MEET MICHELLE

MICHELLE ON: RACING

The Porsche parasite that Michelle was infected by was all-consuming, also getting her into racing. “The only reticence to my gender has been on track. I t’s very, very difficult to be taken seriously, especially here in South Africa.” She’s not mucking around either, entering local hill climbs in a 944 Turbo, competing in the Bernina Gran Turismo and doing endurance races at Killarney. One of which ended in disaster back in 2015. While practising in her 1974 short-wheelbase RSR replica, Michelle crashed at 100kph. She was put in an induced coma for two weeks, broke her collar bone, ribs and vertabrae one, four and seven in her neck. The shunt was so violent it cracked her HANS device. It didn’t put her off though. She went and got an FIA licence afterwards.

isn’t your normal crusty old car collector. With a piss pot helmet framing her unapologetically unkempt locks, she skirts around a 19th century wool shed with languid limby movement and intense blue eyes. We have come to her home-slash-garage-slash-museomegaplex, and four hours into stated the bleeding obvious.