“I want to know how far I can go” - Therese Lahlouh’s journey toward GT3
- RACERS
- Mar 23
- 13 min read
As she steps into GT World Challenge America for her GT3 debut, Therese Lahlouh embraces her biggest and most exciting challenge yet in endurance racing. Here's what she told us about her non-traditional path, the power of representation in motorsport and her goals ahead.
The first thing people tend to notice about Therese Lahlouh is her energy. It arrives quickly, enthusiastic, disarmingly open - the kind of presence that brightens up the whole team. She laughs and speaks eloquently with the animated cadence of someone genuinely passionate by her mission.
Beneath that warmth sits an unmistakable intensity: an analytical thinker, fiercely self-evaluative and entirely serious about where she intends her racing career to go. Because for all the brightness she brings, Lahlouh is fully determined to chase her goals.
In 2026, that mission reaches its most significant milestone yet: the Californian racer will make her GT3 debut in GT World Challenge America Powered by AWS with Wright Motorsports, sharing the Porsche 911 GT3 R with experienced professional and coach Thomas Merrill. The campaign represents her transition from Porsche’s development ladder into top-tier GT competitions, and places her among an elite group of drivers competing in one of North America’s most competitive sportscar championships.
Her debut also carries broader significance: Lahlouh is in fact set to be the only woman on the grid and one of the few competing at top-level GT3 racing, the only in a full-campaign Porsche GT3 in the world this season - a position she earned with hard work over the last few years, but that she also embraces with the responsibility of representation.
"When I started in motorsport, I never stopped to think about being a woman, there were a few instances of maybe needing to prove myself a little bit more than maybe your other average Joe trying to get into racing - but from day one, I was really fortunate to have everyone really treat me like a daughter or like a sister and cheering me on", Lahlouh says, recalling the start of her racing journey. "And it wasn't until I won my first race, and it was the first time a woman had won a race in that series that I realized my gender was relevant."
Her early racing experiences unfolded in grassroots competitions, particularly in large Miata fields, that typically offer invaluable close racing and constant learning.
"It was called Super Miata", she continues. "And I didn't set out to be the first woman to win a race in the series. I just jumped in a local series and that was sort of the result of all the development and the great environment that it provided. That's when I started to realize that I was a woman in motorsport. I think up until that point, I just kind of thought of myself as another car person."
"And then when I started getting on the podium every week, there started to be a shift in the paddock. Instead of there's a girl out here, it was that girl is going to win the race. It became expected and in that shift, I realized that we could have an impact."
That realization however didn’t inflate her ego; it expanded her responsibility and her wider picture on the role of representation in the sport.
"I was having an active role in representing women without intending to. It really made me wonder how far I could go. And that's why I jumped into the Porsche series because they told me about the ladder system."
By choosing the hard path, Lahlouh entered professional racing without the traditional advantages: no karting childhood and no motorsport lineage. She however was immediately ready to put in the work to learn in a highly competitive environment.
"I want to do the real thing", she says. "I want to know if someone like me could do that. And all the information I had up until that point told me, no, you didn't start karting. You don't have any connection in motorsport. There's no way that someone like you will ever race at a professional level."
Instead of discouraging her, those assumptions became motivation. "And then I found out about Porsche Sprint Challenge. They have a lot of pros coming through the series, so I thought I would check it out."
"I'd never been on a slick tire. I'd only ever been on a street tire and 140 horsepower Miata. That year was trial by fire", her first encounter with the Porsche 992 GT3 Cup remains vivid. "Just trying to understand how to handle 510 horsepower and how to warm up a slick."
That experience sums up her personality perfectly: excitement paired with determination, enthusiasm as well as work ethic.
One of Lahlouh’s defining traits would become her willingness to learn from others to accelerate her development.
“I was fortunate enough to meet Madeline Stewart when she was racing in Sprint Challenge. I saw her at JDX Racing, getting a podium every weekend. And I was really intimidated by her at the beginning. I was like, how am I going to compete with this karting prodigy who's come out of Sprint Challenge Australia”, she jokes. “I said to myself, Therese, you got to learn from people, and she was the first real example I saw around me.”
So she broke the ice, quite literally. “I walked over to her and I ended up jumping in her ice bath with her. And that's how we got to know each other. And I just sort of disarmed her with a friendliness assault and asked for her advice.”
That step reflects a broader philosophy that Lahlouh now openly outlines as growth through collaboration among women in the sport.
“She highly recommended JDX. And so I made that transition to JDX to do a North America campaign and try it out, with proper testing. I had just raced it five times, that was the extent of my experience.”
Her inclusion in Porsche’s Mobil 1 Female Driver Program marked a key moment, not only in Therese’s racing career, but in how she began to see herself within the professional motorsport landscape.
The Porsche Mobil 1 Female Driver Development Program was created to identify and nurture promising female talent, providing mentorship, technical and media training, as well as direct integration into Porsche’s racing ecosystem, designed to accelerate development
"That was a huge surprise, I didn't expect to be supported or included in any way", Lahlouh comments. "And it was made very clear that they were told I still had a lot of development to go and I had a lot of potential and that I was worth taking a chance on."
The opportunity immediately reframed her approach; what had been a passionate pursuit began to take on sharper professional outlines.
"I felt I had to prove that I belonged out there and that pressure compounded with the more professional environment at JDX. And when I saw Madeline's driver report, really flipped a switch in me."
Lahlouh leaned into it. Her professional life outside racing, years spent navigating demanding, male-dominated industries, suddenly revealed itself as an extra competitive advantage. That's where Therese brought leadership experience and began merging those two identities: the enthusiastic racer and the disciplined professional.
"This isn't Therese racing on the weekends, I need to bring work Therese to the table", she continues. "And so I understood how to integrate my life experience - and the same things that benefited me there can benefit me here. I might lack the competence, but I'm building that experience day by day. And with people's example, like Madeline, like Ashley [Freiberg], and Jeremy [Dale], it really gave me the roadmap for that."
Behind her naturally upbeat and approachable personality lies in fact a deeply analytical mind, one constantly absorbing lessons and searching for gains. Yet, like many elite athletes, progress doesn't eliminate self-doubt. Despite rapid development, confidence in fact remained something she had to consciously build.
"That was the point that I developed a fear of making mistakes. That's when I started struggling with qualifying after running third in practice. Like at Watkins Glen, when I topped the boards with the pros out there. I kept surprising myself, I never believed that I was capable of that. Even when I find myself at the front, I still consistently find myself surprised to be there."
"And it's all coming from that same fear - that fear of making a mistake or looking stupid or embarrassing the other women. Because with that community comes that pressure that we share a common responsibility of representation, whether we want to or not."
This is a form of pressure that remains foreign to male drivers over their careers: for women in the sport, individual performance often feels intertwined with collective perception, with the additional psychological layer carried into every session, every lap.
"How we perform affects how people view all of us", Therese explains. "And I think we all feel that pressure to a certain extent. But, you know, the advice I keep getting, especially from men, is to be more selfish. If you're focused on yourself and on your own progress, you're going to be the best version of yourself. So that's what I try to do, to focus on inspiring myself, doing the hard things and focusing on just facing the fear a little bit more."
The transition to GT3 machinery is clearly a crucial new chapter in Lahlouh's career, with the commitment to the endurance format even more decisive. It clarified something fundamental: this was where she belongs.
"I think the transition to GT3 has really helped me understand that endurance racing is the right place for me", she reflects. "I felt a lot calmer at the APEX 10 hour, even though it was my first time in the equipment. I didn't feel that same pressure that I felt in the Cup car because it's not all on me. I have to do my job, which is put out clean laps, hit my marks, have a clean driver change. You have things to focus on."
Her first major endurance experience came in November last year at Sebring’s APEX One 10-Hour race - an invaluable opportunity to gain mileage in Porsche GT3 machinery ahead of the 2026 season. The event introduced her to a broader, more strategic perspective on racing.
"It becomes a little bit more of a macro view than the sprint racing", she continues.
The shift from the raw Porsche 992 Cup car to the more aero-dependent GT3 platform will require some adaptation, but also highlighted how her previous experience had prepared her for the challenge.
"There's a viscerality to the Cup car. It's a brutal machine, it's hard to drive on purpose. They make that car difficult so that it is a training tool. And for me, I kind of like that."
"The GT3 is so much more comfortable and so much more capable that really makes up for any of that loss of viscerality. And then it's actually still difficult to extract speed from it: it's easier to drive the car, but it's not easier to go fast in the car. It still requires the same commitment and the same, unique rear engine style of driving. And so I think having the Cup car as a tool is really great."
"It's still just as difficult to extract ultimate pace, but it's a much more comfortable, capable platform to do it in."
Moreover, Lahlouh’s racecraft was forged in the crowded fields, reverse grids, and unpredictable battles of club racing. Those formative environments shaped one of her greatest strengths: the ability to fight through traffic and charge forward from the mid pack, which gained her the reputation as one of the hardest chargers on the grid of the Porsche Sprint Challenge series. Yet, she remains her own harshest critic.
"I tend to view things the more negative way and just beat myself up for that instead of having the ability to charge through from that racecraft that we built", Lahlouh says, reflecting on one of the evergreen topics for racing drivers, fighting their own self-competitiveness to the point of being blind to the progress made.
"I think that's our biggest demon, right?", she continues. "I think at the end of the day, positive self-talk is probably the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. And it's so hard because so many of us are so competitive and so demanding and so driven. I don't think you could do this if you're not that type of person. And it's hard to just be nice to yourself."
Psychology plays in fact an enormous role in motorsport, often as decisive as the technical side. Lahlouh approaches this dimension thoughtfully, reflecting not only on personal experience but broader behavioral patterns.
"I think women are conditioned societally to factor more variables into decisions. There is a study that came out of MIT, for every decision, women factor 20,000 variables to men's 6,000. So when you tell women to think through a problem - and this was in an engineering context - the decision will be overwrought and fraught with a lot of just turbulence and not necessarily the best decision. Whereas if you tell the women to make a decision in three seconds or less, they were able to make accurate decisions within 90 percent of the time."
"And so it behooves women to know that about their own biology and psychology, we are hardwired to multitask and to look at things from a lot of different angles. And that can be a benefit if we're taught to utilize that impulsivity and rely on that instinct, because it is true. We're weighing in a lot more things."
"I think if you try to be too cerebral, you're painting by numbers and you're not driving to the car. The car changes every lap, every corner, fuel load, tire, where you're at on track, the debris - and that flexibility, I think, combined with overthinking can lead to maybe a more conservative driver."
Therese, however, keeps making a strong case for how progress for women in motorsport also in this area must be collective rather than only individual. Where earlier generations often felt more isolated, she now sees collaboration as a competitive advantage as more talented women are coming through the ranks.
"I think it's important to view the community as an asset and not as a pressure point because I think for too long, a lot of women have thought that there's only room for one woman, that if there's a woman racing, it's a novelty. And I think in order to normalize this and to truly have the best chance of success, we have to understand that there's strength in numbers and that the more of us that are out there, not only the higher our chances for success, the better we can support one another."
"I think you're seeing that shift a bit with the new generation coming into racing. There's a little bit more of a collaborative approach."
The Porsche Mobil 1 Female Driver Development program also amplified this sense of shared growth.
"I think one of the greatest unexpected things it provided was the opportunity to build community", she adds. "We haven't had that opportunity as competitors before. So it provided a unique opportunity to build that camaraderie and that community. And I think that has paid dividends for everyone's racing careers. From just having someone to turn to if you just need another woman."
"And I think being older, I have a natural tendency to want to look out for the other women, and just make sure everybody has someone to go to. So I think it naturally helped me step into that role of bringing people together and making sure that we're working together."
As she prepares for her GT World Challenge America debut, Therese approaches the season as part of a deliberate two-year development plan, a structured climb toward endurance racing’s highest levels.
"My ultimate goal is WEC and Le Mans", she makes no secret. "I want to be in the best possible position in terms of my development to try to get a podium there."
"These two years are my training ground", she says, outlining the goals she sets for herself with a realistic learning path. "This is where I need to learn everything possible from pit stops, qualifying, traffic. This is going to be just to absorb as much as possible, so that when we get to where we're going, we have that shot at the podium. So I think I'm really trying to focus inwardly and focus on the development I need to do."
The rookie season beginning at Sonoma represents only the first step, approached with both enthusiasm balanced by realism. However Lahlouh is always deeply aware of the areas she has to work on herself to maximize her chances.
"I have definitely things to clean up, but I'm hopeful that if I focus on all those things the success will come. One of my big goals is to have a perfect driver change. I'm trying to trust the process and just know that if I do all those things, I have a high likelihood of proving that I belong in that top bronze conversation."
The championship will debut a new endurance-focused format, with two 90 minute contests now replaced by a single 3 hour race - with the longer series' flagship event, the 8 Hours of Indianapolis. The new format perfectly aligns with Lahlouh's ambitions in the sport: "I think it provides the best opportunity for what we're looking for", Therese states. "If we're trying to prep for Le Mans, this is the most seat time I can get as a bronze and the most I can drive the progress of the team and the most pressure I can put myself under."
"It's a really stacked field. Some of the best drivers are coming over, some of the best bronzes and we can't ask for more than that."
Beginning at the Californian venue of Sonoma - her home circuit - even adds some significance to the curtain raiser, where despite the learning curve ahead, she knows she will immediately have a chance to prove her worth.
"Sonoma is my home track. It's a track that East Coast guys don't race a lot, so I think we always get a little bit of a chance to shine there. I think it's a bit unfortunate that it's the first race, when I'm still learning the tire and learning the car."
"But I think the whole first half of the season is front loaded with some of my strongest tracks; COTA, Road America, Sebring, Sonoma. And again, that's why it's a two-year program. Because it's the opportunity to really take this year to hone in on everything we need to improve."
Trusting the process, Therese Lahlouh moves forward with ambitious goals and the determination to put in the hard work required to get step by step toward her dream. But by talking to her, it soon becomes clear that her story is not simply about speed or results, it is about demonstrating that motorsport can represent something greater - a source of inspiration for those who did not follow a traditional path. Her story is ultimately about possibility: building a future not only for herself, but for those who may see their own ambitions reflected in her path.
"It's really about us existing in this space", she sums up. "My family came to the US from Sudan and, you know, by no rights should I be a race car driver. I'm the first woman in my entire bloodline to do whatever she wants. I think it helped me really crystallize that message, because I think our life's purpose is to uniquely affect positive change. I think that's everyone's life's purpose, so sometimes we need society to show us the change we're capable of affecting."
