There are 20 drivers in a Formula One championship. Look at the 2019 line-up and you’ll see competitors from 15 different countries and at varying stages in their career. The youngest, McLaren’s Lando Norris, is just 19; the oldest, Sauber’s Kimi Räikkönen, is 39. But they have one thing in common: they are all men.
This isn’t unusual. Only two women have raced in an F1 Grand Prix: Maria Teresa de Filippis in the 1950s and fellow Italian Lella Lombardi in the 1970s. While there have been female development and test drivers in F1 since then (including British driver Susie Wolff), no women have competed in a race for over 40 years. Lombardi remains the only female driver ever to have scored points.
A new motor racing series aims to redress the balance. W Series, which is holding its first racing programme this summer, sees 18 drivers compete for a top prize of $500,000 (£380,000). They are all women.
The point of W Series is to identify and support female talent, with the ultimate aim of propelling female drivers into other, mixed-gender racing series such as F3, F2, Formula E and of course F1. In the short term, this means directly providing female drivers with the experience and funding they need to advance in their careers; in the longer term, W Series also hopes to create role models at the highest levels of motorsport who may then make other female drivers more attractive to sponsors.
Five of the drivers selected for the inaugural 2019 championship are from the UK. Esmee Hawkey, 21, started racing at the age of eight. She had been pursuing dance as a hobby, but caught the motorsport bug after seeing her dad race. “I threw away the ballet and tap-dancing shoes and jumped into a car,” she says.
All of the competitors are already accomplished on the track. Sarah Moore, 25, won the Ginetta Junior championship in 2009, making her the first female driver to win a mixed-gender UK national series. Alice Powell, 26, became the first woman to win a Formula Renault championship in 2010 and, two years later, the first to win points in GP3. Jamie Chadwick, 21, won the British GT championship in 2015, and last year became the first female British F3 winner. Chadwick has also proven herself the one to watch so far in W Series, having taken first place in the first race in Hockenheim, Germany, and second place in the second race in Zolder, Belgium, to lead the driver standings. Powell is third, following Dutch racer Beitske Visser in second.
Despite the British drivers' achievements, however, in the lead-up to W Series only Chadwick was managing to race full-time. The others all point to the same issue as holding back their racing careers: the difficulty of getting sponsorship. “I haven’t been racing for the past three or four years, just because of sponsorship,” says Powell. She coaches other drivers and works with her dad on a building site (at least the labouring is a good workout for racing, she jokes).
The W Series differs from other racing series in that it is fully-funded and free to enter, meaning the drivers do not have to pay to race and are selected only on talent. The total prize pot is $1.5 million (£1.1 million). The series is currently funded by chairman Sean Wadsworth, who sold his recruitment firm Frank Recruitment for around £200 million in 2016 and is a friend of former British F1 driver David Coulthard.
Some in motorsport, such as Indycar driver Pippa Mann, have criticised the series as segregating women, and have suggested that the money would be better spent mentoring girls in existing junior series. But given the comparable costs of backing a young driver through their career, W Series sees a female-only competition as the most effective and sustainable way to spread opportunity furthest, with the end goal not to separate female drivers from their male peers but to boost their participation in motorsport overall.
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The W Series championship consists of six races in total, with the final taking place at the Brands Hatch circuit in Kent in August. The W Series car, the Tatuus F3 T-318, is a single-seater designed to F3 specifications and includes some features recognisable from F1, such as the “halo” safety device around the cockpit.
It’s the first time some of the drivers have been in a car with such downforce. “I had to adapt my gym routine quite a bit, because the racing I’ve done in the past is different to the training you need in the W Series,” says Moore. She is used to driving sports cars, which usually have power steering, and so has been focusing on her upper-body and grip strength. “The Formula 3 car is a lot more physical,” she says.
The drivers are quick to dismiss any suggestion that the physical demands of racing could put them at a disadvantage to their male counterparts, however; this is one sport where men and women can compete on an equal footing. “There are differences in how we’re built, but you can be race-fit,” says Hawkey. “We can train our bodies so that we can race cars just as fast as men can.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
