Female rally stars

When Abir Al-Batikhi (pictured, above) hits the accelerator on her Subaru Impreza in the Jordan Rally at the end of April, she will join a scant but illustrious roll-call of international female rally drivers.

Al-Batikhi's success in Middle Eastern rallies over the last decade serves to remind that rallying doesn't divide the sexes as many sports do. If you're good enough and you can find the backing, you're in the running.

Most famous of them all was the Frenchwoman Michele Mouton (pictured, right), who not only became the first female driver to win a world champsionship rally, but also very nearly the first woman to become outright champion. What's even more remarkable is that she did this in the era of the fearsome Group B cars throughout the early 1980s.

Mouton will be forever associated with the Audi Quattro, the car that ushered in the four-wheel-drive era and changed rallying for ever. However grippy it might have been, it was also a bugger to drive and, at around double the 300bhp of the current cars, it demanded total respect from the driver.

At the close of the 1982 season she narrowly lost out to Opel driver Walter Rohrl for the championship, but this video of her victory in the Portuguese rally displays her cool style in the face of some pretty patronising commentary ("No wonder the whole world loves Michele. All that brain power, and beauty too", spoken in proper BBC English).

Before that it was Britain's Pat Moss, younger sister of Stirling Moss, who was challenging the world's perceptions about women drivers. Driving a Mini Cooper, she won two international rallies in 1962, before switching to a Saab 96. In 1965 she finished third in the Monte Carlo Rally, an outstanding achievement.