W Series end is a dark day for female racers: F1 seats should be based on merit not money

In a lot of sports the reason women aren’t competing in the biggest tournaments is pretty obvious: they’re separated by gender. Historically, the marketing and money has gone into men’s sports, so they have the largest audience and salaries.

In motorsport, the old argument doesn’t hold: men and women can and occasionally do compete directly against each other, so why hasn’t there been a woman entered into an F1 race for more than 30 years?

It was a question W Series, an all-female, junior championship set out to address. The series went into administration last week, to heartbroken tributes from its drivers and staff and a few ‘I told you so’ nods from the wider industry.

Its financial troubles had been getting worse since last year, when what turned out to be its final season got cut short.

The determination to get back on track in 2023 couldn’t be matched to funding and W Series went the way a lot of women’s driving careers do: running out of money way before it could show its potential.

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Fewer little girls get taken karting and even fewer get entered into serious competition. Of the ones that do, 
not many get into the good, factory karting teams.

There’s less belief they’re worth scouting into cars, even if they’re karting champions like Jess Hawkins. Even if they win a car championship, like Alice Powell, it’s hard for them to convince good teams to back them to the next step.

Women consistently haven’t made it to the top flight of motorsport, so it’s treated like a waste of a seat, even when they have the funding. Which they usually don’t because it’s hard to persuade sponsors to part with hundreds of thousands of pounds for a career there’s very little belief in the industry a woman can achieve.

It’s not totally true that motorsport always used to be mixed-sex, although women competed from the earliest days. The 24 hours Of Le Mans just celebrated its centenary year, with all-female team Iron Dames competing for the GT podium into the final hours of the race.

But from 1957 to 1971 women were banned from the race, a sequel to an earlier outright ban on women in French motorsport in 1904. Women were banned from British racing meets from 1908 to 1920 and the American Automobile Association banned women drivers from its events in 1909.

Despite that, pioneers such as Maria Teresa de Filippis (the first woman to drive in F1), Lella Lombardi (the first woman to finish in a points position in F1) and Michele Mouton (multiple World Rally Championship stage winner and title contender) did reach the top of the sport. But they’re always outliers, rarities and becoming rarer. Part of the problem is in the last 30 years the route to becoming a top-flight driver has, not wrongly, extended.

Rather than being a playground for anyone rich enough to arrive and drive there are standards for how experienced and proven you have to be to get a license for high-level competition.

Women don’t struggle to meet the grade but they do always lack track time compared to their male peers– and every step on the ladder is another point someone can pull the rug out from under them by not giving them an opportunity.

W Series funded all its drivers seats and handed them out based on merit based on global auditions. That might seem how sport ought to work but in cars it’s just not the case; politics and nepotism playing roles as big as the numbers on cheques to get a chance.

Last year F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali declared a woman wouldn’t get to F1 in the next five years, which is pretty self-fulfilling for drivers trying to do that. F1 Academy is, so far, a poor alternative. Hidden away and with a smaller field, it’s no replacement for W Series’ ability to challenge the idea there were no women to pick from, that the gender split in motorsport is normal.

It’s the W Series drivers who’ll be least surprised. When the season was cut short in 2022, CEO Catherine Bond Muir, still fighting to keep the series alive, said that the drivers told her: ‘This is what we’ve dealt with for 20 years. We’ve had promises of money, we’ve had contractual commitments for money and it hasn’t come through.

‘We’ve had lots of people saying they’re going to support us and it doesn’t happen.’

Kidology is king when Williams are in the not-so-fast lane

It’s been miserable at Williams for a few years. New team principal James Vowles recently had to explain that seeing their car was less complex than Red Bull’s or Mercedes wasn’t really necessary to know it was a lot worse, you could just look at the times.

Their factory facilities are so out of date the FIA is set to let them breach the cost cap to bring them into the 21st century.

So in an otherwise pretty tedious Canadian Grand Prix it was really good to see the team get Alex Albon home in seventh – their best finish since 2021 – even if they did have to lie to him about how long he was going to have to manage defending against a line of faster cars.

Albon says his engineer told him there were only 20 laps to go when there were actually 35, which proves a new, sporting motivation of pretending you can do it – and that feels like the kind of thing we could all subscribe to.

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