Rosemary Smith - 7th August 1937 - 5th December 2023

In the beginning, I was a dizzy blonde, the young one with the blonde hair and false eyelashes. Then, after I started winning things, there was a bit more of a grudging acceptance, and then when I got the drive with Rootes in England, they started to take note: ‘She must be quite good. Now, when I talk to some people I raced against, I get much more respect. They would say, ‘Oh, you beat us all ends up’, but they would never have done so at the time. To be beaten by a woman, that would never do. “People thought we were making a fortune, but we didn’t get paid for driving, and what’s more the contracts permitted two mistakes, and after the second one, you were out.

Those are the words of Rosemary Smith, the winner of the Tulip Rally of 1965, who died on the 5^th December at the age of 86. Twelve Coupe des Dames and the Circuit of Ireland are just a few of her other competition victories. She also competed in eight Monte Carlo rallies, in the 1968 London to Sydney rally and the 1970 London to Mexico rally. To quote an RTE report: “on 10 May, 2017, when at the age of 79, she became the oldest person to drive an 800bhp F1 racing car during a test drive with the Renault F1 Team at the Circuit Paul Ricard in France” -

Rosemary Smith was born on the 7^th August 1937. When she was eleven, her father told her, “There’s two things you must learn, to drive and to swim.’ Smith later recalled driving in a field which “stood me in good stead when it came to places like Monte Carlo when you start to slide you have to very careful not to overcorrect or you’ll end up in a ditch”.

On leaving school, Smith trained as a dress designer and, in 1964, drove Sunbeam Rapier in the Circuit of Ireland Rally, winning the Ladies’ Prize. The following year, she won the Tulip Rally in a Hillman Imp, later reflecting: “As the car was rear-engined, all the weight was at the back, and although lightweight compared to other engines, the car would oversteer a little and keep me, as a driver, on my toes”.

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of 8305 KV on the Hillman Imp’s image in the mid-1960s, and Smith would forever be associated with the Rootes Group’s small car. As for the reaction of the male-dominated rallying world:

I could be third overall in the prize giving, and they’d say, “The ladies’ award goes to Rosemary”, and my third overall place would go to somebody else. That bugged the hell out of me. You could only have one award, so of course, it had to be the ladies’ one. In an entry of 150, you might have had 12 women entrants. The women would be given the cars with the smaller engines; we were only the birds, there to look pretty!

As two illustrations of such attitudes, George Bishop reported in Motor that:

Two British girls in a bored-out 998 c.c. Hillman Imp confounded all the experts by winning the 17th Tulip Rally outright, giving Rootes their first big international win since 1958. Team mates Tiny Lewis and David Pollard in a twin car backed them up with second place in the GT class. People in a position to know said that the Lewis/Pollard car was debited with one minute too much on one climb, and had the error been righted the girls would have been second to the men. But it was all in the family anyway and a women’s win is better for publicity!

Five years later, Smith and her co-drivers were preparing their Austin Maxi for the start of the London to Mexico rally at Wembley Stadium when they met British Leyland’s Chief Executive Donald Stokes. He told them, “Girls if you get as far as Dover, we will be very pleased with you”. Smith told the team: “We are getting there come hell or high water”.

Simply put, her legacy in motor sport is incalculable. In the words of Tim Morgan of The Hillman Imp Club: “It has been an honour to have Rosemary as the President of the Imp Club. She was always charming and great fun to be around when she attended our National Weekends. There is a deep sense of loss within the Club at her passing, as we will all miss her greatly”.

With Thanks To: Tim Morgan and “Keeping the Imp Alive” (theimpclub.co.uk)