VOLUME 9 PROFILE
Words by Leah Morris
9 MIN READ
Your TOYOTA GAZOO Racing correspondent spoke to the long-serving legend in the lead up to Round 2 of the Australian Rally Championship (ARC) in Western Australia, where she cemented her standing as the individual with the most podiums at a WA Forest Rally.
Kicking off our conversation via video call, Coral tells me she’s been up late watching daughter Molly Taylor compete in the Extreme E off-road electric vehicle race. The course is at an abandoned opencast coal mine, which is set to be converted into a hydro-electric facility.
“I'm not usually a nervous person. But last night as the race was about to start, I could feel my heartbeat going up… it was raining, freezing cold, foggy and muddy. Treacherous conditions and lots of people were crashing. We have a family WhatsApp which was going berserk, with everyone just going ‘oh my goodness!’”.
Despite the challenges, Molly Taylor and teammate Kevin Hansen topped the podium to deliver a solid victory.
Molly’s career makes her a third generation driver, with mum Coral and dad Mark Taylor both longtime competitors. Before them, Coral’s father Norm Fritter was a well-known rally driver, remembered as “one of life’s true larrikins” and a beloved member of the Aussie motorsport scene.
Bates family with Coral and daughter Molly.
Coral has early memories of her father competing in the sixties, some preserved on Super 8 film. Norm at a motorkhana, hanging out the car window to grab the flags as he sped past, while the kids played on a trailer in the car park. “I just assumed every dad was a rally driver and that’s what dads did.”
He was also the catalyst for her career when, aged just 18, Coral co-drove for him at the 1979 Repco Round Australia Trial – a gruelling 19,000-kilometre challenge won by Peter Brock, Matt Phillip and Noel Richards.
It was the beginning of a lifelong love of motorsport, spanning countless kilometres of dust, sweat and adrenaline. When I ask Coral to recall a favourite memory, she tells me most people assume it’s one of her championship moments. “Which were certainly huge, but it would actually be at my first rally with Neal.”
“We were competing against the Subaru team and Possum Bourne at the time, who were driving a factory car. We had a car that was built by Neal Bates Motorsport in Canberra. Halfway through the first day, we came to a service area. Back then, it wasn't a static location where they stayed all day. The crews moved around following the event. You would pull in on your way past, grab your fresh tyres and whatever else you needed, and keep going.”
“This particular service area was on a really narrow road, with the service vehicles parked on the side. As we came through, all of the Possum Bourne Motorsport service team stood on the side of the road and clapped as we passed.”
“It’s a really emotional moment when your fiercest opposition shows this level of respect to you, which they did as we drove past in the service pack. So that's always been my one really big moment, apart from the major wins that we did have.”
When I ask Coral if it’s normal for the competition to show this level of encouragement, she tells me that there’s a lot of good will between opposing teams. In fact, it’s one of the things she loves most about the sport.
She remembers the late rally icon Possum Bourne (his team’s namesake), who shared a similar outlook. “Possum always believed that the camaraderie in rallying was stronger than in other form of motorsport. That's partly because what we do in our event doesn't influence the outcome of another person's event; it's one car, two people against the clock.”
She recalls his recce car breaking down when he was visiting for Rally of Canberra. “It ended up at our workshop and our guys welded it back together for him,” she recalls. “That sort of thing is quite common.”
First: Neal and Coral put the TRD Toyota Corolla to the test (2007).
Second: Coral and Harry get race-ready.
Following her debut at the Repco Round Australia Trial with Norm, Coral continued to develop her co-driving skills before joining Murray Coote for Mazda Australia. Around that time, Neal Bates had just appeared on the scene, mostly competing in New South Wales and dabbling in a couple of ARC events. Coral remembers meeting him for the first time. “This young, really shy guy turned up in his red Celica and we all became friends, as you do in the sport. But he was our opposition at the time.”
Towards the end of 1991, Mazda were pulling out of the championship and Neal rang to ask if Coral would drive for him the following year. But it wasn’t as straightforward as accepting Neal’s offer, she tells me. “There's a lot of loyalty in rallying. You're part of a team and you're about to lose your major sponsor, but you really want to keep the team together. So you're working as hard as you can to find a replacement sponsor.”
“I didn’t want to leave the team and at that point, we really thought that we would be able to get it together for the year. As it transpired, we only did part of the season and hadn't managed to pull together enough sponsorship to finish it. Neal rang again at the end of 1992, and it was actually Murray who encouraged me to take the offer.”
So in 1993, Coral Taylor began co-driving with Neal Bates and a legendary duo was formed.
Coral and Neal at the Australian Rally Championship (2003).
The teamwork between driver and the co-driver creates a relationship that is crucial for rallying success. And driving with Neal for over 30 years, it doesn’t surprise me she considers him a best friend.
“You're holding each other's lives in your hands. So if I’m describing a corner to Neal, he's one-hundred-percent trusting that I’m correct. He's going to commit to that corner based on what I've told him, whether he can see or not,” says Coral. “If you're doing two-hundred kilometres down the street and there's a blind crest, and the co-driver calls a flat crest, there's no lifting. You trust that when you get over that crest it’s going to be straight.”
To illustrate this unique partnership, Coral recalls a major crash at the World Rally Championship in Perth. They were driving a WRC Corolla built by Toyota Team Europe, a coveted rally car that had just been sold to an overseas team. Everyone was wary about damaging it.
But Coral was determined, and she and Neal had a commitment to compete. At first, they agreed to drive the first of three days only. Off the back of it, they convinced the team to take on Day Two. The next part is history.
“We crashed off into a paddock where a pine forest had been freshly logged, so it was muddy and filled with the stumps of chopped-down trees. We rolled multiple times into all this, and by the time we stopped the car it looked like a complete disaster.”
Co-driving the iconic WRC Corolla in Perth (1999).
Thankfully sustaining no major injuries (except to their pride), Coral remembers standing in the middle of the paddock while it poured rain, feeling miserable and looking at a destroyed car that wasn’t even theirs to destroy. Neal said to her “you said that corner was a five.” Adamant, she replied “No I didn’t, I said it was a three.”
(This speed-grading system, which runs from one to six, is crucial to ensure a driver can navigate a corner safely, and a miscommunication like this was extremely unusual for the experienced pair).
The culpability question remained until they got back to Perth, where a TV crew had footage from the WRC Corolla’s onboard camera. As a crew member placed a small screen atop their car roof, a small crowd gathered to watch the crash playback. Coral remembers catastrophising to herself: “if I said five, I'm going to retire. That's it. My life's over. I'm giving this up.”
But it was a three. “And the clearest three you’ve ever heard!”
Of course Neal apologised, and later found out his ears were blocked and he had to have them cleaned out. “After that, when you spoke to Neal in a normal voice he'd say, ‘please don't yell’”, Coral laughs.
“It just proves when you say something, the driver commits. The co-driver has also got to trust the ability of the driver. So it really is a relationship built on trust, and Neal trusted what he thought I'd said. So we rolled the car off into the tree stumps.”
First: Coral and Harry in the hot seats at the ARC Forest Rally (2023).
Second: Kicking up some serious dust in the TRD Toyota Corolla (2007).
Third: Friends that race together (2005).
Over the last forty years, Coral has seen motorsport shift gears to become safer and more technologically advanced.
“If you look back at photographs of me when I was competing as a teenager with my Dad, we were rallying in jeans and t-shirts, with just a helmet. When you look at the helmets now, we all laugh,” she tells me.
One of her personal favourite rally advancements? The humble roof vent. “In the early years when you did a rally, you were just sitting in the car in a swirl of dust for the whole event.” She also recalls how regular driving suits were swapped for fireproof overalls, and intercom systems were introduced.
And of course, the build of the cars has changed.
“I did one rally with Harry last year as an emergency stand-in at the very last moment because his co-driver had come down with COVID the day before. And so of course, after that rally, everyone was asking me ‘how do you compare Harry to Neal?’ And ‘who's the better driver?’ and so forth.”
“It wasn't until after the event, when I was looking back at some of our vision and comparing it to Harry, that I realised the commitment was no different. But the technology and the improvement in suspension is huge. That makes the cars handle so much better, then the grip is so much better.”
Another big area is safety.
“We have very serious roll cages and helmets now, and HANS devices that hook to our helmets so that if you have a sudden stop, you don't get whiplash because it restricts how far your neck can move. We have wing seats which allow for sideways movement. The modern cars even have a special foam within the doors, for added strength if there’s sudden impact into a tree. These sort of things are now very common to the regulations for all the cars.”
Every track is a fast lane in the AP4 Yaris.
It’s impossible to speak with one of rallying’s most notable women champions without being curious about her experience in the sport.
“I think the reason there's not as many women in motorsport is about awareness. That the sport is there, and that it's something that you might aspire to,” Coral tells me. We chat about FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile) and their ‘Girls on Track’ program, supported by Motorsport Australia, and the importance of women role models.
“I mean, Molly went off rallying… she always says she didn't think about it from a male/female perspective, because in her mind there wasn't that issue. Because she would see me going off rallying.”
Checking times at the Falken Tyres Rally of Queensland (2003).
It’s something Molly is now passing to the next generation, too. Coral tells me a heartwarming story about a four-year old girl who turned up with her mother at one of Molly’s ARC rallies in South Australia – not once but many times.
“About a year later, after we bumped into each other at multiple places all around the country, the girl’s father sent me an email with a copy of an article he’d written for a magazine about autism,” Coral says.
“At that point, we didn't know anything about this little girl or the fact that she had autism, but his article explained she’d ask for a Barbie doll every Christmas then left them in a drawer and never played with them. When she started seeing a professional, it transpired that what she really wanted was a (toy) car and she’d been asking for Barbies because that’s what she thought girls were supposed to want.”
When her parents found out she liked cars, they researched women drivers and learned about Molly’s career. “...Which is how this little girl became a fan, and why her mother brought her out to rallies.”
Neal and Coral alongside their trusty steed during Rally of Canberra (2001).
Coral describes the moment that filled her heart the most. “Some way into all this, Molly had a gearbox issue and they were changing it in a twenty-minute service, which was all chaos. The little girl was there watching, and Molly asked her if she wanted to come and have a look at the car. When she said yes, Molly lifted her over the barriers and sat her in the passenger seat. Then Molly went around and got in the driver's seat. And this was all happening while there's constant rattle guns and banging and everything coming out from under the car because they're changing a gearbox. As Molly turned to her and started talking, the little girl turned back and had a conversation with her for the first time.”
“They were smiling and chatting, and I had tears rolling down my eyes. I turned around and her mum and dad were standing there, and they were the same. So this little girl came out of her shell.”
Coral tells me the girl went on to have a YouTube channel and recalls watching a film she made on rallying, where she used ‘she’ as the default when referring to drivers.
“The way she worded it was ‘if a rally driver has a crash, she might hit a tree!’. When I watched it, that jumped out to me so much and I thought ‘yes, here's this little girl who's not even thinking that the rally driver isn't a female.’”
I ask Coral if she remembers being treated differently by the media, especially early in her career. “Yes, for one of the very first articles, which was in one of the major papers, the headline was ‘Australia's Fastest Housewife’. I looked at it and I thought ‘would they write that about a man?’”
“Mid-rally, they would say ‘Coral, how does it feel to be a female in a male-dominated sport?’ while I’m standing next to the car being serviced. And to Neal, they're saying ‘how was the stage?’ And a lot of that happened in the early days, but that’s also an area that has changed now.”
Today, Coral is optimistic for women joining the sport. “I think you're regarded on the job that you do, and if you do a job and do it well, then you’ll gain people's respect.”
With all the cars she’s owned over the years, I ask Coral which is her favourite. “It’s still a Celica ST205. My daughter has a road-going version.”
“It's just iconic. It came out in a shape that everyone loved; it was always a good looking car and it has stood the test of time.”
Congratulations to Coral Taylor and Harry Bates on their podium win at the Australian Rally Championship in WA, and a special thank you to Coral for sharing never-before-heard stories and memories with our TOYOTA GAZOO Racing community in this article.
CONTINUE READING
