The female all-rounder who arrived "too early"

As Laurent Aiello splashed to victory in the 1990 Monaco Formula 3 race, a piece of history was unfolding in the spray 21 seconds behind him. Thanks to what, at the time, was the best-ever finish for a German in the event's history, second-placed Ellen Lohr had achieved a landmark result for female racing drivers, and seemingly put her name on the watchlist of all the F1 team bosses.

From fifth on the grid, Lohr's VW Motorsport Ralt passed Alex Zanardi (41 F1 starts) when he struggled to find a gear at the start, then gained further places when Olivier Beretta (9 F1 starts) spun and team-mate Otto Rensing crashed out. Having been inspired by watching Jean Alesi throw his Tyrrell between the barriers while spectating trackside, Lohr saw her own name in lights.

"I really thought, 'OK, that's it, now they know my name, they have my name on the list'," she recalls. "Everyone was telling me, 'F1 will call for a test', but nothing happened. That was disappointing - and naive of me to think it would happen."

Rather than F1, Lohr's career featured spells on the books of major manufacturers BMW, Volkswagen and Mercedes, and she became the only woman to win a DTM race, following a wheel-to-wheel tussle with Keke Rosberg at Hockenheim in 1992. Oh, and she knows of "a minimum three people who named their girls after me". But her career is littered with tantalising what-ifs.

After battling to raise an F3 budget for 1988, Lohr earned money as a contracted VW racer in the 1989 German F3 Championship and used it as a springboard to Formula 3000 in 1990, only for her one-off appearance at Le Mans in Helmut Marko's RSM Lola to be thwarted by a broken gearbox that scuppered her efforts to qualify. After establishing herself in tin-tops, a chance to test an F1 car for Sauber in 1994, arranged through her links with engine supplier Mercedes from the DTM, also came to nothing when it was cancelled after Karl Wendlinger's Monaco accident.

Faced with these disappointments, she set about becoming an all-rounder, with experience across the full breadth of motorsport, from truck racing to rallying and GTs.

"I'm happy with my career, no doubt about it," says Lohr, who today works as director of motorsport marketing and communications for Austrian engineering powerhouse AVL. "But I never had a real mentor who could guide me, which is a pity because otherwise I would have done many things differently. But my way let me do many different categories and that was always my thing, to be an all-rounder."

The Monchengladbach chemistry student "had to find out everything myself" on her rise through the ranks, starting in the German Formula Ford championship in 1984 with a two-year-old Van Diemen. By 1987, her small family-run team, aided by Germany's Van Diemen agent Peter Krober, was en route to the FF1600 championship, beating the likes of Wendlinger and Le Mans winner Marco Werner.

Alpina boss Burkard Bovanseipen was suitably impressed after he had arranged for the 22-year-old to enter the final three DTM races of the season, Lohr repaid his faith by finishing second in the Salzburgring finale. The world appeared to be at her feet - and indeed, she became a fully fledged BMW works driver in the 1988 European Touring Car Championship - but single-seater opportunities weren't forthcoming.

"I was much too early. If the same things were happening today, can you imagine? I had five podiums in DTM - for a young woman now, the career would take off to Le Mans, to everything" Ellen Lohr

"If this would have happened nowadays, a young woman against 40 other FF1600 drivers, winning a championship, the same weekend being second in a DTM race, many people would be saying, 'Let's do something with this girl'," she says. "But times then were very different, you really had to struggle. I did things I would not have dreamed about before, like these European races [with BMW], as the dream was a formula career."

While combining her studies with German F3 for Lechner Racing in 1988, she did enough to earn VW backing for 1989: "I didn't have to be a waitress while studying to earn my living like many of my student friends."

This put her into the marque's Bertram Schafer Racing-run team and, in the squad's eponymous BSR chassis, she finished second to team-mate Frank Kramer at the Hockenheim season opener, with a certain Michael Schumacher in third. But she couldn't hit the same heights again, Monaco 1990 (below) excepted, and found herself at a career crossroads.

"It was too tough for a young woman without anyone around having connections into F1 to make a real career in formulas," says Lohr, who elected not to engage a manager as "no one could give me the feeling they trusted my talent as they would trust if I was a young man".

"So when I got the [DTM] offer from Mercedes I was really happy. I was earning for me a huge amount of money as an ex-student and there was never a question anymore - I was a professional in motorsport."

The 1991 season was a struggle but, after placing second at Avus in 1992, Lohr showed it was no fluke at Hockenheim, where she overhauled Mercedes team-mate Rosberg with a forceful move at the first corner with two laps remaining and pulled away to win. 'He fought the Lohr and the Lohr won' was Autosport's playful headline.

The 1982 world champion retaliated at the start of race two by taking both off. "If this would have happened nowadays, he would have gotten a big penalty!" she chuckles.

But while the win was a confidence boost for her car crew, Lohr believes it didn't make a difference with those who mattered most.

"I would say I never got the same chances in testing, in material and so on, and that is really a pity," she says. "I was much too early. If the same things were happening today, can you imagine? I had five podiums in DTM - for a young woman now, the career would take off to Le Mans, to everything. But every step I had to fight. That was exhausting sometimes."

Lohr remained with Mercedes until the collapse of what had become the ITC at the end of 1996, then started afresh in the European Truck Racing Championship in 1997 for an initial two-year stint. She returned to trucks for another five years from 2012, after spells in German production touring cars, three Dakar Rally starts and a move into Germany's national rally championship in 2008.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lohr admits she "definitely had my difficulties the first year" of trucks as she adapted to sliding to scrub off speed, "because the brakes were difficult to handle".

"In my very first race weekend, somebody crashed into me in practice and I thought, 'Oh my God, everything is damaged!'" she says. "But you had to have this impact once to feel that for truck racing it was nothing. My mechanics were looking at me like, 'Why are you coming into the pits?'"

Fed up of hunting sponsorship each year, Lohr retired after the 2016 ETRC season, where she proved her competitiveness by finishing second in her final race at Le Mans. And, when she was offered a EuroNASCAR drive in 2019, she quickly accepted. "I started missing it because it's my life, it always will be," she says.

"When I changed direction completely, people would look at me like I'm crazy. It was crazy actually, but it was fun!" Ellen Lohr

Still, Lohr was pragmatic about racing as a "gentlewoman" driver, even if there was still plenty to learn - including a first experience of oval racing at the age of 54 at the Venray circuit in the Netherlands.

"I didn't see myself as a professional driver anymore," she says. "Of course I still wanted to win, but I had to accept that this is probably not possible because I'm not as quick as I was and the team never had the budget to be successful."

The team's money ran out before the end of 2019, and COVID-19 meant a return in 2020 was never on the cards. But Lohr had enough of a taster in an eight-year-old car - "Even for a EuroNASCAR that's quite old!" - to recapture the old fire, and ran third in the Challenge Trophy sub-category before she was forced to stop.

"That was enough for me," she says. "I had some nice races. You can enjoy very much even when you are fighting for 15th place, it doesn't matter."

Lohr remains involved in motorsport through what she describes as her "dream job", combining her experience in marketing from working with the Venturi Formula E squad and her own Monaco-based consultancy (co-owned by 2001 Dakar winner Jutta Kleinschmidt) with AVL's involvement as a supplier to top-level series from F1 to NASCAR and beyond. It's an appropriate role for a racer who prided herself on being a generalist.

"I put all my knowledge into one job, it's perfect," she says. "Without being an all-rounder, you can't stay for 30 years in professional motorsport. When I changed direction completely, people would look at me like I'm crazy. It was crazy actually, but it was fun!"

Top tips to becoming a well-rounded racer

Ellen Lohr's motorsport career is testament that racing is a "constant fight" and that you can "never trust in a result" to open doors. Early on, she found she had to "fight every day for everything", and recognised that success on-track was no guarantee of deals coming together off-track to progress.

"The person in second may fight harder than you in networking and he's getting the seat instead," she says. "So networking, speaking to journalists not only when they ask you, is really important to build a successful career. You have to fight for your hours in the simulator, rent a flat close to the company you're driving for, and be there every day."

Lohr also advises drivers to build a strong mechanical understanding. She learned to work on her own car in Formula Ford, and carried that knowledge all the way through her career, "even in trucks".

"Young drivers will trust completely in their engineers explaining the data, and that's not enough," she says. "Look at the data yourself, learn if the team's engineers are really good or not - which is possible.

"Get into the technical side and be involved, because that makes you a complete driver. It could be that you do Dakar and you have to change your clutch in the sand..."