Irina Sidorkova is a title-winning junior touring car driver from Russia who has recently moved into single-seater competition.
She first raced at a Moscow rally show in 2015, when she was just eleven. This was the beginning of her involvement with the Volkswagen Academy which supported the saloon part of her career. Prior to this, she raced karts in Russia, Estonia and Finland. She won a championship in Estonia in 2012.
Her early interest seemed to be in rallying; she was a junior in the Rally section of the VW Academy and drove a Polo in a Finnish rally, where she was 22nd overall. This was before she even hit her teens.
She then gravitated towards the circuits and raced a Volkswagen Polo in the Russian national junior touring car championship. In 2017, she won two of her eight races, at Fort Grozny and Nizhny Novgorod. She also scored two second places at Smolensk. This took her to second place in the National Junior class of the Russian Circuit Racing series. On ice, she won in St Petersburg, taking home the Ice Circuit Racing Cup.
In 2018, she updated her second place to a championship with three wins in the early part of the season, at Fort Grozny and Smolensk. Three further podium positions kept her ahead of her Polo team-mate, Pavel Kuzminov.
Late in the season, she was entered into the Assen rounds of the SMP Formula 4 championship. This was her first experience of single-seaters and she finished all three races in thirteenth place.
At the beginning of 2019, she was announced as one of SMP’s drivers in the Spanish Formula 4 championship, in a car run by the DriveX team. She was still not yet sixteen. Her first meeting with the series at Navarra resulted in her first top ten, an eighth place. She later finished sixth at Motorland in Spain.
Her management has expressed hopes that she will represent Russia in the W Series in 2020.
(Image copyright SMP Racing)