Daredevil skier & F1 pioneer Divina Galica still coaching drivers, aged 80

F1

Divina Galica celebrates her 80th birthday today. As Matt Bishop learns, the former Winter Olympian and Formula 1 driver can still be found on track, coaching drivers, and never misses a grand prix

Divina Galica in Surtees F1 car ahead of the 1976 British Grand Prix

Galica attempted to qualify for the 1976 British GP but didn't make the cut in outdated Surtees TS16

Central Press/Getty Images

Picture the scene: two intelligent, articulate and sprightly women, one 70, the other 80, are having coffee together in a café in Salt Lake City. What are they chatting about? Federal incentives designed to facilitate religious leaders fitting solar panels to the roofs of nearby Mormon meetinghouses? Conservationists’ objections to a new planned highway in southern Utah? A recent downtown shooting? The US women’s national soccer team’s triumph in the 2024 Olympics? A well reviewed new sushi restaurant? Donald Trump? Kamala Harris?

No. Listen carefully, and you will overhear the odd reference that reveals that these two are not your average Salt Lake City ladies who lunch. The younger of the two speaks with a faded but still discernible South African accent, and did she just mention Kyalami? And Jody Scheckter? And Ken Tyrrell? And is the elder of the two now chuckling as, in English that identifies her as having been born in one of the UK’s Home Counties, she tells a funny story about Oulton Park, Brands Hatch, and Charlie Whiting?

I will explain. If you are reading this column on the day on which it was published – August 13, 2024 – you are doing so on the 80th birthday of Divina Galica, and this week she is in Salt Lake City, having been invited there to celebrate the satisfactory attainment of eight decades on Planet Earth. Her host is her old friend Desiré Wilson, a mere slip of a girl at 70, who now lives in the Utah state capital. They are both exceptional people. Only five women have ever tried to tackle a championship-status Formula 1 race, and only two of those five succeeded: Maria Teresa de Filippis drove three F1 grands prix in 1958, and Lella Lombardi started 12 F1 grands prix in 1975 and 1976. The other three were Giovanna Amati (three F1 grand prix DNQs in 1992), Wilson (one F1 grand prix DNQ in 1980), and Galica (one F1 grand prix DNQ in 1976 and two F1 grand prix DNQs in 1978).

Surtees F1 car of Davina Galica on a runway speed test with Concorde in the background

Galica became the fastest woman on four wheels at RAF Fairford in 1976, clocking over 170mph in the Surtees TS16

Gary Weaser/Keystone via Getty Images

I know both Galica and Wilson quite well because, when I was the communications director for the now sadly defunct W Series, I invited them to attend a number of our races in our inaugural season, 2019, and they enthusiastically agreed. Their kindness and wisdom were a help and a support to our drivers, some of whom had comparatively little previous racing experience, and our two esteemed grandees’ long-earned and hard-won knowledge of being women struggling in a man’s world conferred on them a relevance and a gravitas that more successful male drivers such as David Coulthard and Alex Wurz, who also attended some of our races to offer advice, were unable to match. Even so, Divina was endearingly modest about her accomplishments, and she often deferred to Desiré: “Oh, I don’t mind saying that Des was quicker than I was,” she used to admit quite often in her distinctively upper-crust Hertforshire drawl.

Galica may well have been right about that. Indeed, it is possible, and perhaps even likely, that Wilson was and remains the quickest female driver ever to have dipped her toe into F1’s piranha-infested waters. For, although she never started a championship-status F1 grand prix, in a works Tyrrell 010 she qualified for, and raced in, the 1981 South African Grand Prix, which had originally been billed as the opening round of that year’s F1 world championship but was later downgraded to Formula Libre status. Incidentally, had that downgrade not taken place, Carlos Reutemann would have been crowned the 1981 F1 world champion, not Nelson Piquet, for Reutemann won that South African Grand Prix, and the extra points that he would have scored would have lifted his total above that of Piquet. That sorry saga will have to be tackled in another column. But I digress.

From the archive

Besides, Wilson won an F1 race – of sorts. In 1980 she campaigned an ex-Jody Scheckter Wolf WR4 in the Aurora AFX British F1 Championship, racing it to victory in the Evening News Trophy at Brands Hatch, beating a field of male drivers, some of whom had at their disposal more modern ex-works F1 machinery than she did. Thereafter, sharing driving duties with Alain de Cadenet in his eponymous World Sports Car Championship car, she went on to win the Monza 1000km and the Silverstone Six Hours. Believe me, Wilson was the real deal.

But, since today is Galica’s 80th birthday, I should focus on her, not Wilson. Divina now lives in Sebring, Florida, and, when I last spoke to her on the phone, just three days ago, on Saturday, she was preparing for her trip to Salt Lake City to see her old friend. “I’m usually up at the crack of dawn because my cat, Ginger, wakes me up at that time,” she told me. “But this morning I slept in a bit because I was reading a James Patterson novel, Sail, until after midnight. I thoroughly recommend it. I hadn’t read any of his books before but I’ll definitely read some more now. Anyway, I’d better get on. I’ve got to check Ginger into a cattery before I fly.”

Despite her four-score years, she remains remarkably fit. “I’d love to be able to go for long runs and play tennis properly, as I used to,” she says, “but I can’t really do either of those things any more because I’ve got cartilage damage in my back and my knees as a result of all the tumbles I’ve taken, not only in race cars but also on skis. I walk a lot though – 90 minutes a day if I can. In the winter I love taking in the great outdoors, but in the summer Sebring is simply too hot and too humid for that, so I pound away for an hour and a half on a treadmill in a local gym.”

Galica was a first-class skier before she ever thought of racing cars, which she did only because she had finished a fine second when in 1974 she had been invited to drive a Ford Escort in a celebrity saloon car event at Oulton Park. Duly impressed, John Webb, the famously long-serving Brands Hatch chief executive, took her under his wing and encouraged her to go racing. First she drove karts, but soon she stepped up to Formula 2 Chevrons and Marches, then she did two seasons of the Shellsport International Series in ex-works Surtees F1 cars run by the Whiting brothers, Nick and Charlie. Yes, that Charlie Whiting, god rest him. In her first Shellsport season, 1976, in a Surtees TS16, she recorded two seventh places, three sixth places, one fifth place, and two fourth places. The following year, 1977, now in a Surtees TS19, she racked up four podium finishes: two seconds and two thirds. Also in 1977 she raced a Lola T490 in the then new Sports 2000 series, winning 10 times and only narrowly failing to take the title. And in 1978, in her now ageing Surtees TS19, she entered one round of the Aurora AFX British F1 Championship, at Zandvoort, finishing second. OK, Desiré was “quicker than I was”, according to Divina, and, as I say, perhaps most motor sport cognoscenti would agree with that judgment, but Divina was no slouch either.

Divina Galica among British women skiiers at 1972 Olympic Games

Galica (right), with British skiers at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Japan

Express/Getty Images

For all that, ask her about her racing exploits, and, unless you press her, she tends not to want to dwell on the subject. But on your behalf, dear reader, I promise to badger her another time. She is more comfortable talking about skiing, and here’s why. She competed in slaloms, giant slaloms, and downhills in four Winter Olympics – 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1992 at the age of 47 — captaining the British women’s team in 1968 and 1972. Her best season was 1968, in which year she scored two World Cup third places in downhill events, at Badgastein (Austria) and Chamonix (France). After the 1992 Olympics she took up speed skiing – and in 1993, at 48, she broke the British women’s record, reaching a hair-raising 200.699km/h (124.709mph).

Unsurprisingly, she lives a somewhat quieter life now, although she has never stopped working. In the mid-1990s she turned her attention to driver coaching, first for the Skip Barber Racing School in Texas then for the Bertil Roos Racing School in Pennsylvania. Even now, at 80, she still does a bit of freelance coaching for a small clientele of gentleman drivers.

Oh and she avidly watches every F1 grand prix. “I’m a big, big, biiiiig Lewis Hamilton fan,” she told me on the phone on Saturday, her inimitably luxuriant vowel sounds brimming with enthusiasm. “I thought his comeback win at Silverstone last month was fantastic. In fact I think it may have been his greatest race ever – so far.”

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