The Queen of motor rally

Laureen Marufu with the other drivers.

BY GRACE CHIRUMANZU
Stepping into the reception one is welcomed by soothing soft music, with the black leather couches calling for company. Through to the elegant garden, Mother Nature has a special relationship with sculptures to give a beautiful relaxing mood at Amara’s Health Spa in Harare’s upmarket Borrowdale.
Several rooms are bracing for activities such as various full body massages, steaming baths, body scrubs, manicures, facial treatments among others. But in a separate office furnished with a stylish fish pond table sits the Spa’s lady boss, dressed in a black top that reveals the black rose tattooed on her left arm, a fitting grey skirt with her long black hair combed one side.
Is she the current Miss Tourism Zimbabwe? No, though she may fit perfectly in that shoe. It is Zimbabwe’s top female motor rally driver –Laureen Marufu.
“I am a go-getter,” she says.
Marufu (35) began her career in motorsport three years ago. She impressed many by finishing ninth in her debut Toyota Challenge Rally in 2010. She moved three places up the following year to finish sixth. But the opening event of the African Challenge Rally was an unfortunate stage for her this year. She crashed out of the competition after her Toyota Runx hit a tree at Donnybrook the first day of the three-day show.
“It was really nice,” Marufu gives a naughty giggle as she describes her first crash in Norton.
“The car kept rolling and all I could remember in my head was stop I need to go! Stop I need to go!” It was not even like oh my God I am going to die; I needed to keep on moving. When the car  stopped I was unconscious and started hearing my navigator’s voice “Laureen Laureen” so I became conscious and replied “Yes yes lets go!” and he said we are upside down you know.
“I had just bought my Toyota Runx. It is heavy from the front and it is not very good when it comes to deeps, it lands on the nose because the back is light. I was going very fast and I flipped from one side on a ditch and my car rolled seven times into the bush, a kilometre off the road. It is actually funny, I was never scared, and I still wanted to go.”
The mother to Amara (5) and Ridwaan (4) has in recent years shocked most women whose typical questions are “do you have kids?” and “are you mad?” Marufu has always been an adrenaline junkie.
Her love for speed started when she was a little girl “driving with my Dad and I always looked at him driving and say I want to be the one on that sit.”
Marufu revealed that the fastest speed she has drove was 220km/hr where she got to Bulawayo from Harare in two and a half hours “rushing to do salaries there and I had to rush back to see my father in hospital where I saw his last breath.”
“I don’t see myself being someone else’s passenger at that speed. I feel safe when I am the one in control because as a rally driver in my realm of thinking I know what is safe and what is not. So if it is someone driving they haven’t done defensive driving and they don’t know what tricks to do to avoid certain things,” she said. 
Unfortunately the man who taught her to drive at the age of 14, her father, passed on before he watched his mentee making it into professional racing. Even though she regarded herself as a fast driver, her debut race at Donnybrook made her sweat.
“I was going so fast and I was sweating and when I got there (finishing point) I was last; I was like oh my God I thought that was fast,” she laughed.
“I had a navigator to help me but as a new driver I had no idea what this guy was talking about. I was like please keep quiet you are disturbing; I am trying to see where I am going. When I started racing it was also my navigator Clint (Ashdown)’s first time, so he had no idea what he was reading and I had no idea what he was saying and I was thinking “look I’m trying to get where I am going and you are disturbing me.
“The difference between the normal and rally driving is so so huge. It’s like I learnt how to drive all over again. With rally driving one will be on dust and going on the same speed as on tar, there is more control that is needed, there is more focus that is needed.”
Motorsport is one of the most expensive sports in the world. The costs of car repairs have scared many away from the sport. Marufu dreams for a “brilliant sponsor who will see the potential in me that being the first black woman and the only woman I can go very far.
“I want to be an ambassador for abused women; most women when they are abused they start to think they are less of a person, they feel demoralised, and they don’t have hope that they can still be people. I just want to be an ambassador to see women growing to that position where they are in control of their dreams as well.”
Marufu grew up with an abusive step mother and her childhood life made her “mature at a very young age.” Her first job was with Edgars stores at the age of 14 where she worked during school holidays. She set her goals straight on “what I wanted and what I did not want” and that has taught her to be tough and to expect no mercy in the male dominated sport.
“Its pointless being in a sport where one wants people to recognise her as a woman who is putting an effort; one has to do the sport simply as a sport, there is need to win despite being a woman. Right now I am the only female driver competing with men and if I am going to be a petty little girl I am not going to get anywhere. I don’t want any pity and I don’t want to be treated any different from everyone else,” she said.
African champion and one of Zimbabwe’s most senior drivers, Jamie Whyte, described Marufu as a “good driver who will go far in this sport.”

Laureen Marufu in the African Rally Championship