Milling around in the pit garages with their cars, the Cove family look completely at home — a soft, unhurried choreography held together by instinct rather than instruction. Members’ Day at Wanneroo Raceway has a different energy to a normal round; the pressure is gone, the year’s work is done, and instead of lap times or championship points, the only agenda is giving the people who support you all season a reason to smile. The afternoon was warm and comfortable, the breeze slipping gently across the lush grass banks and carrying conversation from one garage to the next. High, wispy clouds passed overhead, and the whole place felt lighter, almost suspended in time.
The Coves — Naomi and Troy, their four kids, and a rotating cast of partners, friends, sponsors, and schoolmates — greeted people with the kind of warmth that made you feel like you’d walked into a family barbecue rather than a technical sport. Their pit bay felt lived-in in all the right ways: helmets stacked, tools laid out neatly, water bottles half-full and forgotten between runs. When Ashleigh rolled back in from her session, her grin announced her long before her Excel did.
“They call me Crashly,” she said the moment she hopped out, laughing at herself as though she’d rehearsed the line. “Round one, I wrote my car off, and now it’s stuck. Crash-Leigh, Smash, Ash — whatever.”
It didn’t bother her. If anything, it was fuel. Fear and courage sit in the same seat in motorsport, and she has learned to hold them both.
“Turn Six is where I went off,” she explained, the memory already softened around the edges. “So the first time I went back through, I went really slow. I just needed to know I could do it again — trust myself, trust the car.” Then, with a shrug and a little flick of pride, “I didn’t struggle with it today. I’ve got it now. Woo!”
She has a brightness that fills a space. “Being here is my peace of mind,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Everyone’s like, ‘the beach is my happy place’ — nah. I’ve got the track.”
Her rituals are just as endearing. “If the round’s on Saturday, I watch Cars on Friday night. I have to. Last round I couldn’t find it anywhere and I nearly lost it. Mum actually paid for it on some streaming thing so I could watch it.”
A few metres away, Charlotte leaned against the side of her brother’s Excel, watching her little sister with affectionate amusement. At eighteen, she has a composure that feels more disciplined than her age — a steadiness shaped by resilience and sharpened by ambition. Where Ashleigh is spontaneous warmth, Charlotte is the clear, articulate edge of a blade.
“Collie is my favourite,” she said simply, but with conviction. “Love it to bits. It’s technical, it rewards you, Turn One is just… perfect.”
She talked about her crash there as though it was less a setback and more an initiation rite. “It sounds weird, but it was honestly one of the best experiences. I smashed into the wall, and when I came back from it, I felt even more confident. Like, okay, I can do this. I know the car has more to give, and I know I have more to give.”
In her world, adversity has never been a dead end — only a reroute. Years earlier, a Polaris rollover awarded her a degloving injury that left her hand needing more than thirty stitches, and before that, an incident involving a dirt bike, a Bobcat, and some hay bales. She can retell those stories with dry humour now, but they left their marks. Evidence of grit.
What makes the Cove girls’ rise even more compelling is how hard they’ve worked for every inch of it.
Her race-day rituals lean quirky: beef jerky, pickle socks, pickles for cramps, and Eminem — always Eminem. She is also, almost casually, a high achiever: school captain, Long Tan Award winner twice, recipient of a $12,000 scholarship to study law and criminology at Murdoch. “Networking from motorsport definitely helps,” she said. “I’ll talk to anyone. I love talking.”
Her philosophy for other girls thinking of entering the sport was as sharp as her racing: “Don’t try to be me. Individuality is everything in this sport. Promote yourself. Speak loud. Ask questions. You will make mistakes — one week ago I put my car into a wall — but what matters is how you come back. Make connections, keep them strong, and respect your volunteers.”
Watching her daughters speak, Naomi moves through the pit bay with quiet intention. There’s nothing flashy about the way she commands the space; it’s the command of someone who knows every bolt, every schedule, every habit, and every risk. She smiled when she tells the story.
“I blame my husband entirely,” Naomi says, laughing. “He bought a Datsun 280Z, and once Lachlan got the bug, it became one-in, all-in.”
Her love for motorsport is intimately tied to watching her kids become themselves. “The girls continually grow in confidence doing something outside the box. I love that.”
But she has lived through the hardest edges of this sport too.
“Ashley’s night crash… that was awful,” she said, her voice serious. “I counted the cars coming back and she wasn’t one of them. Two days in hospital, in a neck brace — thank God it was precautionary.” She paused, then added, “Lachlan’s fire was terrifying too. And when Charlotte hit the wall at Collie last weekend, her comms dropped out and I couldn’t hear her. I kept calling, ‘Charlotte, are you okay?’ Nothing. That was a long 10 or 15 minutes.”
But in between fear and frustration, joy threads through everything. “The kids sing over comms to test their radios,” she said. “One sings a line, then another one, then they all sing the chorus. We just stand there listening.”
Around them, the day kept rolling. The younger kids — not just Hudson but all the paddock’s little people — bounced between the stands and the grassy banks, those thick, lush slopes so green they almost glowed in the afternoon light. No parent hovered, but every adult kept a casual eye on them, that unspoken it-takes-a-village vigilance. A fall in the grass wasn’t a crisis; a cuddle was always within reach if it was needed.
Every few minutes, another group drifted toward pit-lane. Warm-up. Two paced laps. Cool-down. Cars in, cars out. Families regrouping, GoPros charging, passengers swapping seats between friends, partners and sponsors. It all had that relaxed, end-of-season tempo — not slow, not rushed, just content.
Through it all, Troy and Lachlan moved in ways that didn’t need attention but deserved appreciation. Troy’s competitive streak sits at the heart of the family’s racing DNA, but he carries it gently, through preparation and quiet advice. Lachlan — the first racer — stepped between the cars with a calm competence, checking tyres, tightening wheel bolts, making space for his sisters to shine together.
As the sun began to slip lower, the paddock softened with it. From the top of Turn Five, the visibility stretched on for what felt like kilometres — the long summer light catching the kerbs painted crisp red-and-white, the surface looking almost brand-new, as if the track were getting ready for a season instead of settling in for its break. The grassy spectator areas glowed; the sky leaned into gold.
The Coves packed in that same easy choreography they’d begun the day with — folding chairs, coiling cords, brushing gravel from tyres, teasing each other, laughing. A family bound not by performance, but by presence.
A family where the women are absolutely central — supported, encouraged, and completely unstoppable.
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