A ‘baptism of fire’ on the road of a rallying trailblazer

Hanging upside down, as her Fiesta R2 1600 spiralled through the air at 100kph, Nabila Tejpar’s first thought was, “this isn’t that bad.”

It was 2016, the Essex native’s second year on the circuit, and Tejpar, a third-generation rally driver, was calmly evaluating her life choices as she looped above the Scottish course in the middle of her first accident.

Later, surveying the pricey damage, she would regret some of the moves she’d made in the car - a moment of hesitation, a lifted throttle - in the seconds before she was airborne. But the career path? Absolutely not. She’d fought hard for the privilege of crashing into a tree stump.

“It’s not a normal human response, but it wasn’t that bad,” re-emphasised Tejpar, who this week will contest the opening event of the 2021 FIA European Rally Championship (ERC), the Orlen 77^th Rally in Poland.

“I am kitted out for it. I have a roll cage. The cars are built for accidents like that, and I’ve seen some much worse accidents. The cars are just so strong, and they’re so safe. I wouldn’t do it in a road car, though!”

Tejpar has kicked off her latest ERC campaign in a Proton Iriz R5, a huge leap up from a junior category to the more competitive Rally2, where she’s joined in-car by driver-coach and two-time British rally champion Matt Edwards. 

The 27-year-old has rally in her blood. Both her grandfather, Abdulkarim Tejpar and her father, Aziz Tejpar, competed in Kenya. A picture of Abdulkarim’s car next to an elephant, from the glory days of the Safari Rally, hangs with pride on the family’s wall.

As a child, Tejpar would accompany her dad to the Goodwood Festival of Speed; by 12, he was taking her out to the field behind their house for lessons in handbrake turning. But it wasn’t until she was 16, when a friend brought his rally car over, that Tejpar “instantly fell in love” with the sport.

So Tejpar struck a deal with her mum: finish university and she could compete.

In 2015, with a business degree firmly in the rear-view mirror, Tejpar entered her first event having only karted “three or four times” in her life. A year later, she contested her first major rally, the Mid Wales Stages at the British Rally Championships.

“That was a baptism of fire,” she recalled. “I remember sitting on the start line after it snowed, in the pitch black, going ‘what have I done?’”

Four kilometres later, she hit a rock and broke the steering arm. Fortunately, she fared better in her second rally with a fourth-place finish at the Circuit of Ireland.

Tejpar readily acknowledges she’s representing more than one minority motorsport community every time she simply shows up. In 2017 and 2018, she won the British Rally Championship Ladies Trophy by default - she was the only one in it.

And one only needs scan the driver line-ups across motorsport, from F1 to Extreme E and the W Series, to see the field remains overwhelmingly white.

Tejpar said: “I think it happens in a lot of sports, especially for girls. If you’ve not started in that sport as a young girl, or if you’ve not seen it as being possible, and you’ve not seen a person doing it, then you sort of don’t ever think about it.

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“And that’s a big thing in Asian culture I think, too. A lot of the reason we don’t see as many Asian sports people is there’s no role models for it, but [also] sport’s not viable.

“It’s considered something that you do for fun, it’s not a viable career path. My parents’ family friends literally tell my parents, ‘how do you let her do that? How is that a career path?’

“And my parents are like, A, this is what she wanted to do, B, she’s doing a good job at it, and C, hopefully she’ll change this.”

Tejpar spent some of her Covid-cancelled season working on ‘C’, sharing her story in her community and hoping she’ll inspire others to get behind the wheel. She is also taking part in Unlocked, a cross-sport leadership programme for female athletes run by the Women’s Sport Trust.

This season, Tejpar will have stickers from F1’s ‘We Race as One’ anti-racism and anti-inequality campaign on her car—a choice she was proud to make, but it didn’t come without some trepidation.

She explained: “I mean, Lewis Hamilton is making a big deal about it and look at the fallback he’s getting. People don’t say nice things about him.

“And you sort of sit there and you go, but he’s saying something that needs to be heard, and why is no one still listening? It just sort of makes me wonder, if someone like that can’t make a difference, [how] am I going to make a difference?”

Still, Tejpar, whose career was founded on risk, fearlessness and legacy, will give it a shot.  

One day, she’d love to race in Kenya and recreate that photo of her grandfather and the elephant in the wilderness.

Until then, she’ll work on the one in the room.