if I walk away.”

Guest driving

No fear of that. Her star is rising, finally. She has an invite next month to come and do some guest driving in New Zealand. Bit by little bit, she is getting somewhere. But the road has been rough, no point pretending otherwise.

“I was competing in the UK a few years ago and, without getting into the sexist side of it, there was a lot of jealousy at play over there. There was a lot of harassment and a lot of bullying from other competitors.

“It got to a pretty extreme point and I was very nearly stopping the sport, to be honest. One day, I just packed up my truck and headed home and never looked back.

“There was a particular team that had a big corporate sponsorship deal and as I started gaining up the ranks and started snapping at their heels in competition, they started seeing me as a threat. It just got to the point where I decided I didn’t really need that kind of bullshit so I came home.

“Since then, I have gone on to be the highest ranked female in the King of Europe competition. I was the only woman who qualified for a special invitation-only event in Malta. It was literally the best of the best in Europe at it and I came fifth.

“When I’m competing with the guys, I’m constantly ruffling feathers. In general, things are much better now and the camaraderie is great. But it’s still difficult for them – you have a laugh and a banter with them but at the end of the day, they don’t want to be beaten by a girl.”

They might have to get used to it.