British Expats - Iran - women in motorsports

Iran’s Women Get Green Light to Take Part in Motorsports
This is an unexpected report from a theocracy - women being allowed to participate in motorsports. Good for them.

When a companion and I were hitching in Turkey fifty or so years ago we were picked up by a group of five Iranians (aged late 20s or early 30s) who were driving almost-new Mercedes cars back home from Germany. The group included one woman as one of the drivers. This was in the Shah's time, when Iran was quite Westernised. The Shah ran a nasty police-state, but women were allowed more freedoms than they probably have now in the Islamic state.

(Somewhere east of Tabriz, one of the male drivers drove carelessly and nearly wrecked the car he was driving. They had no reserve drivers, so I ended up driving his Mercedes into Tehran, in the middle of the convoy, with my companion beside me. We found it hugely amusing, to have been promoted so suddenly! After Tehran, it was back to hitching, of course. Sigh.)