A second-hand Xbox is not the usual starting point for a motorsport career. For Girlie Lukhele, it provided an entry into a world that has traditionally been difficult and expensive to access – especially for women. Through sim racing, she learned the techniques, discipline and focus needed for competitive driving long before she entered a real rally car. Today, she balances sim racing, motorsport and content creation, building an audience around a passion that began as a hobby and developed into something far bigger. Her rapid progress was underlined last month when Toyota Gazoo Racing South Africa handed her a seat in its GR Cup Hot Seat programme at Zwartkops Raceway. Swapping rally stages for circuit racing, Lukhele qualified fifth in the GR Cup Media Challenge, before claiming two third-place finishes in her debut weekend. More significantly, the experience exposed her to the intensity of wheel-to-wheel racing and provided another stepping stone in a motorsport journey that began behind a simulator. In an interview immediately after the race, she told us about the costs of getting started, the role sim racing played in her development as a driver, and why access remains one of the biggest challenges facing aspiring racers in South Africa. Sheryl Goldstuck: What were the challenges you faced getting into sim racing? Was it similar to trying to break into real racing? Girlie Lukhele: Sim-racing was much easier to break into than actual motorsport. My biggest challenge in the beginning was the financial expense of sim-racing. I didn’t realize at the time how expensive sim-racing could be as a hobby, but I was determined to get into it despite that. I started out with a second-hand Xbox which I eventually had to upgrade in a few months’ time as many of the games I liked were being