Formula One car racing is a vibrant, quick-paced sport that has fans from all over the world. Recently, young women have joined the sport’s fan base in sizable numbers. But while women may be tuning in to races, they aren’t seeing themselves as athletes in the competition. The vast majority of racers are men, and in the upper divisions — F1 and F2 — no women are competing at all.
Racers will typically begin participating in the sport from a very young age, with some starting before they are 6 years old. As competitors get older, the number of girls involved seems to drop. Some of this could be due to the expense required, but culture may also play a role.
“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Glynn Hill, a reporter at The Washington Post, about why this major gender gap exists. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: Could you, in a nutshell, give us the sort of feeder system — how you get from the lower levels of racing all the way up to F1, please?
Glynn Hill: Yeah, that’s a great place to start. So envision a pyramid, and then we’re going to start from the bottom going up. At the bottom of that pyramid is karting, as in go-karting. From there you graduate to Formula Four, or what is called a Formula Three Regional series. And then from there, the next step would likely be Formula Three. The difference between Formula Three and Formula Three Regional is that the latter is regional championships, as the name suggests. So, Formula Three Regional Japan, Formula Three Regional Middle East. And then Formula Three proper is an international racing series a bit more akin to Formula One. And so you go up from Formula Three to Formula Two to Formula One at the top.
Ryssdal: And there has not been a woman racing in Formula One in, I want to say decades, but it’s been, like, 50, 60-something years.
Hill: It’s been a long time, yes.
Ryssdal: How come?
Hill: So there’s a myriad of reasons. Part of it is that I don’t think Formula One was really interested in or investing in women, and so for decades, I think that was part of the story. The other part of it is, I think, a broader issue, right? Before we even get started, we need to mention that this is not, you know, travel soccer or even Little League Baseball. This is an extremely cost-prohibitive sport, and so that in and of itself limits the people who can participate. And even if you can muster the resources to participate, it greatly affects how long you can participate in the sport. So I think that’s a huge part of it as well, and that’s something that affects, that affects everyone.
Ryssdal: Yeah. Talk to me then about this F1 Academy — how it started and what it is supposed to be doing.
Hill: So just to give you some brief history, there was a league that preceded F1 Academy called the W Series, and that tried to address the very financial concerns that I just hinted at. That lasted from 2019 to 2022. It ultimately essentially filed for bankruptcy. F1 Academy sort of emerges as the W Series is folding, and it’s trying to essentially create a pipeline for women at the point where they tend to struggle most in their motor sports careers, which is in that sort of F4, F3 Regional window as they’re transitioning up from karting. So they’re trying to provide resources. It’s not quite the same as W Series, but they have substantial backing from Formula One and Formula One’s owner, Liberty Media, to try to provide the resources to create this pipeline for women to succeed in the sport, or at least elevate them a bit further.
Ryssdal: Right, and that gets me to the business model of this thing, right? Liberty Media is a business. F1 is business. We’ve all seen “Drive to Survive” on Netflix — and if you haven’t, you should check it out because it’s superinteresting — but it’s all guys, right? It’s all male drivers. And now comes F1 Academy at a time when women’s sports are really hot — women’s soccer, women’s basketball with Caitlin Clark. I mean, this is truly a business opportunity if they do it right.
Hill: Oh, absolutely. And I mean, that’s a huge part of this story is that over the last decade, Formula One has grown exponentially, and a big part of that is women who are fueling that growth. They make up 42% of Formula One’s fan base, and young women specifically make up its fastest-growing demographic within that fan base. So yeah, I mean, part of this is — and F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali will say as much — part of this is in response to people asking these questions: Where are the female drivers? Why don’t I see greater representation?
Ryssdal: All right, so the put-up-or-shut-up question: Do you think this is going to work? I mean, it’s going to take years, but do you think it’s going to work?
Hill: I would say I’m cautiously hopeful, cautiously optimistic.
Ryssdal: Fair enough.
