We’ve been keeping ourselves busy with racing and preparation over the past few weeks, with Aenore Rose continuing to race in the Diamond Drive Cup and making an appearance in Racing Club International’s Friday GT Sprint Challenge. While she is the only active driver at the moment, we are preparing Ruby Acosta’s debut on iRacing for the Mermaids GT3 Series. Here’s a concise summary of our activities through the past few weeks. After Diamond Drive Cup Round 2, Ruby Acosta was expected to continue her campaign and make an appearance at Bathurst. However due to personal issues she elected to sign out from the championship and take a mental health break for the week to regroup. Aenore continued on as the sole Queens’ Design driver for the series, but it didn’t seem to bother her a single bit as she took another dominating victory to keep the streak alive. In the same week, Aenore entered in the Friday GT Sprint Challenge also taking place at Bathurst and managed to qualify 3rd in a very competitive field behind Joona Savolainen and pole sitter Joe McAuley. Breaking past McAuley in the early stages she found herself stuck to the back of Savolainen throughout the race, and although she couldn’t manage to win at the mountain she kept the Finnish driver honest with a 4 second gap. Although her win streak within all RCI events was broken, she still managed to find a spot on the podium once again, exhibiting her excellent pace and racing skill against an even tougher grid.
Round 4 of Diamond Drive Cup at a rainy Donington Park proved to be challenging for Aenore as she struggled with health issues throughout the race. Fighting through lightheadedness didn’t stop her, once again achieving a pole, fastest lap and race victory in the moist conditions. She elected to not partake in the following Friday GT Sprint Challenge round that week due to the same health issues. Round 5 of Diamond Drive Cup at Zolder continued to be no issue for Aenore, as yet again she managed the perfect weekend all wrapped up with yet another win to her record. The final round consisted of two 30 minute sprint races with no mandatory stops at Spa-Francorchamps, in which Aenore found herself starting on pole position once more for the first and second race. Leading every minute in both races and managing to stay clear of trouble behind her, she managed to put together a seemingly impossible two perfect seasons in a row, scoring the maximum amount of points in 12 consecutive rounds.
Aenore was also featured in VCO’s new magazine “Send It”, in which she describes current issues within the sim racing industry pertaining to diversity and inclusion. Recounting multiple experiences, she brings a lot of eye-opening recounts of how women, GSRM and BIPOC individuals have been left out and even harassed inside of sim racing spaces. It challenges the notion that sim racing at its current state is completely inclusive, documenting multiple cases of just the opposite despite its lower entry compared to real life motorsport.
Recently Ruby Acosta announced that she will be racing in Season 4 of the Mermaids GT3 Series hosted on iRacing. The championship features teams such as Prismatic Motorsports, Go for the Gap Racing and +Movement Racing who have also pushed for progressive ideologies in the sim racing industry. Sticking to the BMW M4 GT3, it will prove to be a new challenge for the Queens’ Design. We wish her the best of luck! Recently our driver Kaine Luna has suffered an issue with her hardware and we ask for any help with either advice for sending packages to Brazil or financial support. Hopefully soon she can get racing again and replicate her fantastic debut season from earlier.
And with that, we’d like to thank our fans and supporters as always for following us every step of the way. With your support we grow bigger every day and get one step closer to achieve our goals. We hope to have more exciting news in future, so keep in touch with our Twitter account @QueensEsports to stay updated wherever you go. Until then, happy racing, and trans rights!