With the Formula One championship done and dusted, the tension and urgency of a title fight will be sorely lacking at this Sunday’s US Grand Prix. However, another championship will be decided in Austin where F1’s attempt to return a woman to the grid reaches the climax of its first season at the Circuit of the Americas. For the all-female F1 Academy this is both a finale and also a precursor for grander ambitions.
The series’ managing director, Susie Wolff, is fired up by bringing her drivers to the F1 undercard and encouraged by the positive results from the Academy’s inaugural season.
“Our message around Austin is we have arrived and we are just getting started,” she says. “We will rock up and be bold, we are not there to be just a little support series off the back of the paddock. We want to inspire. We want to do things differently. We have been disruptive and that meant we have come up against challenges where people say: ‘That’s not how it’s been done in the past.’ So I say: ‘Well, this is how we want to do it in future.’”
On Saturday and Sunday the final three rounds of the season will take place for the 15 drivers who make up the Academy. Spain’s Marta García is in pole position to take the title. She leads the championship by 48 points from Switzerland’s Léna Bühler and by 56 from the Emirati driver Hamda Al Qubaisi. Races one and three in Austin offer 25 points to the winner, with 10 for the driver taking the shorter second race, while extra points are available for pole position and the fastest lap.
Drivers are competing for the win but are also part of the grander plan, a concerted effort to bring more women into motorsport and ultimately F1, which has not had a woman start a grand prix since Lella Lombardi raced in Austria in 1976.
Wolff, a former Williams development and test driver, is frank about the scale of the task that still lies ahead and how her role goes far beyond simply putting 15 women on track: “When I spoke to a lot of people in the sport, including the F1 team principals, they said they would get involved but asked: ‘You are just putting a plaster on the problem, how are you going to solve the problem?’
“The problem is a lack of participation. Female participation in any form of motorsport has never gone above 5%. The focus for me, as well as the operational side of running the series, is about using the platform to make sure we are changing perceptions, to show that there are opportunities for women, that they have a place in motorsport.”
Working toward this bigger picture, the first season has already made great strides. Competing at a full F1 weekend will be new to the majority of drivers in the Academy but it is something they must get used to. Next year all seven rounds of the series will be hosted at F1 race meetings. Moreover the series is expected to shortly announce it has completed a deal to be broadcast live on TV in 2024.
Equally, the Academy has already made what is the single biggest step in changing perceptions by persuading all 10 F1 teams to partner with the series such that each one will have a nominated driver competing under their team name and using their livery next season.
Crucially for Wolff, who only views segregation from men’s competition as a means to an end, there has been a focus on ensuring progression. The championship winner will receive a fully funded drive in another series – a step up the ladder – which will be announced next week.
Before the season began Wolff warned it might take as long as a decade to return a woman to F1 but the progress made since has given her cause to reassess. When the flag falls on the championship in Austin it will represent only the beginning of the future for women in F1.
“I have changed my viewpoint now,” she says. “It’s still going to be a big challenge but it is doable and with the F1 teams on board that is going to speed the process up. I don’t want to raise expectations, it’s not going to happen in the next three years but it is absolutely possible.”
