Girl in the Mini who still craves a Silverstone spin

‘After finishing the race, I drove back to London with Steve Mcqueen. He did have amazing eyes’

Snetterton. She is surrounded by F1 drivers of the day: Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Jack Brabham, John Surtees.

And none of them seem capable of taking their eyes off the woman in the suit, who not only looked like a film star, but could drive like a demon. “It was a race where we were all driving the same type of cars round the circuit. I ended up coming fifth,” Watson says.

The suit had been stashed in the attic of her home for decades, alongside other forgotten memories she had never been particularly anxious to share. But when she heard that Silverstone was building a new museum she thought visitors might be interested in her racing togs.

And what a story they have to tell. For a brief three-year spell at the beginning of the Sixties, the “Girl in the Mini” – as she became known – cut quite a swathe. In a sport in which women drivers were then entirely absent, this was a motor racing pioneer.

“I didn’t feel like a pioneer,” she says, as she sits in the museum cafe, reminiscing. “Though I was the only woman. And I did have trouble from the BRDC [British Racing Drivers Club]. I remember I’d got all the necessary signatures needed to compete in an international race at Silverstone. I went to sign in at the start and I was told, ‘No, we’ve not had any women racers since the war because, if they have a crash, they cause us too much bad publicity’. I said, ‘I’m very sorry I’ve got all my signatures, you have to accept me’, and eventually they did.”

This was one determined woman, though she admits her driving career was not something she had been planning for years – it had come about almost by accident.

“Some friends had badgered me to go to a race at Brands Hatch. I got terribly bored, watching these cars going around in circles. I said if I was going to come again, I’d have to race. The more I talked about it, I thought I would give it a go. I applied for a card and got one.”

She turned up to compete in her first race at Silverstone in the Mini she had been given as a 21st birthday present.

“My father didn’t know I was doing it. I’d just tell him I was going to stay with friends in Northamptonshire for the weekend.”

Though he soon found out what she was up to. In the very first practice I couldn’t get Copse Corner right. I asked one of the other drivers and he said take it flat. The next practice I went too flat, left the circuit and, being a bit nervous, came back on to the tarmac at too sharp an angle and went over and over and ended up on my roof.

“I felt so awful. I was all right, but I spent the whole afternoon apologising.

“Unbeknown to me, BMC [British Motor Corporation] took my car away and repaired it overnight so I could race the next day. I rang my parents that evening and my father had already read in the Evening Standard that I’d had an accident and he was furious. ‘It’s far too dangerous,’ he told me, ‘you have to give up’. I said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t, I was beholden to lots of people, no way could I back out’. So I didn’t.”

And for three years there was no backing down: once she started racing she found she was driven by an overwhelming urge to win. She raced most weekends in the summer, once beating a young American actor who was in Britain shooting a movie and had borrowed a car to do a bit of racing. His name was Steve Mcqueen.

“I drove back to London with Steve,” she recalls. “He was charming. I didn’t fall madly in love with him but he did have amazing eyes: very clear blue.”

Such was her obvious appeal as an exemplar of the Sixties zeitgeist, the English rose in a Mini, the pressure on her to compete in high-profile events only grew as her career took off. In her tiny 900cc motor she regularly beat blokes in Jaguars and Chevrolets. She raced around the Nurburgring, and she navigated Timo Makinen to victory in their category in the Monte Carlo Rally (“the party at the end was very good”).

But, despite the successes, after three seasons she gave up with barely a backward look.

“All I wanted was to do better each time. Working out the tactics and how you were going to pass, take each corner: that’s what I enjoyed. To start with it was just fun. But by the third year I found all the attention a bit upsetting. It was getting too commercialised. I didn’t like it,” Watson says.

Looking back, however distant those days now seem, she is delighted she did it. And a little bit of the competitive spirit of the “Girl in a Mini” survives. When asked if, nearly six decades on, at the age of 80 she would still climb into her suit and drive round the Silverstone circuit, she grins widely. “Oh yes,” she says. “Of course.”