Two months ago, Kayla Yaakov became the first woman ever to earn a podium finish at Daytona’s famed Speedway, putting her Rahal Ducati Panigale V2 behind only Josh Herrin and Tyler Scott in the official record books. And, 42 days later, proving none of this was a fluke, she took pole in the MotoAmerica Supersport race at Road Atlanta, another first for women in American motorcycle racing. Momentous occasions both.

How she prospered, however, is just as important as the fact that she triumphed. In the case of her dramatic third place finish at Daytona, her podium was the result of racecraft. Daytona is notoriously tricky, and Kayla played Darryn Binder — the eventual fourth-place finisher — like a drum. Indeed, the lap-by-lap analysts seemed to spend an outsized amount of time positing on the source of her aerodynamic acumen. Whatever the case, Yaakov showed experience beyond her age — she’s only 18-years-old —
perhaps not as surprising as it should have been to the commentators since she’s been riding since she was four.

Taking pole at Road Atlanta, on the other hand, was a display of raw speed. She flipped through the Esses like the Ducati weighed nothing, diving into Turn 12 like a young Marc Marquez and, portending a future that should scare the boys more than a little, celebrated with a restraint that suggests she thinks this is just the first of many. 

It’s also worth noting that those trailing Yaakov’s 1.28:06 — a damned fine time for a Supersport machine around high-speed Road Atlanta — read like a who’s who of American road racing. Josh Herrin, Joshua Hayes and Darryn Binder might not be all that well-known to MotoGP fanatics — okay, Binder might — but they are reliably fast racers on well-prepared motorcycles. Actually, Herrin, who qualified third, was riding an identical Rahal Ducati, meaning the young Yaakov accomplished the first quest of racers: beat your teammate!

Despite this grand accomplishment, I couldn’t help wondering, however, whether this latest display of prowess by a female racer might finally be the one that heralds the genesis of a movement encouraging more women in road racing.

History, unfortunately, suggests not. Indeed, while there have been more than a few cases of women excelling at motorsports, none, so far, have resulted in a much-desired trend to more women in motorcycle racing. 

Indeed, we had a similar come-to-Jesus moments just a few years ago, when Ana Carrasco became the first woman to win a major international motorcycle road racing championship. It may have “only” been the WSSP300 — dominated by two-cylinder Kawasaki Ninjas at the time — but as any fan of small-displacement racing can attest, her victories were nothing if not white-knuckled. Carrasco was as willing as any of the boys to trade paint and block pass. 

Before her WSSP success, she was also the first woman to score points in Moto3 (2013) and the first since Katja Poensgen (2001) to score any GP points. It’s interesting to note, however, that, while Carrasco was supplied top-level machinery in superbike racing — the WSBK paddock always a bit more inviting than MotoGP — her machinery in Moto3 racing was always second-rate.

That pales in comparison to the way the racing world treated Taru Rinne. A promising Finnish racer — she qualified second at a GP125 race — she had a horrific accident in 1989, breaking both ankles, and while she was recovering, she reportedly received a letter from none other than Bernie Ecclestone, then involved in the commercial side of motorcycle racing, saying she was no longer welcome in the paddock.

This was not the only time Rinne was mansplained out of racing. Indeed, she only took up bike racing because she was kicked out of international karting for supposedly using illegal gas. Not only was she banned for an entire year for but a single infraction, but her 1983 championship was rescinded so that organizers could hand the trophy to Mika Häkkinen, who she had beaten consistently over the years.

But that’s not even close to the most awful story in the history of women in motorsports. For that, we need to go to the world of four wheels and a women named Hellé Nice, a wealthy French socialite-cum-can-can dancer who literally tore up the track before the Second World War. Nice was initially sponsored by no less than Ettore Bugatti. No dainty demoiselle, she ruffled feathers by being the jitterbug equivalent of the licentious James Hunt, her “appetite” reputedly as enormous of any of Formula One’s famed playboys. 

After the war, one of the racers she chose not to bless with her, umm, favours — a racer, by the way, whom she regularly beat — denounced her as a Nazi collaborator. Despite the fact that the accusation was made without evidence and never proven, that was the end of her career. She died penniless, and until Miranda Seymour penned a book, The Bugatti Queen, detailing the whole sordid story, entirely forgotten.

The fact is that the history of racing is littered with women — here in Canada, it was Toni Sharpless and Kathleen Coburn — promising to bring a revolution to racing and, even if we haven’t always hindered them, we certainly haven’t capitalized on their success.

I am no expert on the subject, and I don’t know what the solution is — though I strongly suspect women-only racing series isn’t the answer — but I do see in Kayla Yaakov yet another opportunity to do something good. As motorcycling loses all the grumpy old men who’ve sustained its growth for the last half century, ignoring the other half of the population is just stupid. Kayla Yaakov may not want to be a role model — she consistently deflects questions about her gender — but I certainly hope little girls watching her exploits see her as one.