At heart, Michelle Gatting admits she will ‘always be an Iron Dame’, but the official Porsche driver has loftier ambitions in endurance racing, with her burning desire to succeed in the sport making the events of the 2025 campaign all the more challenging.
Gatting was one of the founding members of the Iron Dames initiative back in 2019 – an opportunity that she reveals ‘changed her life’. Since then, she has experienced the myriad highs and lows of performing at the pinnacle, making history alongside her team-mates in Bahrain in 2023 but finding only frustration at the same circuit last year.
“We needed a result,” she explains in the second episode of the FIA World Endurance Championship’s new ‘Beyond the Track’ YouTube series, out today. “We didn’t get it.”
Such observations are typical of the 32-year-old’s refreshingly candid nature – and such weekends were also typical of a season that promised so much yet routinely failed to deliver for the pioneering all-female project.
‘Beyond the Track’ explores the trials and tribulations along the way, from Gatting’s ‘very bad start’ to her relationship with Célia Martin – who joined the Iron Dames’ FIA WEC effort in 2025 – to the pain, both physical and mental, of having to miss the 24 Hours of Le Mans after sustaining a foot injury during pre-race pit-stop practice.
“I wanted to kill [Martin] because she was really testing my patience,” the Aarhus native discloses of the internal tensions and dynamics, with Rahel Frey frequently acting as a calming intermediary to keep the trio united. “As a person, I like her more than as a team-mate. I see a lot of similarities between her and me. She works very, very hard and she’s very stubborn, which is annoying, but I’m like that myself...”
For her part, Martin acknowledges the magnitude of her learning curve as a rookie at the highest level of GT racing, the inevitable ‘beginner’s mistakes’ and the confidence blows she was dealt over the course of the campaign.
The Frenchwoman insists, however, that she ended the season ‘a better driver and a better person’, while Gatting ultimately recognises that ‘we have been through a lot together – good and bad moments – but we also have so much fun’. “What we have realised over the years,” she says, “is that we need each other.”
For somebody who ‘drives to win’, it was, the Dane concludes, ‘a very difficult year’, but her motivation remains undimmed. Having consistently made waves, broken down boundaries and carved out a path in a male-dominated world, Gatting hopes in the future to have the chance to compete with rather than just against her male counterparts.
“I’m working very hard to get this opportunity.”
Check out the full episode below.
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