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In the driver’s seat of her silver RX8 motor car, helmet on, engine revving on the grid, any onlooker wouldn’t know if Maisie Place was a man or a woman.
When the flag drops, her car, nicknamed “Frankie”, zips around the racetrack doorhandle-to-doorhandle with the rest of the cars, usually all driven by men.
This Easter long weekend, Ms Place will become the first woman to lead a garage at the Bathurst 6 Hour endurance race.
It’s something the 23-year-old thought might never happen as a young girl captivated by motorsports.
Ms Place honed her driving skills as a youngster on her parents’ property near Moruya, on the NSW south coast.
“The rule was always: you fix the cars yourself, then you can drive them as much as you want,” she says.
“We spent our childhood destroying cars in a paddock and then fixing them ourselves.”
She’d attend race days at Moruya speedway, where the fast, loud laps had an almost hypnotic effect.
She says the speedway was where she first thought “I want to do that”.
“But I didn’t think girls could get into it, really. I never saw girl racers or mechanics, so I thought, ‘Ah, it’s not something I can do.'”
From mechanic to driver
Frankie — short for Frankenstein because the car is a mash-up of parts from many different vehicles — is one of several cars she’s built herself in the motor mechanic garage she now operates near Moruya.
Her hands are manicured with grit and engine oil.
“Every single day revolves around cars,” she says.
Ms Place joined the Australian Motor Racing Series RX8 Cup — a series exclusively between RX8 model cars —as an 18-year-old with “absolutely no race experience”, expecting to find resistance because of her gender.
Instead, she was judged by her driving ability.
Ms Place is the only female driver in the cup and has completed 100 race starts.
She is the series ambassador, won the 2022 Coral Taylor Award, which recognises an outstanding woman in motorsport, and now leads a four-car team in the series.
She races one car, and leases three to other drivers in the Cup — doing the mechanical work on all four cars between races.
Her father, Brien Place, helps prepare the cars for big race days, but what he loves most is watching his daughter on the track.
“She’s living my dream really. Doing everything I wanted to do when I was her age,” he says.
“She’s very, very respected on the grid. She holds her own.”
Taking on Bathurst
RX8 Cup founder Ric Shaw says having Ms Place run the garage at the Bathurst 6 Hour over the Easter long weekend with Frankie being driven by New Zealand racers is “massive”.
“For a 23-year-old woman to own and run her own race team at Bathurst, and it’s a national event, is just unheard of,” he says.
When she joined the RX8 Cup, Mr Shaw described her as coming “into the scene like a bomb exploding because she’s quite an individual.”
“She’s a jack of all trades,” he says.
It led to the establishment of a ladies’ class race.
Mr Shaw took Ms Place with him to work on his car when he raced the Nürburgring 24-hour race in Germany — considered one of the toughest motorsport tracks in the world.
“When I realised the aptitude Maisie has in motorsport as a mechanic and just solving problems, I thought ‘She has to come’,” he says.
Proving girls can drive
Three years ago, Ms Place was asked in an interview what her future dreams were.
“I wanted to be a team owner, go to the Nürburgring and I wanted to own my own workshop,” she says.
“By the time I turned 23, I’d done all that. Everything from here on is a bonus.
“Having these girls say ‘I’ve been watching you race for years. You’re such an inspiration.’ It doesn’t feel real.
“Coming from thinking I could never do it, to now achieving so much more than I ever thought I would, it’s incredible.”
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