Monaco Grand Prix 2012 - Report

Mark Webber took his first win of the season with a finely-judged drive around the streets of Monaco, making it six different winners in as many races in the process. The Australian was made to fend off a queue of cars during the closing stages of the race as rain threatened to arrive, Nico Rosberg and Fernando Alonso completing the podium positions.

Webber began the race from pole position, but only set the second fastest time in Q3 as Michael Schumacher, a five-time winner at the principality, set the pace. His shunt with Bruno Senna last time out at Catalunya however meant that he would begin sixth, with Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg joining Webber’s Red Bull on the front row. Lewis Hamilton lined up third ahead of Romain Grosjean, with Fernando Alonso the final man to begin ahead of Schumacher.

Webber made an uncharacteristically good start and lead Rosberg and Hamilton into the first corner, but as is typical at Monaco there was chaos at Sainte-Devote further down the order. Grosjean was the first man to hit trouble – the Lotus driver made a slightly slow getaway, and was then pitched into a spin after being squeezed between Schumacher and a fast-starting Alonso.

Kamui Kobayashi was unfortunate enough to collect the stricken Franco-Swiss driver, forcing the Sauber into retirement with damaged suspension. Pastor Maldonado meanwhile hit the back of Pedro de la Rosa’s HRT, eliminating both drivers from the race as well; the Spanish Grand Prix winner had qualified ninth, but was demoted to the rear of the grid through a combination of penalties for being deemed to have made deliberate contact with Sergio Perez’s Sauber during final practice and a gearbox change.

The Safety car was briefly scrambled for two laps, with the order being Webber from Rosberg, Hamilton, Alonso, Massa, Sebastian Vettel (who cut the first corner to avoid Grosjean but wasn’t penalised), Kimi Raikkonen and Schumacher. As the race got underway once more, Webber was able to slowly edge away from Rosberg, with Massa at first pressurising his more illustrious teammate. As the track cooled as the first stint went on however, Alonso was able to shake off his teammate and begin to hassle Hamilton.

With the threat of rain ever-present, the teams were eager to delay the pit-stops as long as possible to avoid having to make an extra stop on to wet-weather tyres. The first man among the lead runners to switch from the super-softs to the softs was Rosberg, who did so at the end of lap 29. Two laps later, Webber and Hamilton followed suit, with Alonso pitting on lap 30 and Massa on lap 31. A superb in-lap by Alonso combined with a quick pit-stop from the Ferrari mechanics allowed the Spaniard to get ahead of Hamilton into third position.

All of this left Vettel in control of the race, the German having not set a time in Q3 on Saturday and thus giving him the privilege of starting the race on soft tyres. Vettel was able to set the pace with the benefit of clean air, but unable to stretch the 20-second gap required to be able to pit and retain his lead. With an advantage of around 16 seconds, Vettel headed for the pits for a set of super-softs on lap 46, slotting in between Alonso and Hamilton in fourth position.

Webber found himself back in the lead, albeit with Rosberg still just a couple of seconds behind the Red Bull. It seemed as if the outcome of the race was all but decided, but light rain did materialise with a handful of laps to go which closed the top six to within five seconds. With none of the leaders able to overtake during the dying stages of the race, Webber duly crossed the finish line to take his second Monaco victory. Rosberg held on for second position from Alonso, Vettel and Hamilton, Massa taking a season-best finish of sixth place which may allay rumours of his replacement for a couple of races yet.

Paul di Resta quietly ascended the order into seventh having begun on softs, with his Force India teammate Nico Hulkenberg collecting a handy eighth position. Raikkonen meanwhile finished ninth in a difficult race, compounding a miserable weekend for Lotus who began the weekend as the favourites for many onlookers. Bruno Senna in the sole remaining Williams collected the final point of the afternoon with tenth position.

Perez’s maiden race at Monaco was nothing short of catastrophe. The Mexican crashed his Sauber at the Swimming Pool chicane during the first part of qualifying on Saturday after suffering a mysterious steering failure, meaning he would start from the rear of the grid. Having negotiated the first corner carnage, the Mexican was handed a drive-through penalty for impeding Raikkonen as he entered the pits for his scheduled pit-stop before then spinning his Sauber at Sainte-Devote trying to overtake the Caterham of Heikki Kovalainen. He finally crossed the line in eleventh place.

Twelfth position fell to Toro Rosso driver Jean-Eric Vergne, who had made his way up to an excellent seventh place with two stints on soft tyres. The team was then faced with the choice of ending on super-softs or intermediates: they opted for the latter, and Vergne subsequently tumbled down the order with insufficient rain on the circuit to make the intermediates work. Kovalainen, Timo Glock for Marussia and Narain Karthikeyan for HRT completed the list of finishers in a race of unusually high attrition.

Jenson Button was another man to endure a disappointing weekend, qualifying in twelfth and spending the bulk of his race behind Kovalainen following the first-corner mix-up. The Brit failed to complete the race, hitting the back of the Finn’s Caterham at the Swimming Pool several laps from home. Michael Schumacher was on course for seventh position after over-hauling Raikkonen during the pit-stops, but ground to a halt late on with fuel pressure problems. Daniel Ricciardo retired after damaging his steering, whilst Charles Pic and Vitaly Petrov succumbed tp electronics gremlins, leaving just fifteen drivers to take the chequered flag.

Alonso now leads the championship race by three points, Vettel and Webber joint in second position with Hamilton a further ten points adrift. A sixth winner not only breaks the record for the most different race winners from the start of the season, but also means now we have had more different winners this year in six races as we had throughout the entirety of last year. With several others who one would strongly suspect will be able to add themselves to that list in the not-too-distant future, the title fight looks set to rage all season long. I for one wouldn’t like to bet who will come out on top.

Monaco Grand Prix 2012 - Preview

Needless to say, Monaco is a unique event on the Formula One calendar. It may no longer be the only street circuit, but the combination of prestige, glamour and the matchless challenge for the drivers quite rightly makes it one of motorsport’s unofficial ‘Triple Crown’ events – the other two being the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Indianapolis 500, which incidentally also takes place this weekend.

As per last year, it will be the soft and super-soft tyre compounds that will be available this weekend, while the rules regarding DRS are also unchanged: during practice and qualifying, the system will be unusable through the tunnel section, whilst the DRS zone will again be the start/finish straight on the approach to the first corner of Sainte-Devote. Even with DRS and tyre degradation however, passing remains next to impossible at Monaco, as evidenced by Sebastian Vettel holding off the marauding Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button on extremely aged tyres en route to a win at the principality last year.

Determining who will be in contention in this year's event, or indeed any F1 race this year it seems, has become nigh on impossible. In fact, Pirelli have been accused in some quarters of creating an ‘impossible challenge’ for the F1 teams this season, and Mark Webber is also on record as saying he thinks that too much variety in terms of winning drivers will turn off the fans. Whilst I still maintain that tyre performance is still having too much bearing on who’s hot and who’s not, having many different winners is certainly no bad thing – remember having eleven different winners back in the roller-coaster season that was 1982?

Someone, somewhere, undoubtedly made a tidy sum two weeks ago with odds for a Pastor Maldonado victory said to be in the region of 500/1. Heading into Monaco, some bookmakers are offering as little as 10/1 for the Venezuelan to make it two in a row at a circuit for which he justifiably has a certain fondness: he was on course for his first career points last season before being bungled into the barriers by a certain Lewis Hamilton, and has won there both in GP2 and Formula Renault 3.5. A second successive win is certainly a long shot, more so than the bookies would have you believe, but if the Williams can perform equally well another visit to the podium seems a plausible outcome.

Maldonado’s success has inevitably put pressure on his teammate Bruno Senna, with rumours already circulating that Williams are preparing to slot in their current reserve Valtteri Bottas alongside Maldonado for 2013. This seems somewhat premature, particularly as Senna has already banked two excellent finishes at Malaysia (sixth) and China (seventh), but admittedly he has tended to qualify considerably further down the grid that F1’s most recent race-winner. The Brazilian nonetheless has also won around the Monegasque streets in GP2, so now would be as good a time as any to prove he can match Maldonado.

The other star of Catalunya was Lewis Hamilton. The Brit, who after being excluded from qualifying charged through the field with a two-stop strategy to take a commendable eighth place, will be a threat to take an overdue first win of the year. More so than any other track, qualifying is the key, so if the Brit can bag a third pole position of the season, half the battle is won. The second McLaren of Jenson Button has had two lacklustre races on the trot, and seems to be struggling to achieve the perfect balance without which he has recently proved unable to fulfil his or the car’s potential. A good result this weekend is required to get a season that started so brilliantly at Melbourne back on track.

Red Bull have taken the last two wins at Monaco, but then again so they had at Catalunya where Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber disappointingly finished sixth and eleventh respectively. It appeared at Bahrain that normal service had been resumed, but as with every other team Red Bull still have a long way to go when it comes to understanding the nuances of the Pirelli tyres. Nico Rosberg’s breakthrough success at China also appears to have been something of a false dawn, with the Mercedes still struggling with tyre wear more than most. Michael Schumacher will also be greatly hindered by a five-place grid penalty as a result of slamming into the back of Senna’s car last time out.

Fernando Alonso can never be ruled out, and considering how close the Spaniard came to winning at perhaps the most aero-dependent track of the year, the Ferrari appears to have made a genuine step forward. Well, at least one of them had – Felipe Massa’s performance last time out was about as far away from that of Alonso as it’s ever been. It seems that the team is finally losing patience, with Ferrari president Luca di Montezemelo expecting a ‘change of gear’ this weekend from the Brazilian. 

Both Sauber drivers have been mooted as potential replacements for Massa, and not without good reason. Perez was on course to qualify strongly at Monaco last year before his heavy qualifying shunt, whilst Kobayashi took a career-best finish of fifth, which he incidentally matched two weeks ago at Catalunya. Seeing either of them on the podium would come as no real surprise, whilst the Lotus team appear capable of making it six winning teams in as many races. Kimi Raikkonen is no stranger to winning around the streets of Monaco, having done so back in 2005, whilst Romain Grosjean has won here in GP2. The Lotus car has had genuine race-winning pace for the last two races, and there’s no reason why that should be about to change.

Qualifying Prediction

1. Hamilton, 2. Alonso, 3. Raikkonen, 4. Grosjean, 5. Vettel, 6. Maldonado, 7. Button, 8. Webber, 9. Perez, 10. Rosberg

Race Prediction

1. Hamilton, 2. Alonso, 3. Raikkonen, 4. Vettel, 5. Grosjean, 6. Button, 7. Maldonado, 8. Perez, 9. Rosberg, 10. Kobayashi

Track position is king at Monaco, making the pole-sitter a strong bet for victory. According to that logic, Hamilton will do the double, with Alonso hot on his heels. Raikkonen will be in with a shout, but the Lotus has so far raced better than it has qualified, meaning a win is unlikely for the Finn. Vettel may be able to leapfrog Grosjean during the stops, but the Red Bull with the exception of Bahrain hasn’t been excellent in a single lap so far this season. Button will do likewise with Maldonado, but his qualifying performances have been consistently lacking in comparison to Hamilton, particularly considering the narrow spread in performance among the top runners. Perez and Kobayashi will finish either side of Rosberg, whose car wouldn’t appear to be particularly suited to this circuit, with Webber’s bad luck continuing with a second successive non-score following a disappointing Saturday.

Spanish Grand Prix 2012 - Report

Pastor Maldonado took his first ever victory and the first in eight years for his Williams team with an exemplary drive at the Spanish Grand Prix. The Venezuelan fended off home hero Fernando Alonso during the closing stages of the race, becoming the first driver from his country to take the top step of the Formula One podium.

Maldonado was the unexpected pole-sitter when Lewis Hamilton, who had qualified half-a-second clear of the field, was excluded from qualifying and thus made to start from the back of the grid. The McLaren driver coasted to a halt immediately after setting his fastest lap in order to ensure a sufficient sample of fuel would be available for scrutineering, but the stewards ruled that this contravened the rules as the fuel shortage was a result only of human error on the part of the McLaren team.

Hamilton could at least take comfort from the fact that most of his championship rivals also suffered a poor qualifying session – his teammate Jenson Button failed to even make the Q3 cut on merit, qualifying eleventh (tenth after Hamilton’s penalty), with Red Bull’s Mark Webber one place behind. Sebastian Vettel did make it into the final session, but elected to save tyres and only set sector times en route to seventh on the grid. Alonso would on the other hand start alongside Maldonado in second place, with the two Lotus cars of Romain Grosjean and Kimi Raikkonen occupying the second row.

At the start, Alonso replicated his excellent getaway of last year to out-drag Maldonado during the approach to the first corner to lead in front of his adoring fans. Behind, Raikkonen was able to move ahead of teammate Grosjean, who in turn made contact with Perez which resulted in a left-rear puncture for the Sauber. Rosberg was thus able to sneak by Grosjean for fourth place, with the sister car of Michael Schumacher gaining two places from its starting position of eighth.

Alonso was able to initially press home his advantage, but Maldonado was surprisingly able to peg the gap at just a few seconds throughout the first stint, during which the entire field was using soft compound tyres. Alonso was first to head for the pits on lap 10, switching to hard tyres, with Maldonado following suit one lap later. Both of the Lotus cars instead opted for a fresh set of softs for their second stints.

Schumacher meanwhile found himself stuck behind the Williams of Bruno Senna after his first pit-stop, and was clearly anxious to pass the Brazilian so as to keep pace with Rosberg and Grosjean ahead. The seven-time champion set himself up to overtake Senna around the outside at the first corner on lap 13 with the help of DRS, but then tried to dart to the inside at the last minute. In his indecision, Schumacher’s car slammed into the back of the hapless Senna, abruptly ending the races of both drivers.

A few laps later, Rosberg was demoted a place by Grosjean at the start of lap 16 with the help of DRS, with Vettel now up to sixth position ahead of Button and Kamui Kobayashi. Back at the front, Maldonado continued to keep race leader Alonso in check, pitting for another set of hard tyres at the end of lap 24. The Venezuelan then put in an excellent out-lap, which combined with Alonso being held up by the lapped Marussia of Charles Pic served to give him the lead after the Spaniard stopped for fresh hards two laps later.

At this stage of the race, Maldonado was on a charge. He incredibly began to get away from Alonso at the start of the third stint, but the two-time champion closed in as the third round of pit-stops loomed. Maldonado made his final stop on lap 42 for a further set of hard tyres, while Alonso followed suit two laps later and resumed just behind his adversary.

Alonso was able to haul his Ferrari to within a second of Maldonado’s Williams, but was never really in a position to make the pass in spite of the assistance from DRS. With a handful of laps to go, Maldonado began to ease away again, whilst Alonso was forced to shift his focus to defending second position from Raikkonen, who had been reducing the gap between himself and his Ferrari successor at a rate of over a second per lap throughout the final stint.

Maldonado therefore duly crossed the line to take a well deserved maiden career victory, Alonso taking a joint championship lead alongside Vettel with second position. Both of the Lotus cars lost ground during the second stint with their ill-judged choice to equip softs, Raikkonen and Grosjean thus consigned to third and fourth places despite their eye-catching end-of-race pace.

Behind the top four, there were a number of exciting battles for position. Kobayashi made up for the disappointment of Perez’s early disaster by overtaking Button during the second stint at turn five and Rosberg during the final stint at turn ten, also taking advantage of a drive-through penalty for Vettel to take a superb fifth position. Vettel’s penalty was administered for ignoring yellow flags, and after dropping from sixth to ninth was able to recover his position by making his way back ahead of Button, a recovering Hamilton, and Rosberg, whose tyres were shot to pieces by the end of the race.

The Mercedes driver was nonetheless able to fend off Hamilton, who put in a spirited drive from last place on the grid. The Brit put off his first pit-stop all the way to lap 14, at which point he had climbed all the way up to fourth place. The McLaren pit crew made another minor blunder as Hamilton was forced to bounce over an errant tyre as he left his pit-box, but a long, fast second stint put the former champion into contention for a decent amount of points. The only driver to pull off a two-stop strategy, Hamilton ultimately came within a whisker of overhauling the struggling Rosberg and finished a valiant eighth.

Button finished in ninth, having struggled to get to grips with the hard tyre all weekend. Nico Hulkenberg put barely a foot wrong to claim the final point for Force India, holding up Webber all the way to the chequered flag. The Australian was the first to switch from soft to hard tyres, but found himself caught up in traffic and failed to make much headway before losing further time with a nose change during his second pit-stop. Jean-Eric Vergne came home twelfth for Toro Rosso ahead of teammate Daniel Ricciardo and the second Force India of Paul di Resta, while Felipe Massa endured another difficult race as he too was penalised for ignoring yellow flags – the Brazilian ended up a lowly fifteenth place.

Heikki Kovalainen and Vitaly Petrov finished sixteenth and seventeenth for Caterham, ahead of Timo Glock’s Marussia and the HRT of Pedro de la Rosa. Along with Schumacher and Senna, also failing to complete the race were Perez, whose wheel came loose after his second pit-stop, Pic, who suffered a driveshaft failure shortly after being handed a penalty for holding up Alonso, and Narain Karthikeyan, who parked his HRT early on due to a wheelnut issue.

Maldonado’s incredible performance has given us a fifth winner in as many races, and the pace of Lotus would suggest there’s every chance of that particular streak being extended. With the top seven drivers separated by just twenty points, we are still almost none the wiser after a quarter of the season’s races as to just who will be heading to Brazil with an eye on the title. The expectation heading into the 2012 season was that it had the makings of a classic, but nobody could have expected the degree of unpredictability and openness we have enjoyed so far. Long may it continue.                                                                                                            

Spanish Grand Prix 2012 - Preview

The Catalunya circuit has something of a reputation for providing Formula One fans with their clearest picture yet of the pecking order among the teams of the grid, and not without good reason.

With its mixture of fast and medium-speed corners, Catalunya provides the most rigorous test of aerodynamic efficiency on the calendar, meaning any shortcomings in the aero department will be brutally exposed. What’s more, the first appearance of the season of Pirelli’s hard tyre compound alongside the soft is likely to make excessive tyre wear less of an issue that it has been so far. Both of these factors combined with a layout where overtaking has traditionally been tricky at best stand to give us our best idea yet of who’s where.

Perhaps the team with most to gain from last week’s in-season test at Mugello was Ferrari, co-incidentally the most vocal proponent of the test. The Italian team trialled a raft of upgrades including new exhausts and revised rear bodywork, but the impact was less than had been hoped for. Ferrari however insists that there are more modifications set to be debuted today during practice as well as further updates in the pipeline for Canada and Valencia, but a podium finish at home for Fernando Alonso still seems some way off even if the scarlet cars should be closer to the pace than they have been up to now.

Based on the last race alone, you’d be hard-pressed to bet against Red Bull to make it two victories on the bounce. The team has won at Catalunya during each of the last two years with both Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, and the former looked as if he had recaptured his title-winning form as he controlled the race at Bahrain throughout notwithstanding the late challenge from Kimi Raikkonen’s Lotus. Webber on the other hand racked up a distant, fourth successive fourth place finish, upon which he’ll soon need to improve to keep his teammate in his sights as far as points are concerned. The recent rumour that Ferrari have approached Webber as a potential teammate for Alonso next season can nonetheless be viewed as a compliment, even if it may be a tad wide of the mark in reality.

McLaren meanwhile have arguably failed to capitalise on their strong start to their season.  Lewis Hamilton’s early pole positions at Melbourne and Malaysia already seem some time ago now, particularly after a disappointing outing at Bahrain whereupon Hamilton finished a lowly eighth place following two botched pit-stops and Jenson Button retired from a hardly awe-inspiring seventh place after a near-simultaneous differential and exhaust failure. The British squad will use the new, higher nose design for this race seen at the Mugello test in order to try and revive their fortunes for this race, although the team somewhat curiously elected to use solely its test drivers Gary Paffett and Oliver Turvey at the test – whether this will prove a disadvantage to Hamilton and Button remains to be seen.

Lotus is the only team that can realistically keep the trend of different winning teams alive. Both Raikkonen and teammate Romain Grosjean performed near-flawlessly at Bahrain, and both should theoretically be in the hunt for another podium finish this time around.  It’s worth noting that Grosjean was the fastest man across the three days at Mugello, though the Enstone-based team can expect a larger degree of opposition than it had last time around with tyre wear being less crucial. Mercedes on the other hand should benefit from this situation, but the layout of the Catalunya circuit is rather different to that of Shanghai were the Silver Arrows were dominant. The car’s performance at Bahrain, where Nico Rosberg finished fifth, can probably be interpreted as a more realistic representation of the team’s performance level, the team along with Lotus and Red Bull having only trialled very minor updates at the Mugello test.

One of the biggest talking points this week has been Michael Schumacher’s criticisms of the Pirelli tyres; namely that tyre management now plays too big a part in deciding the outcome of races as drivers are unable to push to the maximum in order to preserve their rubber. It’s easy to overlook these comments as the petulant grumblings of a man who virtually had tyres designed specifically for his driving style by Bridgestone back during the early 2000s. However, he does have a point, and there is an argument to say that rapidly degrading tyres are, whilst entertaining, contrary to the prevailing ethos in F1 of vorsprung durch technik. I appreciate I may be in a minority on this, but I still yearn for the days of the good ole’ fashioned tyre war, where the drivers could drive balls-out for the entire race distance.

Of the midfield teams, Force India and Williams made the largest changes at Mugello with revised exhaust layouts, although the Sauber team (complete with Chelsea FC decals for this weekend) still looks the pick of the mid-field bunch. Even so, points for any of the teams outside the new ‘big five’ will in all likelihood depend on misfortunes befalling the drivers of these teams, particularly since the updates Ferrari have brought to the table should make Felipe Massa a more competitive proposition.

Qualifying Prediction:

1. Vettel, 2. Hamilton, 3. Webber, 4. Button, 5. Rosberg, 6. Raikkonen, 7. Alonso, 8. Grosjean, 9. Schumacher, 10. Maldonado

Race Prediction:

1. Vettel, 2. Webber, 3. Raikkonen, 4. Hamilton, 5. Alonso, 6. Button, 7. Grosjean, 8. Rosberg, 9. Massa, 10. Perez

The Red Bull car has suited Catalunya perfectly in the past, and the evidence suggests things will be no different this time around. That’s why I have no choice but to predict another lights-to-flag performance from Vettel, with Webber some distance behind. Hamilton will qualifying strongly as usual, but his race pace seemed inferior to that of Red Bull and Lotus at Bahrain even without his pit-lane dramas. Therefore I’m forecasting a second successive podium for Raikkonen, albeit with Grosjean further behind as he struggles to pass Alonso and Button on a track where overtaking has always been a challenge. Something tells me Mercedes will be the least competitive of the top teams in race trim, leaving Rosberg eighth and Schumacher outside the points, with Ferrari driver Massa and Ferrari driver-elect Perez rounding out the top ten.

Women in F1

Without a shadow of a doubt, throughout its history Formula One has predominantly been a man’s world. All the drivers along with the majority of the engineers, mechanics, journalists, marshals and race officials have been, after all, male, with the role of women traditionally having been restricted to the odd pit-lane reporter, glamorous grid girl and the nervous girlfriend/wife willing their partner on from the pits. But, with ladies now perhaps playing a bigger role in motorsport than they have done ever before, this state of affairs may not be destined to last.

Admittedly, there have been woman drivers in F1 in the past, but their results don’t make for earth-shattering reading. The first, the Italian Maria Teresa de Filippis, participated in three grand prix at the wheel of a privately-entered Maserati 250F in 1958, finishing tenth and last at Spa and retiring at the other two at Porto and Monza with mechanical failure. Seventeen years would pass before another woman got a crack at the F1 whip, in the form of another Italian, Lella Lombardi. She was somewhat more successful, even scoring half-a-point in her second race – the tragic, shortened 1975 Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuic – for the March team.

Though Lombardi failed to add to that tally in her remaining ten races, she was to find greater success in sports car racing and touring car racing before tragically dying of cancer in 1992. In the meantime, three other women tried but failed to qualify for an F1 race: Divina Galica in 1976-8, Desiré Wilson in 1980 and most recently Giovanna Amati in 1992. It should also be noted that Wilson is often billed as the only female F1 driver to have won a race, but this isn’t entirely accurate. The race in question is the first Brands Hatch round of the 1980 Aurora F1 Series, a short-lived British-based championship open to F1 machinery amongst other things. To put Wilson’s achievement into perspective, the winner of that year’s Aurora championship was Emilio de Villota, who himself only ever qualified for just two World Championship races in 1977.

Outside F1 however, two women in particular have enjoyed somewhat more success. The first is Michele Mouton, who won four World Rally Championship events en route to coming a close second behind Walter Rohrl in the championship in 1982 at the wheel of an Audi Quattro. Though she was unable to challenge for the crown after that, placing fifth in 1983 and twelfth in a part-time 1984 campaign, she had certainly made an impression on her competitors and the media, Autosport in particular giving her the lofty title of ‘motorsport’s most successful ever female driver’. When you consider how close she came to taking the WRC title, it’s hard to disagree.

The other is Danica Patrick, who caused a media frenzy in 2008 when she became the first woman to win an IndyCar race at Motegi. There’s no doubting Patrick is talented, even if she did lack the required consistency, particularly on road courses, to mount a coherent challenge for the IndyCar title before she defected to NASCAR this year. For all her talent though, she is perhaps better known as motorsport’s foremost pin-up girl, and you’ll soon see what I mean if you type her name into Google Images – on the first page, you’ll find no images of her at the wheel of a racing car, and only a couple of her wearing racing overalls. In fact, in most of them, she’s not wearing much at all. It would therefore seem her strong performances in IndyCar seem to be of secondary importance to her slim and attractive physique to her sponsors, and more pertinently the US public in general.

Patrick is far from the only woman to have participated in IndyCar in recent times, though she is the only one to have been able to challenge her male counterparts regularly; Sarah Fisher, Milka Duno, Simona de Silvestro, Ana Beatriz and Pippa Mann have all graced IndyCar grids in recent years, albeit with precious little in the way of hard results to show for their efforts. DTM is another series which has seen fairly strong female representation in recent years, Mercedes-Benz and Audi having each had a single female driver on their books. Susie Wolff (née Stoddart) has been driving for the former since 2006, but has up to now achieved just two top-eight finishes in 62 attempts. Audi meanwhile have enjoyed the services of Vanina Ickx (daughter of Le Mans legend Jacky), Katherine Legge and Rahel Frey, though none of the trio have ever finished inside the top ten in a DTM race so far.

Wolff recently became a development driver for the Williams team, but despite the outfit’s protestations to the contrary one can’t help but get the feeling her marriage to Williams shareholder Toto played a part in this particular appointment, particularly bearing in mind her less-than-stellar DTM results. Likewise, the uninspiring form of Maria de Villota (daughter of the aforementioned Emilio de Villota) in Spanish F3, Formula Palmer Audi and the football-themed Superleague Formula would hardly merit her recent hiring as a test driver for Marussia if not for her gender. Furthermore, Sebastien Buemi’s cousin Natacha Gachnang showed some promise in the lower formulae at one stage by finishing third in Spanish F3 in 2008, but her career has stalled off the back of some disappointing results in Formula 2 and Auto GP.

When it comes to identifying where F1’s next woman driver is going to come from, GP3 suggests itself as the obvious place to look with no fewer than three female drivers present there in this year’s championship. While the indifferent results of Carmen Jorda and Vicky Piria in Spanish F3 and Formula Abarth respectively don’t exactly mark them out as likely candidates for a future F1 drive, the record of Britain’s Alice Powell warrants a somewhat more optimistic outlook. The 19-year-old won the second-tier BARC Formula Renault championship in 2010, and performed solidly in the main Formula Renault UK series the following season, placing ninth in the championship. More to the point, she has looked by far the most convincing of the three ladies of GP3 in pre-season testing, making her perhaps the best prospect of having another woman emulate de Filippis and Lombardi in the near future.

Still, you wouldn’t feel entirely comfortable staking your life on such an outcome. What is a safe bet on the other hand is that in just a couple of years, the sport will be able to boast its first female team principal. I am of course referring to Sauber’s CEO Monisha Kaltenborn, who stands to take over from Peter Sauber upon his impending retirement. This is arguably a far more significant development than would be another woman taking a place on the F1 grid, as it will hopefully drive (see what I did there?) women on to get themselves more involved in motorsport in areas other than driving. F1 may still be primarily a man’s world, but there’s no doubt that women in ten or twenty years’ time have the potential to make that the case no longer.