“Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. … It’s not going to happen.” That’s what Regina George, the meanest girl in 2004’s Mean Girls, tells a hanger-on who is hoping to gain favor by coining a synonym for “cool.” While “fetch” never happened, the admonishing phrase certainly did, escaping the movie and becoming a meme for all the hoped-for but eventually hopeless things — Google+, Android tablets — that the general public simply doesn’t want.
In October of 2022, the “W Series,” a free-to-enter, female-only open-wheel racing league using Formula 3 cars two levels below the F1 cars you see on Drive to Survive, canceled the rest of its season and declared bankruptcy. The raison d’etre of the W Series had been somewhere between logically dubious and downright stupid. Its logic had been, in essence, this: The only way to ensure women can compete against men at the highest levels of motorsport is to make sure they don’t have to compete against men on the way there. Much of the racing world looked at its failure and said something along the lines of “Stop trying to make women’s-only pro racing happen. It’s not going to happen.”
That, however, didn’t stop Formula One from immediately reenacting the W Series as something called “F1 Academy.” F1 Academy works like so: The relatively poky F3 cars of W Series have been replaced by even slower “F4” cars. They are the opening act for Formula 2, which in turn is the opening act for Formula One at several events. Each F1 team must “hire” a female driver to drive in the series and put its livery on that driver’s car.
This is bizarre for a few reasons. There are already multiple F4 and Formula Regional leagues around the world. None of them prohibits female drivers, and most already have at least one woman participating on a regular basis. The gap from “F1 Academy” to F1 is roughly equivalent to the gap between middle school football and the NFL. The F4 cars themselves, although they look professional, are slower than many amateur race cars, including the “Radical” series driven by 12-year-old boys, your 52-year-old author, and many competitors who have long been collecting Social Security. On a full Formula One track, the cars are small and slow enough to look like they are merely pace-lapping. It’s not compelling spectator material.
Not that it really matters. F1 is no stranger to what may be fairly called performative wokeness. When they aren’t busy printing money through lucrative deals with autocratic and conflict-ridden venues like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Azerbaijan, the sport’s directors adore cringe-worthy stunts like the mandatory “#EndRacism” driver T-shirts of 2020, or hiring a “sustainability director” for a schedule that reportedly creates 256,551 tons of CO2 emissions per year. It’s hard to imagine that F1’s senior people see the Academy as anything but additional window dressing to distract from some unpleasant truths regarding their product.
Chief among those truths is the fact that money, not gender, is the real barrier to entry in racing. It often costs well over a million dollars, starting around the age of five, to train a child to the point where he or she might be eligible for sponsorship besides the Bank of Mom and Dad. A season in F4, the destination for most 15-year-old prospects, costs a minimum of $150,000 but can soar to three times that. About half of the current F1 grid comes from wealth; the other half typically secured a long-term sponsor early on. Lando Norris, winner of the Miami Grand Prix, has a father who retired at 36 with a nine-figure net worth. Sergio Perez has a personal relationship with billionaire Carlos Slim via family connections.
Another problem is the physical nature of Formula One itself. Jamie Chadwick, who won the W Series championship three times, has publicly questioned whether it’s possible for women to drive the current cars at their limit for an entire race, a sentiment echoed by a female former F1 test driver, Carmen Jorda. A study of female athletes showed that their average VO2 max, a measure of aerobic capacity and potential strength, was about half that of an F1 driver. Even the fittest men struggle at times. When F2 standout Oliver Bearman was unexpectedly drafted into an F1 race for Ferrari, he was unable to hold his head straight for 90 minutes of 5g cornering, and ended up denting the car’s headrest surround with his uncontrolled helmet. This doesn’t mean that there are no women capable of driving the car, of course, merely that fewer of them, by percentage, will have what it takes.
Last but not least, there is the fact that although women make up 13% of competitive youth kart racers, only about half of them do any racing past karts. And the rate of attrition among female racers over time is higher than that of their male counterparts. Walk through any karting paddock and you’ll quickly observe an open secret that somehow never makes it into the sports media: there are a lot of girls whose fathers all but force them to race karts, and those girls quit the moment they can make their own choices. This, too, reduces the pool of available Formula One prospects.
Against these realities, you have the magical thinking of F1’s polling, which tells them that more than 80% of their fans believe there will be female drivers in the sport within 10 years. Anything short of this outcome will be seen, however unreasonably, as discriminatory. Which explains much of F1 Academy, from the novice-friendly cars to the forced team affiliations that allow these lightly trained and credentialed drivers to dress, act, and post on social media like they are proper Formula One participants.
It’s obvious, therefore, that the real purpose of F1 Academy is to keep a multibillion-dollar business rolling along without interruption, rather than to actually create top-level opportunities for female drivers. The irony is that F1 Academy standouts may find themselves being compared, likely unfavorably, to women like Sophia Flörsch, who has scored points against men in the F3 series competing against men, and who called the W Series “a step back on a sporting level” upon its introduction.
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Miss Flörsch is not alone. Your author is married to a female racer with multiple wins and series championships, all earned against men. She never misses an F1 race, but has zero interest in the Academy. “What’s the point of it? Racing against each other instead of the men they’d see in Formula One? They should…”
“…stop trying to make it happen?” I suggested.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.
