12/27/2022
From The New York Times sports section:
Motorsports Is Looking for the Next Danica Patrick. And the One After That.
Despite a push for greater diversity, female drivers remain a rarity in top racing series like Formula 1, NASCAR and IndyCar.
By Gregory Leporati
Dec. 26, 2022It has been 14 years since Danica Patrick became the first woman to win a top-class race in a major motorsports series. At the time, pundits predicted her victory in IndyCar would usher in a new era of female racers.
But today’s landscape shows a more complicated picture.
For every success, there have been even more setbacks. There currently are no women driving full time in Formula 1, IndyCar or NASCAR — and, historically, very few have ever competed, even though these series are not exclusive to men. The Indianapolis 500 had featured at least one woman in its field for 20 straight races starting in 2000, but none participated in two of the past three seasons. And the W Series, a women’s racing league that runs as part of Formula 1 grand prix weekends, canceled its 2022 season prematurely because of funding problems. …
Racing is fairly dynastic, with famous multigenerational family names like the Andrettis and Unsers. Women partake in dynasties too.
Susie Wolff, a British former racecar driver who has worked in various roles within motorsports, agrees that increasing gender diversity in racing behind the scenes is essential to ultimately producing more female racers.
“It’s not just about putting a girl in the car,” Wolff said. “There are generally 20 or 30 drivers on track, but thousands involved in making a race happen. On-track drivers get the most publicity, but it has to be much more than that.”
Wolff knows firsthand what it is like to be one of the few women in a racing garage. In 2012, she signed as a testing and development driver for the Williams Formula 1 team, and two years later she became the first woman since 1992 to participate as a driver in a Formula 1 race weekend. In the summer of 2018, she became the team principal of Venturi Racing, a team in the electric racing series Formula E. She said she has been met with skepticism at every job she’s ever taken.
“I will never forget when I was announced as team principal,” she said. “I was with 16 journalists, and the first question was, ‘What qualifies you for this job?’ The second question was, ‘Did your husband get you this job?’ And the third question: ‘How can you manage the travel involved, since you just had a baby?’” Wolff is married to Toto Wolff, the longstanding team principal of the Mercedes Formula 1 team.
Toto Wolff is a billionaire who owns 30% of the dominant racing team, Mercedes Formula 1, in the world over the last decade. He appears to have started out as a race car driver and then leveraged that fame to get into the investment business. But, he appears to be a really competent guy about motor racing.
So, yes, women can belong to dynasties too.
Interestingly, the top driver in the world over the last decade, Wolff’s racer Sir Lewis Hamilton, who has won a record 103 F1 races, is diverse: he has a black father from the Caribbean.
All this raises an interesting question (being interesting, it’s not raised by The New York Times): What is biologically keeping women from being top race car drivers? Is it the g-forces simply require too much upper body strength to handle winding Formula 1 tracks? What about less twisty NASCAR and Indy tracks?
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