Long a bastion of male heterosexuality, Formula One is a sport that for years positively revelled in all that went with it. The drivers living a glamorous high-life alongside beautiful women was sold to the extent that it became intrinsically linked with F1’s image. Change is happening for the better but as some of those in the sport note it has been a long time coming.
On Sunday when the former driver Ralf Schumacher came out as being in a same-sex relationship, he was only the third F1 driver to have done so since the championship began in 1950. Schumacher, brother of the seven-time world champion Michael, raced between 1997 and 2007 and was married for 14 years to Cora Schumacher, a former model, before they separated in 2015. Nonetheless rumours about his personal life persisted during his time in F1 and afterwards.
F1 has always sold itself on the drivers being gladiatorial characters, of the race-fast and party-hard variety, the latter as a matter of course expected to take place with beautiful women. How extensive this was evident in the rightly now defunct grid girls, a sexualised normality where scantily clad models holding the grid boards was an unquestioned given for decades. Indeed one that actually formed part of the F1 fantasy, part even of the aspirational notion the sport was promoting.
Of course then this must have felt equally as repressive for anyone who did not fit within this narrow heterosexual stereotype. Yet even as the world changed, F1 perhaps moved more slowly than most.
Matt Bishop is the former editor of F1 Racing magazine and joined McLaren as director of communications in 2008. He went on to join Aston Martin as chief communications officer in 2021 and now heads his own PR agency, Diagonal Communications, during which time he has handled four different world champions: Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button, Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel.
He was the first openly gay man in the F1 paddock, unashamed of his sexuality as he had been all his life. Last year when I interviewed him for my book F1 Racing Confidential he recalled an extraordinary event which happened in the years shortly after he had started at McLaren.
“I did get some homophobia, most of which was said behind the back but there was one driver who I won’t name who called me the ‘fat faggot’ habitually and to my face,” he said.
On one occasion the driver in question did so by shouting the abuse across the paddock. Bishop ignored it but the driver Alex Wurz confronted the man and told him off in no uncertain terms. Wurz and Bishop are now close friends and Wurz is the chair of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association.
Under such forthright leadership Formula One has in recent years made a concerted effort to improve its equality, diversity and inclusion and these moves, led since it was taken over by Liberty Media, can be felt. What Bishop underwent is now unthinkable and there is still a long way to go but attitudes have fundamentally changed.
Bishop was also one of the founders of the Racing Pride organisation which promotes LGBTQ+ inclusivity across all motor sport. Its aims and F1’s efforts have been very vocally and publicly supported by drivers such as Hamilton and Vettel, as well as teams and the FIA.
They have made a difference. F1 now has many LGBTQ+ personnel working within it and from the driver perspective there is much less of a sense that coming out today would be of the detrimental impact it would once have been.
In the past this was categorically a major issue. The most high-profile racing driver to have previously come out was Hurley Haywood, who had an enormously successful sports car career including winning the Le Mans 24 Hours three times and the Daytona 24 Hours five times. Throughout his career Haywood was inevitably pictured alongside female models, yet he was gay and it was an open secret in the paddock. But as he admitted, he remained afraid to say so publicly, concerned he would lose his fans and his career.
The 76-year-old retired in 2012 and came out in 2018 after a young fan had told him he had been bullied his entire life because he was gay and felt “worthless”. Haywood told him to be himself. “I told him, it’s not what you are, it’s who you are. It’s the who that people remember,” he said. Years later the boy’s mother thanked Haywood, saying he had saved her son’s life. It gave Haywood the encouragement he needed to come out publicly in the hope doing so would make a difference to more lives.
Schumacher’s decision to similarly go public will hopefully have a similar impact on drivers within motor racing and those entering it. As Haywood noted in 2019, change is coming, not flat out by any means but it is coming. “Racing is evolving,” he said. “I think those barriers that stand in the way are gradually being knocked down.”
