Nicole Drought is an Irish driver who mostly races saloon cars. She was the first female driver to win a round of the C1 Challenge in 2019.
Nicole first came to prominence racing touring cars in the Irish championship (ITCC). Her car was a Honda Integra, which runs in the Touring class. She started saving up for the car herself when she was 16.
2015 was her first year of serious competition, although she is from a motorsport family (mostly involved with rallying.) Her season got off to a shaky start with a crash in her first race, but she was soon on the pace. Her best finishes were a pair of second places, and she was second in the Touring class at the end of the season. As well as the Honda, she was invited to race a Porsche 944 at the Classic Car Live meeting, and finished fourth.
She carried on in the ITCC with the Honda in 2016, in the Production class. After leading the Production standings for part of the season, she was fourth on the final leaderboard. She picked up her first win this year in the second round, at Mondello Park, crossing the line eight seconds in front of her nearest rival. She had been pushed off-track in the first race but still finished second in class. Her momentum was interrupted in later rounds due to car trouble.
Her first trip to the UK mainland was a run in a Global GT Light at Anglesey this year. As one of her first activities with the Sean Edwards Foundation, for which she is an ambassador, she also tested a Porsche GT3 at Paul Ricard.
A deal to run in the 2017 CSCC New Millennium Series in a Ginetta seems to have fallen through. She spent some of the season as a brand ambassador for Nissan, having reached the last eighteen of the NissanGenNext competition. She missed out on a prize drive.
In 2018, she competed in Endurance Trials with a Nissan Micra. She was the Class 1A Endurance Trial champion in 2018 and defended her title in 2019 with several wins. On track, she raced in the 2018 Stryker sportscar series in Ireland, having first raced the Lotus Seven lookalike in 2017.
She also came to England for her first Citroen C1 endurance race for Preptech UK in 2018, with whom she would win the following year.
In the middle of 2019, she became the first female driver to win a round of the Citroen C1 Challenge, sharing with Colin Edwards at Anglesey. The pair were in the lead for a good proportion of the four-hour race, having started from eighth, and Nicole was 21 seconds ahead of her nearest rivals at the finish. Nicole and Colin raced together again at Snetterton but were only twelfth this time.
She also raced in the Stryker Challenge and continued in Endurance Trials. Shortly after her C1 victory, she drove a Formula 1 car for the first time in a demonstration at Mondello Park. The car was an ex-Derek Daly March 811, as raced in 1981. It has a Guinness livery and was shipped over to Ireland especially by its owner John Campion. She also drove a Jordan owned by Campion in a private test in February, alongside James Roe Jr.
Nicole is a founding member of Formula Female, which was started by hockey player Nicci Daly. In March 2019, she challenged 20 of Ireland’s top sportswomen to beat her lap time around Mondello Park in her Stryker.
(Image from tipperarylive.ie)