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.