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Photo: Renee Brinkerhoff / Porsche
Renée Brinkerhoff is 64 years old. She’s a mother of four, a road rallying champion and the woman who’s driving for change, literally so, at the wheel of a Porsche 356 of the same age as her. She is a champion, a role model and the motivational story you probably need reading today.
Without getting into gender politics or possible explanations for it, women in racing are few. Even if there were more, hundreds more, Renée’s story would still stand out, since she started out when most people already think of retiring: she was 56 years old and she was folding laundry when the thought occurred to her, “I’m going to race a car.” Just like someone remembers they should have picked up groceries on the road home from work.
Once she’d made up her mind, Renée was relentless in her new mission. Her four children had already left home and she had, as the saying goes, all the time in the world. As of 2011, she also found herself the perfect car, a 1956 Porsche 356 her husband’s cousin had picked up for restoration.
Photo: Renee Brinkerhoff / Porsche
To use another cliché, she fell in love with it the moment she laid eyes on it, and the fact that they’d both been born the same year probably had something to do with it. “I just fell in love with it and I thought that’s the car I want,” Renée would later recall. “I didn’t even look at another car. When I saw that one, I knew it was the car.”
So far, Renée story seems your typical Hollywood rise-to-fame type of narrative, but there is nothing cliché about her progress, the hurdles she and her team overcame along the years and, most importantly, her admirable mission. Right now, as we reported a while back, Renée and her Valkyrie Racing (through the charitable branch Valkyrie Gives) are preparing to head to Antarctica in early 2021, to complete what has come to be known as Project 356 World Rally Tour.
Named after the car that started it all, which Renée still drives to this day and which will be her companion on the frozen continent to (hopefully) set at least two new world records while completing the mission that started in 2017, Project 356 raises money and awareness for charity. Renée is a champion for a variety of non-profits and charities that offer support to women and child trafficking victims, and her goal is to have raised $1 million for them by the time she completes the project.
Photo: Renee Brinkerhoff / Porsche
When she does, she will have driven a total of 20,000 miles (32,180 km) across all continents, taken part in the most challenging rallies and made a lot of firsts for women in the sports. And she will have done it all in her Porsche 356.
So far, Renée has driven in the La Carrera Panamericana in Mexico several times, and reached the podium each time. She’s done the East African Safari Classic Rally during the wettest season in 40 years. She’s driven in Targa Tasmania in Oceania and during the Caminos Del Inca up the Andes. She took part in the Peking to Paris rally.
Though sudden, Renée’s transformation from housewife to race driver wasn’t a matter of getting in the car, revving it up and instantly knowing what to do with it. “You have to learn how to drive, right?” she says, laughing. And learn she did, doing the Porsche Track Experience program with Hurley Haywood as Chief Driving Instructor.
Not that she’s prepared for the Antarctica challenge, she admits. There’s really no preparing for such an event, except to perfect her ice driving and make sure the 356 is ready. The already-heavily modified car is now being fitted with skis and tracks, solar panels, a crevasse bar and a new bright red wrap that will make it more visible in the snow. The entire event will be carbon offset to be carbon neutral, but the goal remains to raise money to help women and kids who are in no position help themselves.
Photo: Renee Brinkerhoff / Porsche
In the end, that’s what makes Renée’s story all the more special, besides the many accolades she’s won. During the many races she’s taken part of, she and her team have made an effort to meet with the people whose lives they’re touching through their charitable work, and the charities directly profiting from the event.
“The memories of the children around the world that we have been blessed to touch and their innocent faces will forever be in our minds and hearts,” she says in a recent interview with the New York Times. “Since I started racing, I have always believed it was what I was being called to do. Faith has allowed me to push through the many fears I’ve faced.”
And fear was the first obstacle she had to overcome when she got started.
