Why A Former Rally Driver Wrote The Book She Never Had As A Child.
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Nabila Tejpar is a former British Rally Championship Ladies Champion and an advocate for diversity in motorsport. She is now encouraging the next generation of girls into the sport through her children’s book - Racing Towards a Dream.
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Nabila TejparThe question she couldn’t answer
After Nabila Tejpar appeared on BBC Look East, a young girl spotted her in a supermarket. “That’s the girl who was rallying,” she told her mother. Then she asked Tepjar directly: how did you get started? It should have been an easy question. For Tejpar, it wasn’t, at least not in any way that would help. Her grandfather rallied. Her father rallied. She grew up watching Formula 1 because he did, and standing on the sidelines of Rally GB because he took her. When she decided she wanted to compete, her father showed her how.
“My dad told me what to do, and I did it,” she says. “I never had to think about how. I was given the tools.” That honest answer is no use to a child without the family connections. And this situation points to the real barrier in motorsport for many kids, but especially for groups under-represented in the sport.
The Inherited Pathway
In Tejpar’s experience, the overwhelming majority of people in rallying came in through family, or because they grew up somewhere the sport was part of local life. That holds true for men as much as for women. I call this the Inherited Pathway: in sports with high costs and low visibility, access passes down through families rather than being discovered. Children gravitate towards the sports they can see. They play football and hockey at school. Few ever see a rally car up close.
In my work on women’s careers, I describe championing as pivotal for career progression by having access to individuals with influence who activate opportunities on your behalf. Tejpar had a champion, her father opened doors, connected her to the right people and taught her how to pitch herself to corporate sponsors. The question is what happens to the talented child who has no one to do that.
A book instead of a lecture
Tejpar wanted to show children that motorsport was an option, without building a grassroots programme that might never get off the ground. A children’s book seemed the simplest way to put the idea in front of as many young people as possible.
“If some kid sees it, they can look at it and go, ‘Oh, that’s a race car, and that’s a little girl. Now you’re picking up a conversation.”
The result is Racing Towards a Dreampublished in August 2026 by Emrae Publishing. Its hero, Kyla, is a girl of colour who dreams of racing. Tejpar chose the name deliberately, wanting something that could belong to many cultures. She chose racing rather than rallying for the same reason: thanks to Drive to Survive and F1 Academy, children recognise a racing car even if they have never seen a rally stage.
The book took four and a half years. Tejpar describes herself as a maths and science person, not a writer. Her first rhyming draft fell flat. What changed everything was her best friend’s cover illustration: Amy Vint. Once she could see Kyla, she could finally write her story. Once written, Emrae Publishing, whom she met through her author marketing business, helped her bring Kyla to print.
Her measure of success is disarmingly simple. A friend sent her a photo of her mixed-race daughter reading the book. “Seeing someone who looked like the girl on the cover read the book,” Tejpar says. “That’s success to me.” Adults have told her they wish they had had a book like it as children, because they never saw anyone like them on a cover. She is clear that the book is about more than motorsport: It is about a child with a dream, and the setbacks, hard work and failure it takes to pursue one.
The deal: a degree first
Tejpar was fifteen years, when she first sat in a rally car and knew it was what she wanted to do. Her parents laughed. A year later, her father paid for a session with former rally driver Mark Higgins to test whether there was any real potential. Higgins saw something worth exploring. Her mother set the terms: finish university first. Tejpar studied business at American University in Washington DC, took summer courses to finish early, and graduated in December 2014. She came home, handed her mother the diploma and said she was going to rally. By 2016 she was competing in the British Rally Championship, fully sponsored, using the pitching skills her father had taught her.
Nabila Tejpar in action rallying.
Nabila Tejpar“But he was a man”
Not everyone was convinced. People in her wider community told her parents they were mad, and asked why she wasn’t studying law or medicine instead. This was not a career, they said, and she would never earn money from it.
The sharpest objection came from her grandmother, who disliked her racing even though her own husband had rallied. When Tejpar pointed this out, the reply was simple: he was a man. It is a small family exchange that captures a much bigger pattern. The same risk, the same passion and the same sport were judged differently because of who was behind the wheel.
The decision to stop
In 2016, at the Scottish Rally, Tejpar had her first major accident and lost partial sight in her right eye. Doctors put it down to bruising, her vision recovered enough to drive, and she was back competing by August. Her career built momentum through 2018 and 2019, and she was preparing to step up to a faster car when COVID halted the season.
In 2021, on her first event of the European Rally Championship, she rolled the car and lost partial sight in her left eye. Specialists in the UK and the US diagnosed a rare eye condition that meant high-speed impacts could permanently damage her sight. There was not enough research to say what a faster car, or a future crash, might do. She weighed it up. Her family would worry on every start line. She did not know what her eyesight would be like at 60. And she had promised sponsors a level of performance she could no longer be sure of reaching.
“I didn’t feel comfortable taking sponsorship if I wasn’t going to get to the level that I said I was going to get to,” she says. So she stepped away. It is a leadership decision many seasoned executives struggle to make: choosing integrity over momentum, and stopping before the cost falls on others.
“My favourite failure? My whole career”
I ask everyone I interview about their favourite failure. Tejpar’s answer came instantly: her whole career. She competed by a simple rule: failure is the key to success. Every crash, she says, taught her where her limit really was. “These people are crashing because we’re finding limits that we think don’t exist, and then we realise they do exist.”
Today she applies the same mindset beyond the car. She will try anything once, which is how she came to start a marketing business for authors. She is honest about the part she is still working on: letting go. Rallying was her identity for so long that she never formally announced her retirement.
What would open the door wider
If the Inherited Pathway is the problem, the answer is to build pathways that do not depend on family. Cost is the biggest barrier. Motorsport is extraordinarily expensive, and Tejpar would one day like to fund access grants. But money alone is not enough. Drivers also need the skills her father gave her: how to handle the media, build a personal brand and win sponsorship.
She points to the Motorsport Ireland Rally Academy as the model that works. It gives drivers media training, sponsorship skills and long-term support. In 2026, two of its drivers, Josh McErlean and Jon Armstrong, are contesting the full World Rally Championship season in Ford Puma Rally1 cars with M-Sport. France, she says, runs a strong programme too. The lesson for governing bodies is that investing in talent pipelines builds the sport itself.
Visibility matters just as much. Netflix’s Drive to Survive turned Formula 1 into mainstream entertainment. F1 Academy, the all-female series launched by Formula 1 in 2023, now gives girls a visible route into single-seater racing. When I attended an Iron Dames all-women endurance racing event in Qatar, I saw how powerful it is when girls can see women competing at the highest level. Rallying, with its gritty, unpredictable action, deserves that same spotlight. It is simply harder to broadcast. The structures are starting to change, but for most children, the first step is still the simplest one: knowing the sport exists, and that someone like them could do it.
The long game
Tejpar is clear on the impact of the book, she measures success by its impact over decades, not sales charts. Ten or twenty years from now, success will look like someone telling her they were given the book as a child, and that is why they work in motorsport today. “It will have done its job,” she says.
She has one more private hope: that Lewis Hamilton sees it. As the sport’s most prominent driver of colour, he understands better than anyone what it means to enter a world that did not expect you. She was lucky enough to inherit her pathway. With Kyla, she is drawing one for children who were never handed a map.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com