Samantha Tan is feeling slightly under the weather when she speaks to The CEO Magazine from Frankfurt. It’s the day after she took to the track in the Road to Le Mans – two hour-long support races for the 24 Hours of Le Mans in northern France.
After spending the last few Le Mans in the spectator stands, this was her first time driving the legendary Circuit de la Sarthe.
“I got a bit unlucky in some races,” the 27-year-old Chinese Canadian says of the weekend racing for BMW team WRT in a BMW M4 GT3 alongside Swedish driver Gustav Bergstrom. “But overall, it was a rewarding and special weekend for me.”
Race reviews have hailed her debut as impressive, noting her great pace in both races on the world’s biggest stage.
“I got so emotional on the first day,” she says.
It was the biggest step she has taken toward her ultimate career goal of being the first Asian woman to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans – the world’s most prestigious endurance race.
And, after such a turbocharged weekend, she’s allowing herself a day or two to rest before the next big race the following weekend: the 24 Hours of Nürburgring in Germany. It’s one of the most grueling endurance races in the world.
It’s a rare rest day amid a packed 2025 race calendar that’s hooked on chasing down the GT World Challenge (GTWC) America championship she lost by one heartbreaking point last year.
The birth of her own team
Yet busy is her cruising speed. Tan wears multiple hats, not only as the principal driver but also as the owner of her own racing team, Samantha Tan Racing (STR), which she founded with her father, Kenneth, at the age of 20 in 2017.
Starting her own team was an early move, just four years after she gained her racing license, and one that has set the pace for her career.
“It’s allowed us to position ourselves as a serious contender on the global stage.”
In 2019 and 2020, STR took out back-to-back championships in the Pirelli World Challenge and the Pirelli GT4 America series. In 2021, the team was crowned the overall champion of the 24H Series in its first year competing outside of North America.
The next year, in the GT3 class, it made history as the first-ever overall winner for BMW’s new M4 GT3 at the 2022 12H Mugello in Italy and a place on the starting grid for the 24 Hours of Spa in Belgium.
In 2023, the momentum continued, with victory at the GTWC Road America and the GTWC 3H Barcelona. The 2024 GTWC America title battle was decided in the final race, with that single point separating Tan from the title.
Tan says making a conscious decision to commit to endurance racing was one of the most important decisions she has made in her career.
“While it’s one of the most demanding forms of motorsport physically, mentally and financially, it also gave our small Canadian team the space to prove ourselves through strategy, consistency and grit,” she says.
Victories have validated the approach.
“It’s allowed us to position ourselves as a serious contender on the global stage,” Tan enthuses.
A push to be better
What makes the speed of Tan’s achievements all the more startling is that, beyond the fact that Tan is a woman of color in a male-dominated space, she also didn’t take the conventional route to motor racing.
“I didn’t come from a motorsport background, and I didn’t spend my childhood racing karts at the track,” she says.
Instead, she can trace everything back to the car meets and track days that her father, a car enthusiast and racing fan, would take her to.
“He and I bonded when I was younger over our shared passion for cars,” she says.
“I fell in love with this process of improvement and the mental toughness that you needed to constantly push to be better.”
From a young age, Tan was captivated by the cars, the precision it took to control them, the community, its energy and the sounds.
At age 16, brandishing her newly earned racing license, she began competing in regional races across the United States.
“I was hooked, not just by the speed or the competition, but by the sheer discipline that it demanded,” she reflects.
“Every lap was truly an exercise and every mistake became a lesson. I fell in love with this process of improvement and the mental toughness that you needed to constantly push to be better.”
Ownership equals agency
Yet she never expected to be in the position she found herself in back in 2017, when the team she was renting her racing car from went bankrupt, leaving the racecar in her hands. It was the biggest turning point in her nascent career.
“Suddenly we weren’t just racing,” she says. “We were responsible for figuring out how to continue racing and how to keep the season alive.”
More than a crash course in ownership, it was a moment that forced her and her father to ask themselves if they should walk away or build something of their own.
“We realized that if I wanted to protect my future and perform at the highest level, we couldn’t rely on anybody else to do that for me,” she says.
“That’s when it truly clicked that ownership equals agency. I didn’t just want to be a driver, I wanted to be in the decision-making room.”
“I didn’t just want to be a driver, I wanted to be in the decision-making room.”
Thus, Samantha Tan Racing was born.
“Not just to keep me racing, but to imagine what a team could look like,” Tan explains.
It was, she adds, an opportunity to create a team rooted in values, one that could push boundaries in motorsport and reflect a new generation of leadership.
Beyond that, however, it was about reclaiming power in an industry that often sidelines people who don’t fit that traditional mold.
“I wanted to prove that, with vision and integrity, you can build your own seat at the table and bring others with you,” she says.
A full-circle moment
Taking a different path into the sport hasn’t come without its challenges, of course.
“We truly had to learn how to navigate the industry by ourselves,” she explains.
Quickly, it became apparent that she needed to surround herself with a community she could trust and learn from.
“We’ve been quite intentional in choosing people with more experience and knowledge to be able to teach us and guide us through this experience,” Tan adds.
One of the most important supporters has been BMW, a relationship that started long before she ever zipped up a race suit.
“Growing up, Dad had a BMW M3, and some of my earliest memories were riding along with him in that car,” she says.
She also learned to handle a manual gearbox in a BMW – and she still drives the car today.
“BMW is a brand that celebrates those who go against the grain, and my own journey as a woman of color building my team in motorsports speaks to that same kind of spirit.”
When it came to making strategic decisions for STR, partnering with BMW was not only a smart strategic move but a full-circle moment.
“From both a performance and a brand perspective, they felt like the right partner: technically strong, very globally respected, with a strong brand value. That’s what we wanted to build STR around,” she says.
The partnership not only gave STR credibility but also the technical foundation to grow. In 2023, it deepened even further when Tan was unveiled as the only global BMW M Motorsports Ambassador, something she describes as a dream come true.
“What makes this partnership so meaningful is that it isn’t just about sponsorship,” she says. “It’s built on genuine alignment.
“BMW is a brand that celebrates those who go against the grain, and my own journey as a woman of color building my team in motorsports speaks to that same kind of spirit of pushing boundaries and redefining expectations.”
More than racing
If there’s one business lesson that stands out since she started STR, it’s that racing is as much about what happens off the track as on it. She views the belief that talent alone will carry you as one of the biggest misconceptions about motorsport today.
“It’s unfortunate, but the truth is that you can be the fastest driver in the world, but without a strong brand and the ability to attract partners, you won’t have a sustainable career,” she says.
The strategy to build a brand that is authentic and differentiated, not just to fans but to sponsors, is deliberate.
“From the beginning, I knew I wanted to do more than simply race.”
“From the beginning, I knew I wanted to do more than simply race,” Tan explains.
“I wanted to tell stories and build a platform that truly reflected who I was as a young woman of color, navigating a space that wasn’t built for people like me.”
By embracing the things that set her apart, instead of trying to blend in, Tan has been able to create deeper connections with partners and audiences. They take pride in the team’s race cars donning bold, creative liveries instead of generic striping and celebrate how Tan seamlessly blends beauty and fashion into motorsport, often sharing snapshots on social media of her impeccably manicured nails gripping the steering wheel.
A motivation mindset
Embracing her so-called feminine traits – such as empathy, intuition, collaboration and even fashion and storytelling – has given Tan a quiet power in an environment built around toughness and grit.
It’s also allowed her to connect with new audiences, inspire younger fans and bring more women into the sport. Yet Tan still finds herself in rooms where she has to prove not only that she belongs, but that what she is building is worth betting on.
“There’s this unspoken double standard where women, especially in leadership, are expected to overdeliver just to be taken seriously,” she points out. “The bar is higher, the scrutiny is very sharp and that margin for error feels small.”
Rather than let herself be discouraged, she has used this as motivation and fuel to be even better prepared and more intentional and strategic.
“I’ve learned how to articulate our value clearly, not just in terms of results on track, but in terms of social media, content creation, brand alignment and global reach,” Tan says.
She has also learned to embrace her visibility as a form of resistance.
“For a very long time, I was the only girl in the paddock, and I never had a role model that looked like me,” she says, acknowledging that it was an absence that created self-doubt at the beginning of her career.
“If I didn’t have a role model who looked like me, maybe I could become that person for someone else.”
Over time, she realized the power of shifting that perspective.
“If I didn’t have a role model who looked like me, maybe I could become that person for someone else,” she says.
That mindset became her motivation.
“I knew that my potential would eventually outgrow that box that everybody tried to put me in and that if I stayed committed and worked hard and focused on my performance, I could be the one reshaping perceptions of what’s possible for female racers,” she says.
Tan has come to embrace that her presence alone is a form of disruption, but she’s nowhere near finished.
“My role is evolving from competitor to catalyst,” she enthuses.
“I want to be a part of reshaping the future of motorsports by showing that success can look different. It can be more inclusive, and it can be more human – whether it’s mentoring younger drivers or influencing brands to back diverse talent.
“I truly see it all as a part of my responsibility now,” she says.
Additional images: George Bucur, Madeleine Hordinski, Victor Chadarov and Wini Lao
