Racer, stunt driver, ambassador: Jessica Hawkins’ fight to deliver on her dreams
They call Formula One the “pinnacle of motorsports” for good reason. The global series features some of the world’s fastest and most sophisticated cars, most brilliant engineers, and most talented drivers. For the people in the sport, the climb to reach that pinnacle is the most daunting part of their careers.The Athletic’s F1 coverage is designed to illuminate those sagas, and that’s what we’ll be doing in Origin Stories. Follow along as we take you beyond today’s news to understand how today’s players earned their starring roles.
Children are natural dreamers, seeing a world of possibilities and optimism.
When it comes to what they want to be when they grow up, the ideas might sound unrealistic to adults who are inclined to set more realistic expectations. For most, dreams of becoming a royal, astronaut or pop star give way to hours in the library studying for law school, monitoring the stock market from their cubicle, or fielding calls from aggrieved customers. But for a few, the childhood dream that might have seemed silly becomes reality.
Jessica Hawkins wanted to be a stunt woman.
She might not have known what that meant when she told her mother about her dream job during a childhood car journey, but the Briton would later become a stunt driver in 2021’s “No Time To Die,” Daniel Craig’s final film as James Bond.
But before she realized that early childhood dream (just in a different form), she found another love: the track, where she spent more than a decade competing.
“As soon as I found motorsport, nothing else mattered,” said Hawkins, now a driver ambassador for Aston Martin’s F1 Team (a role that includes media appearances, attending engineering debriefs and getting time in the F1 simulator, to name a few). “I was obsessed with it. I still am. I still love it as much today as what I did 20 years ago, which is quite annoying, actually, because I’m sure there’s probably a life outside of motorsport as well.
“But I don’t know what that is, and I don’t want to know what that is just yet.”
From Reading to racing
Growing up, Hawkins was a “very sporty” person, “never particularly academic.” All she wanted to do was run around, picking up netball, hockey, running and soccer. Golf was her least favorite, though one particular round with her father changed her life.
While on the course, a karting track off in the distance caught Hawkins’ attention, and she begged her dad to stop by. “Lucky for him at the time, I was too small.” But a few months later, the circuit lowered the height restriction, and Hawkins jumped into the cockpit. She fell in love immediately. “(I) wanted to give up all my other sports, pestered my dad, ‘When can we go back?’”
Bitten by the motorsport bug, Hawkins dove head first into the world of cars, “a world that we didn’t really know.” She began navigating karting while listening to others’ advice. Neither of her parents could bear to watch their daughter race, even during those days. “My dad used to be pacing up and down behind the garages, back and forwards. And my mom cannot watch a race; she will watch it half an hour after it’s done.”
Hawkins won the championship during her first season and subsequently followed others’ advice in getting her own kart. She began giving up her other athletic hobbies, even soccer — which she played for Reading F.C., a professional club that’s now in the third tier of the English soccer system (EFL League One) — and it paid off as she won multiple karting championships, including the Honda Cadet British Open Championship in 2008.
Hawkins made the leap to single-seaters in 2014, making a one-off appearance in Formula Ford and doing half a season in MSA Formula (F4) a year later. Her racing career continued to VW Racing Cup, where she made an outing in 2016, and the Mini Challenge, where she finished runner-up in the pro division with six class wins in 2017.
Though a proven successful driver, Hawkins struggled with funding — a common roadblock for up-and-coming drivers.
“Motorsport is very expensive, and you need funding to move forward,” she said. “We could afford the kind of early karting days, and then it became a real struggle. We were very reliant on sponsors.”
Hawkins soon found herself off the race track — yet still in a car.
‘A calculated gamble’
It began with a Facebook post.
One of Hawkins’ friends tagged her in the comments of the post. “They were looking for a female with good car control,” Hawkins recalls. “Didn’t say what it was for or anything like that.” Even with scant details, Hawkins jumped at the opportunity and applied. It turns out she had applied for “Fast and Furious Live,” which she described as “a live arena show, performing all of the stunts that (were) in the movies” all over Europe.
The group had already held auditions six months prior, Hawkins recalled, and found nearly everyone they wanted – except for a female stunt driver. The Facebook post was an effort to push the audition outside the stunt and drifting world, and it worked. Hawkins had two weeks or so to prepare for her audition.
“They wanted me to be able to drift, doughnut, J-turn, do lots of these fancy things that they do, and I’d obviously spent my whole career not trying to go sideways because sideways was slow,” Hawkins said. “So I was kind of fretting. And I think I told them at the time, ‘Look, I’ve probably got the skills that you need. I’ve just never used them in the way that you want me to use them.’”
Hawkins found a drifting school in Ireland that could teach her these tricks fast, but she went a few days before her audition. “On the day before my audition, someone at drift school over there literally taught me how to do a basic doughnut. It was probably a fluke at the best of times when I nailed it. I was there for two hours, like nowhere near enough time.”
She auditioned the next day and remembers being extremely tired. The lead casting director kept looking at her as she yawned. Hawkins said, “He still, to this day, reminds me occasionally. He’s like, ‘I thought you’ve just got a really late night or something.’ I didn’t tell him I’d been in Ireland (training) for the audition. He looks back now, and he’s like, ‘You should have just told me because I nearly didn’t take you because of it. I thought you didn’t care.’”
Hawkins, though, cares deeply about her career. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have moments of feeling “out of my depth.” She remembers showing up and seeing drifters from all around Europe who had won championships. “Fast and Furious Live” was her first opportunity, a fresh start.
Within two days, she’d gone from one of the weaker drivers to one of the strongest. “I honestly think it was my rate of progression and my willing to learn and my passion that got me the job,” Hawkins said. “I wasn’t perfect, probably wasn’t very consistent, either. But we had three to four months, nine to five. My nine-to-five job was in (a) car, driving, learning routines, learning everything I needed to know.
“You could not pay for that experience that I had.”
It may not have been racing, but Hawkins found a way to stay in the world, carrying out a dream she had as a young child (though it was more the acrobatics and fighting she wanted to do as a kid).
“It was a big thing for me at the time to leave racing,” she said. “But it was a gamble that just seemed right at the time, a calculated gamble.”
‘Don’t stop’
The idea that good things come to those who wait is true to an extent, Hawkins said. “But honestly, that’s like the worst phrase ever, isn’t it? Because when does anything ever happen if you just don’t do anything? Never. I think the good things come to those who work hard and keep going and going and going and never give up. And if you try hard enough, someone’s at some point gonna say yes.” It comes down to being in the right place at the right time, but “you have to make sure that you’re in those places to be in the right place at the right time.”
Hawkins didn’t sit and wait; she pivoted and flourished. Stunt driving opportunities in movies soon came her way, including “No Time to Die.” But as she navigated the stunt driving world, racing once again came calling in the form of the W Series in 2019. The all-female series gave her a second chance in motorsport and helped open doors like Hawkins linking with Aston Martin. In May 2021, the team announced Hawkins would become a driver ambassador for them, making her the second W Series driver to have a role within a Formula One team.
“She has not had it easy in her racing career so far, always having to fight for drives as all young drivers do, especially young women, and her determination to beat the odds is as obvious as it is admirable,” said Otmar Szafnauer, who served as Aston Martin’s CEO and team principal at the time.
This is her life — motorsport. “I found I’m the most boring person outside of the circuit ever,” she said. Hawkins is competing this year in the Britcar Prototype Cup, on top of her Aston Martin duties. She loves the speed, the competitiveness, the adrenaline rush that comes with both stunt driving and racing. “It’s difficult to tell you what I love about it because it will probably be easier to tell you what I don’t love about it, to be honest. I don’t love that it costs so much.”
She didn’t make it to F1 as a driver, which may have disappointed her younger self. But if she could give any advice to that athlete back then?
“Well done, but keep going. Don’t stop.”
(Lead image: Qian Jun/MB Media/Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton/The Athletic)
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