TCR World and life

We’ve seen several champion skiers move into motorsport and have successful careers, like Luc Alphand, Guerlain Chicherit and Kristian Ghedina. What made you decide to swap your skis for racing boots? “I’ve always been around motorsport because my Dad (GT racer David Askew) started racing when I was about 13. As a teenager I was fully-focused on skiing, but I was always at the races supporting him. The feeling of being at the starting gate waiting to head down a ski run sounded quite similar to sitting on the startline waiting for the lights to go out, so perhaps the two weren’t as different as I’d previously thought. I fell in love with skiing on a family vacation in Utah. When we eventually moved there I was able to get a lot more serious about it and started competing for the Freeride team out here. Things just grew and in 2017 I won the Junior Freeride World Championship in Andorra. Freeride is a bit more extreme than regular skiing. You have a start and a finish, but no course, so how you get there is up to you. It’s pretty wild and you really have to concentrate hard or you can have a big accident. I stopped skiing competitively when I went to college at 19. I tried a racing car for the first time in 2015 and I knew from that moment that I wanted to race. Over the next four years I did a handful of club races at Utah Motorsports Campus in a Nissan 350Z, but it was hard to commit to because I was at College in British Columbia, Canada. Now I’m finishing my studies – I’m a math major – in Utah, it’s much better.” How did your TCR debut go at Virginia International Raceway in July? “Better than I’d expected. Having only raced the Nissan before, it was a big challenge to go from low power and rear-wheel-drive to a more powerful front-wheel-drive car. Fortunately for me, VIR its one of only two circuits I’d driven before. I was prepared to have to finish last and just build and build and build, so fifth place on my debut was more than I could ever have hoped for. The biggest challenge was dealing with traffic. In TC America we share the races with two slower classes, so over a 40-minute race we do have to lap people, and the Honda TCR does gain pretty quickly on them. VIR is really twisty, so it teaches you to plan several steps ahead and line up your moves so you lose the least amount of time. I lost some positions through not doing this as well as the guys behind me, but I know what I need to work on now going forwards. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that the drivers that will do best in this championship are the ones that can keep their front tyres alive the longest.” What are your aims for the rest of the season? “The major goal is to feel comfortable at every track. I’ve never raced at any of the tracks coming up, although I did test at Road America, so that will help. I feel like I’m quite a fast learner and I have good instincts. I’m quite good at being coached and because I was in that situation from the age of 12 in skiiing. Bryan Sellars (2018 IMSA GTD Champion) is coaching me and my team- mates Scott Smithson and CJ Moses and I simply couldn’t have done it without him. Good coaching helps you to learn something new every day, but you have to have a good process to take everything in and make it into something that really helps you. I think I’ve made the most of it so far so let’s see how much more of a step I can take through the rest of the season.” Three questions to… Olivia Askew TC America’s rookie reflects on her success as a World Champion skier and outlines the challenges of swapping the slopes for the racetracks in her debut season with the DXDT Racing-run Honda Civic Type R TCR.