Michèle Mouton, Joyrides, and Fire-Resistant Underpants at the 2024 Dirtfish Women in Motorsports Summit

Underpants. The most important conversation I had during the 2024 Women in Motorsports (WIM) Summit at Dirtfish Rally School in Snoqualmie, Washington, was not with guest of honor Michèle Mouton about her incredible Pikes Peak triumph in 1985, or how she doesn't drink alcohol unless it's champagne. Nor was it with WRC commentator Becs Williams about how she discovered motorsports at a relatively late age and made a stunning career out of reporting on it. The conversation that really stuck with me was about underpants. Don't get weird about it.

Dirtfish Rally School is famous for its dirt-clod-flinging driving classes and founder <a href=«https://dirtfish.com/rally/meet-steve-rimmer/?cq_src=google_ads&cq_cmp=9546352985&cq_con=154727256154&cq_term=&cq_med=&cq_plac=&cq_net=g&cq_plt=gp&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwkuqvBhAQEiwA65XxQHOKe9L24mSKdn_Ztmg4FHjrmPo5JH4jRROYby7K4KMCkGktzzFOAxoCppwQAvD_BwE» target="_blank" data-vars-ga-outbound-link=«https://dirtfish.com/rally/meet-steve-rimmer/?cq_src=» https: data-vars-ga-ux-element=«Hyperlink» data-vars-ga-call-to-action=«Steve Rimmer's » class=«body-link css-168zq96 et3p2gv0»>Steve Rimmer's

envy-inducing Group B Rally car collection, but the company also promotes rally racing with a team of photographers and writers and hosts a yearly meet-up to celebrate and support women in racing. The WIM event was Josie Rimmer's idea. Dirtfish's head of strategy, she felt that while there were plenty of women involved in rally racing, they weren't often in spotlight. «I'd grown up around rally and have seen countless women in the service park occupying all sorts of roles,» she said. «It became quite clear quite quickly that those women weren't being written about or invited to sit on podcasts. No one was shouting their names from the rooftop the way they should have been. We wanted to be the ones shouting from the rooftops, 'Hey! You really can do this too!'» Rimmer thought it might appeal to a few folks if she put together a panel of speakers and some hot-lap ride-alongs and invited some local women-run companies to get together at Dirtfish for a day-long event.

In 2022, Dirtfish hosted around 100 rally fans (men and women) to talk