How Eaton's Grand Tour has led to single-seaters

"Being in the limelight with The Grand Tour, people are just expecting you to jump into any car and be quick straight away, so it's a different kind of pressure. But ultimately if I don't say yes to these things, I'm not going to be racing which is what I love and what I want to do."

For Abbie Eaton, the past few years have been something of a rollercoaster both on and off the circuit. The 28-year-old Briton has gained a public profile for her role on Amazon's The Grand Tour as the show's official test driver. But it's on the world's race circuits where she wants her reputation to continue growing and make good on the promise she showed in club racing more than a decade ago.

She first came to prominence in 2009 after following her father, Paul, into motorsport, winning her class in the Dunlop Sport Maxx Cup.

Another title came in 2014, this time in the highly competitive one-make Mazda MX-5 Supercup. A season in the GT Cup yielded a single victory before she moved into British GT with Ebor GT in 2016 at the wheel of a Maserati GT MC GT4, finishing fourth in the class standings with Marcus Hoggarth as the runners-up in Pro-Am.

It was to be her last season of competing full-time for three years due to the perennial problem many drivers face - budget. Since then, she has had to look high and low for one-off drives.

Not that it's been all bad, as she has sampled an impressive range of machinery including a Ferrari 488 GT3 at Monza, where she took the Am class victory in the Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup season opener in 2017.

Twelve months ago she had hoped to make her big break down under in the Super2 Series - the support championship for the premier Australian Supercars series. As with many of her drives, the deal was put together at the last minute with Matt Stone Racing to drive a Holden VF Commodore at the season-opening Adelaide round.

"We literally said yes to doing it two days before the cars were taken down, so it was all really last-minute. It just wasn't the best kind of environment to have my first go in it," she says of a weekend where she took a best result of 14th. "The view was to do the full year, but the partner that we were speaking to about doing it long-term basically just ghosted me.

"I just feel like I wasn't able to give it my best shot, which means it's kind of unfinished business. I'd love to go back out there again and do it properly and do a full season in the championship."

"They're looking at it [W Series] as a solution for now to try to at least lift the profile of females in motorsport and just try to give them a helping hand" Abbie Eaton

Not to be deterred, she moved her focus elsewhere and took part in the inaugural season of the TitansRX rallycross series in a Pantera RX6, against maiden Formula E champion Nelson Piquet Jr, British Touring Car champion Andrew Jordan and rallycross sibling royalty Kevin and Timmy Hansen. She competed in four rounds through the season, taking 13th in the points despite having never previously driven a rallycross car.

Most recently she got behind the wheel of an electric vehicle in the opening round of the Jaguar I-PACE eTrophy in Saudi Arabia in November (below). She took a best finish of fourth.

At last, though, 2020 is set to provide her with the chance to compete full-time once more, as she is due to race in the second season of W Series, the single-seater female-only category that was won by fellow Brit Jamie Chadwick in 2019.

Eaton had been approached about joining for the inaugural season but was - and still is - against the principle of segregating men and women.

"I just didn't agree with it - not the championship and spending money on females, which is brilliant - but with segregating men and women, and I still don't agree with that," says Eaton, who prior to the evaluation test had only driven a single-seater on one occasion. "I don't think that long-term that's the answer to get more females into the sport.

"But now I've watched the series for the year and I've seen the people involved, and how they run it, there's no expense spared and actually what W Series is trying to do, [they know] it's not a long-term solution. They're looking at it as a solution for now to try to at least lift the profile of females in motorsport and just try to give them a helping hand.

"The thing that kind of made my mind up was that I was supposed to be in Australia all year, so I was like, 'I've put a year of effort into trying to make this work - I'm not going to turn my back on that'."

Given the coronavirus pandemic that has swept across the world, Eaton's debut in the category has had to be put on hold - and W Series is yet to announce when the campaign is now due to begin - but Eaton has already shown that she has the patience to wait for her next opportunity.