Italian version here.
The inaugural season of FIM Women’s Circuit Racing World Championship, known as WorldWCR, came to an end in mid-October 2024 in Jerez, where the finish line was crossed for an interesting season that delivered close racing and also brought new faces to the world stage. One of the latter is a strong American racer named Mallory Dobbs, who joined the series with Maddi Patterson’s Sekhmet International Motorcycle Racing Team.
From Washington, Dobbs started racing a few years ago and then ended up competing in MotoAmerica in 2023, as she even raced in two classes: Supersport and Super Hooligans. In the first one, Dobbs qualified to all the races but one and scored points in Laguna Seca. In the Super Hooligans, Dobbs was constantly in the points and scored a number of top 10 finishes. These results proved how good she can be in racing and then the next step came when she was signed to contest the first season of WorldWCR. 2024 was full of new things and challenges for her (plus a couple of crashes caused by other riders), but Dobbs managed to finish the season on a high as she scored six top 10 results in the last seven races. All this while dealing with her full-time job as Project Manager, that she also carried out remotely during her race weekends.
Palmen in Motorradsport had the chance to interview Mallory Dobbs on her 2024 campaign, her racing career so far and more.
Mallory, 2024 season marks a new chapter in your racing career. What can you say about this year?
It’s been alright, and I would say it’s been a challenge. We’ve had a lot of missteps along the way and we know it’s part of the championship and it’s part of changing what you’re doing and there’s a lot of learning, which comes out of the steep learning curve. We don’t get a lot of time on track and we don’t get a lot of time to test on our bikes, which made it even more difficult. It’s also a new place for me, traveling to Europe for the first time and coming to these racetracks I had never been to. I’m learning a lot about who I am as a racer and my racing capabilities and, you know, really just having to grow and try to get better. It hasn’t always been perfect, since I also crashed a few times because of other riders, but it’s part of the thing. I was hoping to get some top 10 finishes, and we made it. It’s just a matter of being consistent and not crashing in the midst of that, but just trying to get up to speed a little bit quicker. I also had a lot of bruises to my confidence and it sucks, but I could ride through that and build my confidence back.
Have you settled somewhere in Europe, or you are traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Europe?
I’m traveling back and forth. I still have a full-time civil engineering job. I work as a Project Manager: I do design sites and utilities and things like that. My job is fully remote. But when I’m in Europe, it’s eight hours ahead. You know, we’re eight hours ahead of when I’m back at home, so I’m working in the afternoons, or I’m trying to, right? And so it’s a little bit of a challenge of juggling that.
Quite challenging, isn’t it?
Yeah, there’s the travel back and forth. We tried to minimise that as much as possible, but it is what it is. I have a dog and a bunch of other things at home that I’ve got to take care of, and it is really hard to stay in Europe for a long time without your family or friends. I spent a week in Milan by myself and I spent a week in Portimao by myself as well. I can do it for a week or two, but then after that I want to go home. I think if something were to come up next year and we could do this again, there would be an opportunity to stay in Europe and do that. Anyway, my boyfriend also races, in MotoAmerica, and he’s a national champion himself. So yeah…There’s a lot of racing in our timeline.
Talking instead about the tracks, because we know that circuits in MotoAmerica are a little bit particular compared to Europe..How has it been for you to move from there to the European circuits?
I wouldn’t say it’s too much of a challenge. The biggest change for me was switching from Dunlop to Pirelli and from Supersport 600 to the Yamaha R7, which means I had to re-learn my riding style and figure out how to understand things like the front-tyre feeling of the Pirellis, as well as a different asphalt and a different bike. It all kind of felt a little weird. In any case, I admit that these tracks we have raced in Europe are amazing: they have all the infrastructure, they have all the runoff…During my life I’ve also ridden at racetracks that have none of that, like certain venues in MotoAmerica. And I have to say that it’s really cool to be at iconic places that everybody talks about to you.
How did you get passionate about motorcycle racing? And how did your racing career start?
I bought my first bike in 2016. I had a boyfriend who had a motorcycle and I rode on the back of it for a couple of months. I hated to just sit on the back, so I decided to buy my own bike…and we shortly broke up after that! But I met a lot of people on the street that rode and I had a couple of college friends that also rode and did track days. They were like: “Hey, you should come to a track day and meet everybody there”. And so I got to do that. I went out there and I was like: “Wow, I really want to do this!”. You just take your bike, you pay $200, you get all the gear and then just go out there and ride. And I went to my first track day. I met a bunch of people at the track that rode and a couple of them said that we should get into racing, so we started a novice race team called Hobbit Racing. So about six months after I got my first motorcycle, I started racing at club level in 2017.
Where did you race during your first season?
Washington Motorcycle Road Racing Association, or WMRRA, which is my local club. We have three tracks on our circuit: The Ridge, Pacific Raceways in Kent and then Portland, which is about two hours from my house. I raced those for a couple of years and then, when MotoAmerica came to the Ridge in 2020, I caught the opportunity to race for the first time at national level. It was a whole crazy experience. I had gone to Southern California to race and I had broken my Yamaha R6, then I got it fixed and I crashed it. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to race that bike at MotoAmerica. On my drive home from Southern California, I stopped at PCP Motorsports and I picked up a brand new Kawasaki on my way home. I picked it up, drove it home and immediately started building a race bike. In 2021, I spent a lot of time working on riding development, because up to that point I really had just ridden club racing and done it for fun with my friends. So I got some coaching from Jason Pridmore, I rode a bunch of new tracks and built my new bike.
In 2022 I did my first MotoAmerica round and then I liked it so much that I did another one at Laguna Seca the following month. I really wanted to keep doing it and pushing myself and seeing how far I could go. Then I had a sponsor who told me they wanted to do the Super Hooligans class, and I signed for that series, and the fun thing is that I thought I could not afford a season in Supersport in that moment, but then I managed and finally I ended up racing in two classes.
I guess the gap between Supersport and Super Hooligans is huge.
The Super Hooligans are not really bikes that are meant to race, right? I mean, I rode a Hypermotard sponsored by Ducati Richmond, And yeah, I mean, it was a fun bike to ride. But it was definitely hard: you have one bar, it’s upright, no tank to grip to, all that stuff…And it’s so weird. And then coming back to the Supersport, I found myself on a much faster machine and more of a race bike.
It was a challenging, but also valuable experience for you.
It was a little bit crazy as a rookie season in MotoAmerica to do both, I don’t know if it was really beneficial to my riding. I mean, I learned a lot of racetracks, got to go to a lot of cool places, we learned and we qualified for every single round except for New Jersey, which our goal was to qualify every single round. And the only reason we didn’t qualify was a mechanical issue in free practice, and I was only 0.4 seconds off from qualifying, but in the same weekend Qualifying 2 took place under the rain and there I was even seventh, ahead of Xavi Forés (Spanish rider with lots of international experience, including positive seasons in WorldSBK, ed). In Super Hooligans, we had three 7th-place finishes and we were 10th overall for the season. We would have finished 7th, but it didn’t happen because we crashed at the last race at Austin.
After 2023, you got the opportunity to come to Europe and to race the first season of WorldWCR. How did you get the opportunity to join this new championship?
I applied for it when it became possible and was uncertain if I really wanted to do it, because I wasn’t sure about the logistics and everything. I was finally accepted and so I got an email in January that said: “You’ve got seven days to come up with your €10,000 deposit”. I needed help at this stage and so I posted this info on social media. Everybody was chiming in, supporting and sharing it. It was crazy. A friend in common between me and Maddi Patterson shared my post and Maddi was actually looking for another rider for her team. And that’s how we got connected. We had a conversation, our goals kind of aligned with what we wanted to accomplish and she knows that I want to keep doing more racing. That’s kind of where we landed.
Again, a great opportunity for you and a crucial step towards your goals for the future…Actually, which goals have you set for your racing career?
My original goals really were to do MotoAmerica for a couple of years and be done, so my goal has changed once this championship came about and we got accepted. WorldWCR kind of opened up the door to more opportunities to be able to do more racing here. I ultimately would love to do some World Supersport rounds, because I definitely prefer riding a Supersport bike than the Yamaha R7. However, I don’t know what the long-term goal really is at this point. I think the 5-year look ahead would be to keep doing as much as I can in the WorldSBK paddock and see what happens with WorldWCR, including whether it moves to MotoGP, which is rumoured. I think if it were to be up to me, I would stay in the Women’s World Championship for another year or two and then maybe do something else, hopefully go to World Supersport, even if we did a wildcard. MotoE is pretty cool as well, I admit. Basically, as any typical racer would say, if an opportunity were to come up I would get it.
Something interesting about you is that you are not fully focused on racing, but you have as well a full-time job off the racetrack. How are you balancing these two things?
I would probably be a better racer if I was just a racer full-time, not just a racer and a civil engineer. Three months ago, I got a full-time job that was fully remote, so I switched jobs from the people I’d worked with for seven or eight years, basically my entire career, and decided to work with new people and get a fully remote job, so I could do it while I’m traveling in Europe and I don’t have to rush back from race rounds and things like that. They’re based in California, and so I changed job, offices, position and state. I’m working in California and doing projects down there, and it’s a big learning experience in my workplace too. When it comes to racing, we just have an agreement that I’m going to work typical hours of when people are actually at work: I work 6AM to 3PM when I’m there, so in Europe I am supposed to work from 2PM until 11PM or midnight. It’s hard, because I’d rather be doing interviews or talking to people or whatever, or just hang out with racers. It’s even more difficult when I am traveling to Europe for the races: 24 hours by the time you do all the traveling, then we get to the Airbnb, we eat dinner and I’m like: “Oh my gosh, I still have more work to do”. My brain is just fried. Sometimes I am afraid that I don’t work well enough to keep my job, but racing where I am now is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’m not the best project manager I’ve ever been, because I want to be racing and doing more racing stuff, but it is what it is.
So you would like to become a professional racer?
I would love to, but I just don’t feel like that’s possible these days. It’s always constant anxiety of whether or not you’re going to get that next team, which makes racing stressful in that sense, and I don’t envy anybody. It’s great when people are full-time racers and they get paid to do it, but there’s still the stress linked to whether or not you have a ride the next season or your team folds up or you’re going to get paid. I would love to race full-time and not have a day job, you know, but I don’t think that’s going to happen in my career.
Which series are you following? What are your favorite riders?
I watch a lot more racing now than I ever have. Obviously with World Superbike being here, I’m definitely following it a lot more. About the riders, it’s hard to not like Toprak (Razgatlioglu, ed) because of how crazy talented he is. I also went to a MotoGP round (Austin, ed), so I got to meet a bunch of MotoGP racers. And that was nice, because it was like meeting an actual face and having a conversation with them outside of their racing persona. In particular, I met Álex Rins and we had a whole conversation about my championship, what I was doing and if I was living like in Andorra and all those things. It was just cool that he took an interest in it.
So yeah…I watch a lot more like MotoGP, World Superbike and all that stuff. Moreover, Pedro Acosta is coming up through the ranks and it’s so cool to see another guy that’s very talented, that’s going to do well in MotoGP and keep working his way up,
Heading towards the conclusion, what do you think in general about the direction that is being followed regarding women in motorcycling, and how it’s been growing in the last years?
I think that women have always wanted to be a part of it and have always wanted to do those things and get involved in them, not only as racers but also as engineers. It’s just a matter of how you get started, and that is actually the most intimidating part, besides keeping up with the thick skin when some people say things they don’t mean. With motorcycles, I meet a lot of women in the sport that I really try to just motivate and help open like that because it is hard and very intimidating to get started. Another hard thing comes if you don’t have a boyfriend that’s going to help you get started, because doing it on your own is really hard and also when it comes to things like driving a trailer or loading a race bike with no kickstand on your own.
Talking about WorldWCR, I think that this championship is showing that there are several women who do racing like this. Those who race in their own clubs or just do track days may now be interested in racing and they may think of trying to do that. I think this series shows that there are a lot of women racers that do have a lot of talent, and therefore you shouldn’t just not do it because you don’t think you’ll be talented.
Something many people still believe it’s true.
There is still this stigma on motorcycles: women can’t ride motorcycles because they’re too little. We have to train differently than men do, for sure, but if you put your mind to it and have the mentality, you can do it just as good as anybody else. Kayla Yaakov is showing everybody that in MotoAmerica: racing in Supersport, beating up on more experienced racers, being on the podium…yeah, she is very talented.
Plus, I think WorldWCR is a women-only championship right now, but how many of these girls are going to go and do different championships, or how many of them are now getting followers from people and teams and all these other things that they wouldn’t typically get? We’re getting exposure that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
And how do you see yourself in this context?
I want to be up there with the best, like María Herrera, Ana Carrasco and Sara Sánchez, but I have to be realistic about where I am in my career and where they have been and where they’re going. I didn’t get my first motorcycle until I was 22, and a lot of these girls have been racing and riding since they were little. Plus, as we discussed before I do have a full-time job. I went and got a career first, and then I started doing motorcycles. Still, I can show other people that it’s never too late to start to pursue your dreams, because it’ll all work out.
Do you see WorldWCR as a starting point for women in racing, or as the highest point they can achieve?
I see it as a starting point, even if I think the championship thinks otherwise. There was a post or publication when they first came out of the championship that mentioned WorldWCR as the top-level tier for women’s racing. I think it’s rather a starting point: you race there, you get exposure and then opportunities may come your way to race in different championships and do it against men.
In conclusion, who would you like to thank for what you are living?
Thank you to Maddi and Simon for believing in me, my family and all the people who have believed in me. I also want to mention one person in particular: Doreen (Walmsley, ed) from Ducati Richmond, for putting together my program to race in Super Hooligans in 2023.
Palmen in Motorradsport thanks Mallory Dobbs for her availability and kindness and Maddi Patterson for making this interview possible, and wishes them all the best for the future.