Lena Bühler started karting at 17 and drove her first single-seater race at 23. At 29, she now competes in Le Mans Cup with R-ace GP. The 2023 F1 Academy runner-up sat down with Feeder Series to discuss her single-seater career and what she thinks is the best path for women in motorsport.

By Calla Kra-Caskey

“I liked always the man sports, you know? I never did the female sports,” Léna Bühler told Feeder Series over the phone. “Classic dancing or something like this, I tried when I was young.” 

“I will say more masculine sports,” she added, correcting herself. “It was more for me than very calm sports.”

Bühler’s assessment of motorsports’ gender is stark, but not wholly inaccurate. In her first year competing in the Swiss karting championship, she was one of just three women in a field of 27 drivers. When she stepped up to Spanish F4 three years later, she was the only woman to compete in the series. 

But Bühler’s gender has never been a factor she considered in pursuing motorsport.

“My dad was a driver, but he never pushed me to do this,” she said. “He wants me to do what I want. Before [karting], I did BMX for 10 years. My two cousins were doing this when we were young.” 

She had started karting competitively at 17, much later than most drivers, although she first sat in a kart at 12. Though she admits her age meant she started behind her peers, it wasn’t as big of a deal then as it is now. 

“At the moment, all the team wants young drivers, but I would say 10 years ago, it was not like this,” Bühler explained. “It was more about performance and everything, but not about age. 

“But for sure, when I start racing at 17, I have to recover all the past in few years, I would say, because I didn’t do a lot of karting when I was young. I didn’t start young, so I have to recover all the late time to be back. So I worked a lot. I was very focused on everything.” 

Bühler took her karting career to the national level in 2017, when she first competed in the Swiss Karting Championship. After three years there, she stepped up to Spanish F4, in which she raced for Drivex. She finished the 2020 season in 15th, taking 23 points and a best finish of fifth on two occasions while also grabbing a front-row start at Jarama. Then, after just one season at the F4 level, she moved up to the FRegional European Championship. 

“Because of my age, I didn’t have enough time to take time in karting, to take time in Formula 4. I did five years in karting, then at [23] I was in F4, very late, and I did only one year in F4 because for me I was already too old to do one more year,” she explained. 

“[2020] was a very good year for me because even with not a lot of testing, I was doing well. I was learning a lot. I was doing mistakes also, and the team also, but overall the pace was quite well.”

The transition to the regional level proved difficult for the Swiss driver. Between 2021 and 2022, she entered 28 races in FR Europe and FR Asia. She failed to score a single point. 

“The level was higher than the F4 Spanish, first. The car was different and more difficult to learn,” she said. “I missed practice time in the car because I was not able to do a lot of tests. So it was a mix of everything, mix of experience, the car was not easy to drive – I would say not physically, even if it was more difficult than an F4 – but the conception of the car was not easy.”

After a difficult 2022 – she departed FR Europe after just three rounds – Bühler was planning a move to endurance racing. But around came ART with an offer she couldn’t refuse: to drive for them in the inaugural F1 Academy season. 

“It was a good year because it was the first year for ART [in F4]… so I think we did quite well in terms of performance compared to Prema,” she said. “We lost a few times, the round one and round two, but then the result was quite decent.”

Bühler, who was the oldest driver in the field at 25, finished the season in second place. She had two victories to champion Marta Garcia’s seven but led the series in podiums with 13. When she reflects on her career, her first single-seater victory in Barcelona that year stands as the proudest moment to date. 

F1 Academy, like F2 and F3, requires that champions depart the series. But unlike F2 and F3, it has an upper age limit of 25, and Bühler turned 26 during her F1 Academy season. Regardless, it was time to move on anyway. 

“For me, when you finish P2, there is no point to do a second year because it can be better, it can be worse also,” she said. “For some things like Hamda [Al Qubaisi], she did P3 and second year she was struggling a lot for some reason.

“And for me, it was like, for me, we have to move in a higher category and not staying too much

time in F1 Academy just for podiums or things like this. We have to fight with the best level.

“Same in single-seater and same in endurance. We have to fight with the guys, the boys, because our sport is mixed.” 

Which comes back to the notion of male sports versus female sports. While F1 may have long been a boys’ club, it isn’t a sport for men alone. One point of contention in F1 Academy’s four seasons of existence is whether an all-female series is succeeding at de-segregating the motorsport ladder. 

Bühler says a different method might be more successful. 

“I think for me, it’s my opinion, the best thing to do is to take two or three or four girls

and invest [in them] until F2, F3, and follow her with everything like marketing teams, budget, everything – and see if it works or not.”

Bühler’s suggestions come from a place of personal experience. Despite her own success in F1 Academy, she was ill-equipped to succeed once she graduated from it. 

“Because now, we can see that F1 Academy, even if we win the championship, we are not able to do FIA F3. It’s very difficult,” she said. “And even when we do Formula Regional, we are fighting for P20 for some reason. But I think we are able to fight for top 10 if everything is on our side.”

Her 2024 was bitterly disappointing, ‘like a season for nothing,’ as she returned to FR Europe. She competed in the first six of 10 rounds but, plagued by car issues, departed before the end of the season with no points under her belt. And while in retrospect she thinks Abbi Pulling’s route of doing GB3 after F1 Academy may have worked out better, it wasn’t on the cards. 

“For me, it was only Formula Regional,” she said. “It was the only option and I was not able to choose.”

Since then, Bühler has moved to endurance racing, this time permanently. She’s spent the past two seasons in Le Mans Cup and taken a victory at the 2025 Road to Le Mans – the first woman ever to win outright in the class. 

“It was good to win, but it didn’t help me for the future, you know?” she said. “A lot of people see I was the first woman, but it doesn’t really help me for the future. We have to show more potential, more results to go higher.” 

Her 2026 Le Mans Cup season started with a third-place finish in Barcelona, but that was followed by a retirement at the Circuit Paul Ricard and a difficult Road to Le Mans in which the team lost a wheel during qualifying and suffered brake problems during the race. 

Still, her focus remains the same. 

“In GT or in Hypercar or Formula E, anything,” she said, “the goal is still to try to become a professional.”

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency