Alice Buckley's routine at Bathurst is a small adjustment to a sport built around men. When she clears the top of Mount Panorama and reaches Conrod Straight, she wiggles her fingers and takes a deep breath. "Race gloves are made for men, so my fingers are quite short," she said. "So I'm allowed to have [long] nails in my gloves." This weekend her nails are an iridescent pink, though sometimes they match her team's colours. If all goes to plan, one day they will match a Gen3 Supercar, an upgrade that would make her the first full-time female Supercars driver since 2019.
Buckley, who is from the Gold Coast and drives for her family team, almost never got a start in the sport. After her younger brother was born, her father was flooded with messages from old karting friends urging him to get back to the racetrack with his son. "Mum didn't like that at all and pretty much said to dad, 'You're not living here if the girls don't get a go'," Buckley said. Her older sisters did not take to racing, but she did, leaving her brother to trail behind her.
She says the community has become more welcoming over time. When she was growing up in karting, she recalls just three girls racing go-karts in the whole country, while girls are now visible across the sport in roles from team manager to engineer. "I definitely don't feel as much of an outlier when it comes to Supercars," she said. She notes a lag between grassroots racing and the top level: "It's like grassroots motorsports have caught up and Supercars have caught up, so there's kind of a delay that I think I'm sitting in at the moment."