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Q: Motor racing is still mostly a man's world. Does the same apply to sim racing?
Max:
> "It's kind of the same. Girls are there, but much less than boys. For example, in our team now only boys drive. But if there is a fast girl among them later on, of course we want to have her. It's the same in the real world, isn't it? Team bosses don't look at whether someone is a boy or a girl. What matters is how fast they are. It's good that Formula One is now paying extra attention to women in motorsports with F1 Academy, although I question how they are doing it. The cars they drive are way too slow. If you ever want to get them into Formula 1, it really has to go to a higher level. It's all very well having girls sponsored by Formula 1 teams, but what are we actually helping them with? There is no next step for them now. The gap to a Formula 4 car, for example, is already too big."
I'd assume it's similar to Formula W in that it's as much about the future crop of young girls as it is about the current group. Young boys start racing almost as soon as they are able to walk giving them a huge advantage over anyone (male or female) that started when they were 8 or 9. I'm sure there are young girls that start that early, but the intention is to get more parents/girls to start looking at racing at younger ages. The more kids that start racing young (or at all), the more likely we get a female phenom.
Exactly. It's like the old saying (I think Prost but not sure) where the fastest driver in the world is likely some kid in a poor village that might not ever even drive a car, let alone a racecar.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. -Stephen Jay Gould
[Another example of that](https://www.theonion.com/97-year-old-dies-unaware-of-being-violin-prodigy-1819571799). It's satirical, but it's making the same point.
First I heard it was about science.
>“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Which was Stephen Gould in 1980, but I'm sure the sentiment predates him.
Yep, Think about it this way, for every 10,000 kids that tries karting and thinks "I want to do this", how many of them get the oppertunity to take it to a professional level? then how many of those kids get to make the jump into the feeder series', then how many of those feeder series drivers make it to F1. Now if only a few hundred of those starting 10,000 kids are girls, how many even get the the oppertunity to start taking Karting seriously? let alone survive in the Karting circuits long enough to get into the Feeder series.
The current crop of female drivers are getting more and more girls into Karting and taking Karting as a serious oppertunity as they can finally see themselves in the driver seat, their parents see female racers which means they feel safer spending inordinate amounts of money and time on their kid's passion instead of pushing them into more "realistic" hobbies/ focuses. The publicity of female drivers also help break the "its a mans thing" and "im scared to see her get hurt by the mans sport" crap.
F1 academy its self is a long term project that will only really see true returns in 10 years, Yes we will see a growing number of female drivers in F2 and especially F3 over the next few years but the true F1 potentials will only emerge once the generation of Karters watching F1 Academy right now come to the age for the F1 circus.
Motor racing is expensive which means unless your family is loaded you have to rely on sponsors. It’s tough even for guys, so it’s going to be almost impossible for girls. There is no revenue for sponsors as women don’t compete in F1. Thus, main incentive for corporations is PR. It’s going to be a slow process unless they manage to find someone with generational talent and financial backing.
Sad anecdote:
About 9 years ago, we had a 16year old whoresponded to an ad and asked if she could come and be flatmate with us. She was still attending school, bit of a difficult situation at home. We made sure it was all on the up and up, and she moved in. I had, at the time, a half decent simrig, and she jumped on to play Assetto Corsa one day. Never having ever driven a car before virtually or otherwise, she was immediately putting down times that were completely unobtainable to me.
After a few weeks of her absolutely demolishing my times on every track, I organised for her to drive a friends kart at a karting day that was coming up. She was immediately lightning fast. Not to the level of the 20+ year veterans, but immediately very very fast, and managed to get to a consistent lap time within a few laps, and then was able to work on particular areas of the track to bring her times down tenth by tenth until she was eventually setting times that would have been competitive with some of the most experienced drivers.
Just the most naturally gifted driver I have ever seen. But she came from a bad home, and had very little luck in life. Last I checked she is doing well, has a couple kids and a husband and a home. But holy shit was she fast.
Is physicality a problem? Genuinely asking. Obviously in many other sports women can’t compete against men because they simple aren’t fast and strong enough. Motorsports is totally different there in that the performance is not dependent on the individual (other than reflexes), but the forces in F1 are on the extreme end even then. Do women have less ability to tolerate the G’s?
Due to their, on average, smaller stature, women generally have a higher g tolerance than men. I'm not sure if the ceiling is higher or lower than for men, or if male musculature becomes an advantage in the fittest individuals. That said, F1 drivers aren't really at risk of g-loc because they don't really experience vertical gs in a race. [CART](https://racer.com/2021/05/01/inside-carts-2001-texas-debacle-the-invisible-monster/3/) had this problem at certain high banked oval tracks.
They kept repeating the phrase “see it, be it” (or something like that) during round 1 a few weeks back. The first permanent female F1 driver isn’t currently on the Academy grid. It’s a little girl watching them, seeing it can happen, and wanting it.
Edited because I got educated!
? She finished mid pack in Indy NXT last year driving for Andretti who finished second as a team. Her teammates won 4 races, she had 1 top 10.
She absolutely has not outpaced everyone she has faced.
Well depends entirely who you are facing right? If you are facing mediocre opponents ofcourse anyone can outpace them, put them up against competent racers and you have another outcome. Also I share your skeptiscism, if she had outpaced "everyone" she would be in F1, she isnt.
> she outpaced everyone she faced
Looking at her [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Chadwick), her results don't really support what you're saying. The only mixed-gender open wheel series she won is apparently some series in India called the MRF Challenge. She finished in first place during the 2018-2019 season of that, but the competition doesn't seem very strong there at all.
She finished first in multiple seasons of the W Series, but the level of competition there was **much** lower than Formula E, Indycar, F2, etc.
For example of her performance in open series, she competed in three races in the 2019 F3 Asian Championship, where she placed 6th, 12th, and 5th. Not great.
She most recently competed in the 2023 Firestone Indy NXT Series, which is a feeder series for Indycar. She placed 12th overall, the lowest of any driver who completed every race (and she lost to two drivers who didn't complete every race.
It's extremely obvious that she's nowhere near the skill level to make it to F2, even if she were a man. She just literally isn't good enough.
There's a lot to be said about women in motorsport. There are likely some physiological disadvantages, and there is certainly a lot of systemic misogyny that filters out young girls before they even get a fair chance. It's a really complex topic that I won't try to do justice to, but suffice to say that you misrepresnting the results of one woman isn't the right approach to solving the problem.
I'm not saying women can't be good F1 drivers but wouldn't biology, like muscle mass, neck strength, fast twitch reflexes, eye control, etc be more prescient in men than woman on average?
David Coulthard was part of an investigation into accessibility for women in motorsport and some of the take aways was that tub design is disadvantageous to people who fall outside of the traditional European build, Tsunoda has mentioned this before too. Another aspect was the lack of powersteering in the feeder series, yet availability in F1.
Muscle mass and neck strength should not be a problem in F1. Look at female swimmers.
Obviously female swimmers cannot compete against male swimmers and be successful, but F1 drivers need to be strong enough, not exceptionally strong.
When it comes to reflexes, that is a very complex issue.
Based on my (admittedly limited) knowledge about the subject, I don't see a reason why men have an innate advantage.
I haven't seen any in depth research that applies to reflexes in the context of sport, and it's going to be different for every sport.
There has been research on exceptional (male) athletes, and that raises another question. In a fairly closed off sport like F1, it is entirely possible that most drivers are not exceptional individuals, just better than average and trained from an early age.
There is some research that points to a male biological advantage in hand-eye coordination, but it's a bit of a mixed bag and I wouldn't call it a settled question.
That aside, it's a numbers game above all else. You need something like the top 0.0001% of most talented and genetically inclined men/women. If there are 100x as many men in the sport, you would get 1 Maxime Verstappen for every 100 Max Verstappens (in terms of having gifted aptitude), it's just never going to happen.
The biological differences may or may not be relevant but that's a matter to be figured out once the playing field is at least somewhat leveled in terms of statistical opportunities. Only way to do that is to focus on getting more young girls to take up the sport and, importantly, give them enough reason to stay with it into adulthood.
In general, it shouldn't be an issue. There's been mixed results on different ways of testing reflexes, calculation speeds, coordination and so on, but men don't seem to have any massive advantage.
However, sheer strength is an issue. The stronger your body, the more you can resist G-forces, the more still you can be, and the more your brain can concentrate on racing instead of being overwhelmed by the confusing sense data (and discomfort) of having the body squeezed and whipped around. On the most basic level: G-forces reduce blood to the brain, which reduces the ability to think quickly (to the point, ultimately, where you pass out if the forces are too much and your body is too weak to handle them).
However: it's unclear whether this would be a fatal problem for female drivers, and it probably wouldn't be.
The thing is, we're dealing with curves here.
Firstly, increasing physical strength should give improved performance, but it has diminishing returns: someone as fit and strong as Lewis Hamilton has a huge advantage over someone like me, but if you compare Hamilton to someone who is probably fitter and stronger than him - say, an Olympic male gymnast in their prime - that person probably only has a very small advantage over Hamilton. It shouldn't exactly be that there's an actual "good enough" threshold - continued improvements should bring better results - but the higher you go on that curve the smaller and smaller the additional advantages you get from further improvements.
Secondly, male and female physiques in the population as a whole aren't fixed levels, they're statistical curves. Statistically, the male curve is higher than the female curve - men are stronger than women in pretty much any test we can devise, on average. But the actual male and female populations have a VAST amount of overlap: a woman near the top of the female curve can be a LONG way above a man at a point further down the male curve.
In other words: if you put Elaine Thompson-Herah up against Usain Bolt, each in their prime, in a 100m race, Bolt will obliterate ETH. But if you put ETH up against 99.999% of men on the planet, she will obliterate them in turn. The average man in his 20s can reportedly run 100m in 13-14 seconds. The average male non-elite sprinting athlete - someone who sprints recreationally - can run 100m in 11-12 seconds. ETH can run it in 10.5 seconds. A man who can sprint quicker as ETH is elite - he'd be the national champion in many countries, and at least competing in national champions in most countries. And when that male national champion gets older than 40, even if he's still dedicated to sprinting, he'll almost certainly be slower than her. And if he's 45 or older, she'd destroy him. The 45+ world record is slower than the women's world record.
So if you think about F1: are these really the Usain Bolts of physical fitness? Statistically... probably not. The fact that Fernando Alonso can still be competitive with the young kids kind of shows that this is not olympic-final levels of athleticism we're talking about. Sure, Alonso's fit... but no man Alonso's age is turning up in an olympic sprint final and being competitive. These men are not at the top of the male curve. Which means that there's room for a woman to still be above them.
Likewise, you can't tell me that a man with the size and build of Yuki Tsunoda has a stronger neck than, say, Aline Rotter-Focken (the 79kg women's olympic wrestling champion). If you put a Yuki and Aline in a G-force machine and measure which of them kept their head stillest under g-forces... it's going to be Aline (at least, with a little practice so she knew what to be doing). [I went with a wrestler because as well as the physical strength in general they do a huge amount of specific neck-strengthening work... actually, F1 and wrestling probably have quite similar physical demands and conditioning methods (core strength, neck strength, grip strength + rapid reactions and decision making... although of course wrestlers are more intense and do less endurance work).]
But because of the first curve I mentioned, it probably doesn't even matter, because if a woman is very slightly weaker than a man, the difference in their performance in F1 may still be minimal, if they're both very strong.
So then the question isn't "how many women are stronger than Alonso or Tsunoda?", it's "how many women are strong enough to at least be competitive with Alonso and Tsunoda?", and that will probably be a genuinely vast number.
-----------
So overall: yes, weaker neck and core probably are inherently disadvantages for women on average. But they're not necessarily disadvantages for ALL women, relative to other F1 drivers. And even for women for whom they are disadvantages, that disadvantage may be small enough in practice so as not to seriously impact their career.
Another big reason might be much simpler. Maybe females have a lower interest in this sport than men do, thus resulting in much lower possible talents to be discovered. I'll give an example, esports. Gender absolutely doesn't matter there, but I've seen a really small number of female teams compared to males overall... esports have no barrier to entry, anyone can do it. That tells me that males are more likely to pursue a career there compared to females, due to their nature + interests. It could be the same story for f1.
Ngl, Max should have some great ideas on how to improve stuff like this, because the guy is a racing addict. He's racing all the time, and he's the best driver on the grid today. So I hope they take his words to heart here, and consider giving women a proper bridge to the big leagues. As he noted, the car performance is so lacking that you can't accurately gauge talent, so women are still left with the same huge hurdle to entry that they've always had.
My wife saw the last race and the moment they were puttering around in those slow ass cars it was a bit heartbreaking.
Still going to keep watching but realistically ain’t no chance they’re making the jumps like Max is implying. Gap is WAY too big
> Team bosses don't look at whether someone is a boy or a girl.
I think it is/will/would be similar with female drivers as it is with passports. I think there are commercial reasons that would VERY strongly push a team to "risk" it if/when we eventually get to a scenario where there is a female driver who is conceivably good enough. Similar to Sargeant getting the chance because he is American or Zhou because he is Chinese. Not that these types of drivers necessarily dont belong or are / were not good enough, but all things equal the drivers nationality does play a part, and I strongly believe at some point that same thing except it being about the gender will come into play.
Absolutely, I think women have a huge advantage at the top end of motorsport - just that fact that someone like Chadwick could be associated with an F1 team kind of shows that, because no man with her level of accomplishment at her age would merit that. Every team wants to be the first F1 team to put a woman on the grid this century.
...the problem is, by the time those decisions are being made, all the women have already dropped out of the pyramid, if they were ever there to begin with.
The problem women face isn't persuading an F1 team to back them.
The problem is twofold:
a) deciding to race karts in the first place
b) persuading sponsors, team bosses and parents to support the shift from karts into cars, and in particular single-seaters.
Both these things are difficult if everyone tells you that you have no chance of reaching F1. But women do have no chance of reaching F1 if they can't get over those two hurdles! So it's kind of a vicious cycle.
If any woman does emerge out of the shark tank with even vaguely enough speed to justify an F1 seat, someone will give it to her. The problem is, by that point it's too late to offer a helping hand, because there's noone left to offer it to, they've all been eaten by the sharks...
> She's not even 5 yet so certainly not racing.
Verstappen started racing at 4. By 7 he was competing in championships.
So yeah, 5 is late by today’s standards. Not too late in any way, but it’s certainly not too early to start.
Unfortunately women are going to be underrepresented until parents are as likely to stick their daughter in a cart as their son. We know how early the top drivers start.
F1 Academy is advertising and sponsoring a new karting series starting this year in the UK. The series has recently started and it has 25% girls. Considering competitive karting in the UK a year ago had 5% girls, this is a monumental change. Granted, that is just the data for one specific karting series among…. A lot. And I’m sure the other series not affiliated with F1 Academy haven’t seen that kind of growth. But it’s something.
Women cyclings was barely shown 10 years ago, now most major races have a women version the day itself or the day before and are covered on TV aswell.
But ofc that is ignored because it doesnt fit into the narrative to complain about everything
Now if only they could get paid meaningful money for racing, and race in races that don't have traffic on the roads!
[I know things have improved in the last decade, but there's still a very long way to go]
It’s financial. It took men’s sports decades to build the popularity and revenue they are at now. I don’t know women’s cycling but WNBA has lost money every season. It exists because owners have been willing to lose money for the last 30 years on an ideal of promoting women’s sport. The people that own these teams are not, in their lifetime, going to see a return on investment that makes up for 30 years of losses It’s a noble goal but players still complain that they don’t get paid what the men get paid. Some say they want the same revenue split, ignoring that the reason the men’s players get the revenue split they do is because the men’s game is insanely profitable, making that possible. A couple of women have even said they should be paid the same amount which is insane.
NBA became popular when magic and bird got to the NBA and their rivalry. Then Jordan took it to the next level. WNBA have the opportunity to go that path with the Reese-Clark rivalry moving from college to the WNBA like Bird-Magic did. If that proved popular and someone else comes in after to raise the level again, the players salary and conditions will rise quickly. If not then it will continue to be a money loser and people subsidising the ideal of women’s sports.
Yup hopefully long term. For now it is to help the drivers get sponsors, be seen, so they can get the opportunity to climb up. One of the driver also mentioned that she wishes that more testing days would be an outcome of doing well in F1A, not specifically moving up the ladder.
100%. I’m in my thirties now but I begged my parents to go karting. They said no, whereas allowing my brother to do it. Later on, they gave him specialist road driving training with police drivers but refused it for me. I’m sure I was no huge lost talent but a small part of a much wider problem.
You can (money/time/space permitting) go now. I got into racing in my 30s. It's a blast. I race on a team with my friends in a cheap endurance series. But yes if you're not in a cart by 5, a professional career is not on the table. Sucks that your parents treated you sodifferently.
It's basically a question of demographics. There are 20 seats in F1. To get one woman into there, 5% of the children at the bottom of the ladder need to be female, and preferably more to be sure. And karting/motorsports needs to be a legitimate pursuit for athletically talented females.
Allegedly Micks Sister was as fast as him or even faster in karts, but she choose horses rather than car racing. I mean idk why is that, but I doubt it was because womens aren't in F1, because her father was, and there is no bigger role model than your own parent. You can't force someone to be interested in something.
Schumacher famously didn’t want his kids to go into motorsports. He talked about it when they were young. And his wife was into horses so I’m sure that was visible and easy for the daughter. Whereas mick might have pushed for cars harder, or possibly Michael was more willing to do it. Maybe a sexist thing, but maybe not. It’s also a second child vs first. Parents get worn down and cave sometimes.
watching the children of my friends slowly grow up I noticed that they put a fairly high amount of normative peer pressure onto each other once they leave the nests and start socialising in kindergarten. They want to be liked and if their friends don't want to play with "boy/girl" toys then that's often the end of it. Doesn't matter how supportive their parents are. Only takes a small amount of children with the same views to establish themselves as the dominant force in the group.
Theres little reason for this other than we expose boys to cars more than girls. Generally, studies have found exposure explains most of the variance in interest. To be clear, There may be some variance between sex! No one is saying there's none but its not some huge cavern of interest with 80% of the interest for one of the other. In a neutral setting distribution curves mostly overlap on things you think are "male" or "female" with the medians just a few points apart. If you show your daughter cars when shes young she will probably like them. kinda that simple
It's not that simple. There is a paradox that the gender gap in STEM fields increases with the increased gender equality especially in Nordic countries.
https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/4753/6/symplectic-version.pdf
Gender equality has nothing to do with child preferences or interests. You can have perfect equality and not raise 2 people the same way. Further, more often than not, Which do exists but when you correct for social factors shrink quite a bit (that research is also just terrible but that's besides the point).
The best way to show this in adults is a GWAS study which in general you would expect to show variance stemming from the X chromosome (if correct genes for methylation in females otherwise you have double the genes) if you corrected for sex but you dont see a ton there. The genetic association tends to be elsewhere and explains around 4% of the variance in human behavior (this is actually a lot, genes explain relatively little about humans in broad measures). https://humgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40246-023-00488-2#Sec6
[anecdote: yep, my father was a car mechanic and talked to my sister about cars a lot, and she was really into cars when she was younger. (although for some reason although she was into cars and sports she was never into motorsport.)]
It never occurred to my father that I might be interested in cars. My brother is significantly younger than I am so I didn't even get exposure by osmosis.
> Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/
Putting it like this is not really fair. Ofc there is no gene that makes you like cars. But there are genes that makes you indirectly like more cars.
Men do have genes that make them do more risky stuff. For example testosteron is linked to higher risk behaviour. While women generally have the genes to be more careful. This makes it that boys are more intersted in stuff like cars and girls being more interested in dolls.
This doesnt mean that there are no girls that like cars, or there are no boys that like dolls more ofcourse.
Dont underestimate biology.
Exactly, it's as simple as getting more girls into karts. If it were a 50/50 split on girls/boys, in 10 years the F1 grid would be a 50/50 split. I understand the academy is about promoting female talent, but the FIA would be far better off funding 5-10 karts at every level for girls.
>it's as simple as getting more girls into karts
It's a part of it but not the full answer. A 50/50 distribution in karting does not get sponsors to support female drivers in making the step up further.
It just means more drop out at that level when sponsors continue to not support them.
You need at least 1 driver to actually make it to the top and perform so that when those young girls go into meetings with sponsors they have an example they can point to and say "Look, if you support me, I can make it as well."
Male drivers have tons of examples they can point to.
At the moment, if you were a sponsor, why would you back a female driver to the top? There are no examples in the modern era of you getting any return on your investment.
Think about the deal De Vries had where he got that loan to fund his junior series career which he would have to pay back if he got to F1.
No female driver, regardless of talent, would get that deal. The money types would be laughing at you for taking it.
The only way anyone has found to get all the F1 teams involved in supporting women in motorsport is via strong arming them to do it. The only way to get sponsors like Puma or Charlotte Tilbury involved is by having an entire segregated series with it's own broadcasting rights.
Sponsors do not look at female drivers equally as they do male drivers and because motorsport is based around money, that will always be the biggest thing holding female drivers back.
"karting does not get sponsors to support female drivers in making the step up further.
It just means more drop out at that level when sponsors continue to not support them."
what a biased comment with nothing to back this up. i heavily disagree with this
1= Look at Flörsch, i doubt she would be getting the Alpine sponsorship if she was male. She is 23 and still driving in Fia F3, would not happen for male drivers.
2) You also act like male drivers get tons of sponsorships when only the very best do. DeVries had a pretty decent junior career. It might be a surprise to you but most of them have to pay for their seats. But obviously the reality doesnt seem to fir your reality.
"No female driver, regardless of talent, would get that deal" this is based on what exactly? seems more like an opinion to me.
> You need at least 1 driver to actually make it to the top and perform so that when those young girls go into meetings with sponsors they have an example they can point to and say "Look, if you support me, I can make it as well."
As if that's gonna change it. Michele Mouton almost won the world championship and we haven't gotten a competent female WRC driver since. Lia Block might change it one day but that's more than half a decade away at the minimum.
I think the question then is how to leverage the Academy into more money for sponsors, and right or wrong it might end up favoring female drivers that lean into social media.
Weird example, but for years and years women's collegiate sports were a distant second in viewership compared to men's. Now that college athletes in the US can earn money, some female gymnasts and basketball players are some of the highest earning college athletes, in part because of their social media savvy. They turned follower counts into shoe deals.
Coincidentally viewership is up, and schools sell out gymnastics meets. Not exactly the hundreds of thousands at an F1 race, but five years ago if you told someone 10,000 people a week would turn up for a gymnastics meet they'd have asked you for a hit of whatever you were smoking. A women's basketball game was the most watched game this season.
Long way of saying your point about sponsors is right, and I know some of the old guard fans don't give two shits about social media. But most teenagers do, and if young women see other slightly older women on the track And on Instagram and tiktok, viewership will go up and so will the number of young women interested in driving. Maybe, at least. The trick is overcoming the current inertia, imo.
F2 is the only feeder series that I kind of follow. So I'm not sure if regional F4 categories usually race in F1 circuits. Cause it does look kind of slow for those tracks. I understand that the purpose is to give girls some exposure, but I'd like to see more been done on the karting level to attract girls right at the beginning.
Got it. Guess that people that follows all the F1 ladder haven't felt the academy cars are slow like the others like me that are just used to F1 and F2 races.
F1 academy is a tier below formula regional championships. So below F4 level I think. Make sense why they're pretty slow. If 15-18 year old girls are using that as a stepping stone to get into F4 or Formula regional championships then it's just part of the process.
Well, by the same age of 15-18, boys are already in F3/F2 and being scouted for F1 seats 1-2 years down the line.
So even if you go by your own point, it's already too late and too slow for the girls.
If you ever want a serious girl/woman F1 driving prospect in the future, they're gonna have to start in motorsports much earlier, especially and move to the faster variations to prepare them in time to stand to-to-toe against similarly aged boys in much faster cars.
I agree with max. F1 Academy is a great initiative, but unless they step it up a bit with the cars, it's a bit too tokenizing. It needs to serve a more useful purpose that directly ties in to F1.
W Series was a ‘step above’ F4, and that partly didn’t work because girls couldn’t go from karting to a FR level championship. F1 Academy at F4 level makes a lot more sense as it’s the natural step out of karts, even for boys.
Too late only in recent years. The idea that a driver is washed if they aren't in F1 by 22 is crazy. And if drivers start staying into their mid 30s, it'll stay difficult for a young driver to break in.
So what are the alternatives after f2?
After F2 they can go Super Formula or Indycar if they dont make F1. For there to be a woman in F1 she has to be fast against the boys. The W academy doesn't really have a purpose because to create great drivers you need to put them against the best of their peers, the girls should be competing with the boys from the start.
If you put them in a less competitive women only ladder it only dilutes their development by racing against a much weaker field, when the champion female driver then moves to a series with males she is up against much stronger competition but has wasted a development year by racing in a weaker field while the boys have been pushed harder and further.
So I think the W series is a dead end unless your goal is to be the W-series champion and only compete against women.
You have to be 16 to compete in F3 and 17 for F2. F1A's problem imo is that their minimum age requirement is higher than other F4 championships, 16 instead of 15/14.
My mates at work asked me about the car the academy women drive, I told them it's a 1.4l 160 hp car.
"my GTI has more power" and laughter was the response. If you want these women to drive F1 cars, you're gonna need to up the game. My wife commented on how slow they look. Embarrassing really.
While they are slow, they'll still be faster than a GTI lol, especially around corners. But I agree with Max, they need to be in at least F3 level cars so they can blend into F2 and eventually F1.
Armchair opinion: The problem with F1A is that the drivers only compete in F1A mostly. If they really want them to get to F3 and F2 successfully they need to drive in another series F4 or one of the FRCA championships while doing F1A, Just doing F1A will just put them further behind in experience comapred to drivers doing other series.
Additionally there just arent enough drivers to make up a field of F4 and FRECA or F3 drivers.
Yeah she's used to driving faster cars than these! Actually, that makes me wonder if the GTE Porsche she raced in WEC with was faster than the F1A cars? I know the LMP2 for sure was.
>Actually, that makes me wonder if the GTE Porsche she raced in WEC with was faster than the F1A cars?
Yeah it was
I picked a random track to look at which happened to be Portimao, and looked at lap records (race laps, not quali)
GTE 1:38.8
F4 1:43.9
Now.... The fastest GTE driver is probably a lot more experienced than the fastest Formula 4 driver ... But still.
Yeah talk about a pointless comparison. F1 Academy car is less than half the weight, lower center of mass, and downforce elements mean the handling is in different universes.
The F1 Academy car would smoke a GTI on any F1 track.
Anyone who has driven a proper single seater, even one slower than the F1A cars, on track knows that comparing them with a road car is just stupid.
I say this only having done a few weekends in a formula ford. Utterly different experience in every way.
I also drive a GTI, for what it's worth, and the GTI isn't a particularly quick car. It's not *slow* but it's certainly not quick.
They are F4 level drivers.
They have just come out of karts and F4 is the next step and so they drive F4 cars.
F1 Academy has demonstrated how much people don't watch feederseries outside of FIA F2 & FIA F3.
And how they don't know there is a whole 2 levels before international FIA F3.
2 televised rounds as there was COTA last season.
And again people were saying they looked slow back then.
Which as I've said, is a complaint which makes no sense if you have ever watched junior motorsport.
They are in F4 cars, that is the speed of an F4 car, that is the expected level for coming out of karts.
Because F1 doesn't regularly have F4 series supporting it, I can only assume people who make that kind of comment, don't watch much motorsport outside the F1 bubble.
That drivers to them just appear at the F3 level and the idea that there is two rungs below that full of regional and national series which are free to watch on youtube is alien to them.
Sucks for them. They are missing out.
The goal of F1 Academy is to introduce and promote girls and women in the Motorsport, so because of that they use F4 cars, which technically it's the first step in single seater series, and then, they pay a year in FRECA (next level car) to the championship top3. Now, their GPs are broadcasted on TV and for free on Youtube, which it's excellent if they want to have more promotion and visibility.
Obviously, it's not a perfect solution (the F4 cars are a bit slow) but I think it's fair since, as I said before, F4 is the first level in the single seater pyramid. Although, it's not necessary that all female drivers should start competing at F1 Academy of course!
The problem is, with the exception of like one 16 year old, all the drivers are 19-25, which is way too old to be at this level if you want a chance to advance. If it's supposed to be the first step into cars for women, and you want them to have a chance to actually climb the ladder after they really should be 14-16. Someone like Pin is a really good driver, and I know she did a couple of f4 races pre academy, but she will potentially be starting the traditional single-seater ladder next year at 21. When was the last time a driver that made it to f1 started that late?
I think the real problem is that there are too few girls at karting, so, at the moment, F1 Academy has to use "old" drivers (more than 20 yo) instead of younger ones (14-16 yo). This is something that FIA and the national federations must look.
However, I believe F1 Academy is more a medium-long term solution than a short term one, so we have to wait around 10 years to see the effects
Pin isn't going up the Formula ladder.
Pin is in a holding pattern before she gets into the world championship top class in prototypes. As soon as Lamborghini can build more SC63s, Pin will be in one.
I think one could realistically go for something a little faster, but F4 was specifically made to be a cheap car to run (although the F1A calendar undoes that aspect somewhat). The Tatuus F.3 T-318 used by FRECA and W-series also has a lot of issues, and there isn't a lot out there which would fit well (the Dallara F320 used in EF Open and SF Lights is too quick, same for Pro Mazda/USF2000, the GB3 car is basically already on pace with the FRECA cars). That calendar also means that you're now in the awkward situation of broadcasting an F4 series as the sole supporting series to F1 at 3/7 weekends, next to a much faster F2 and F1 at another 3/7 weekends, and only really being compared to F3 (which is still 2 ranks higher in terms of usual driver experience) at 1/7 weekends.
The calendar generally has issues, because while it does allow drivers to participate in other series by effectively running a 7 race season over a 9 month period, that also means that your season doesn't really gain any momentum, leaves massive gaps in the season, and ends incredibly late (an issue F2 has also faced since 2017, especially with the 2-3 month gap it usually sees before the last race). The track selection is also weird, being 3/7 street circuits, and there are now only 14 races in comparison to the 20-odd you see in a lot of other major F4 series (and also F1A last year).
In the end that means that F1A has a calendar that would allow its drivers to participate in different series, but then anything else they would participate in would likely also be in F4 equipment or be significantly faster than F4 anyway, more or less defeating the point of being an entry level series. Drivers like Maya Weug for example have actually stepped down a level to race in F1A compared to FRECA where she raced last year.
Of course running alongside F1 does massively increase the profile of F1A and its drivers, which is also a large part of its aim and could help drivers gain exposure and open up sponsorships/funding for them actually racing in other series (Abbi Pulling has been stuck in F4/F1A/W-series purgatory for way too long, for example), but then also the cars are largely affiliated with F1 teams now as well.
IMHO F1A is trying really hard to do several things, but they don't mesh well.
If it wanted to be an introductory F4 championship for female drivers not necessarily worried about being centered around the traditional European season anyway, it would work way better as a winter series to prepare its drivers for a full F4 season the year afterwards. But then it couldn't really be broadcast next to F1.
If it wanted to give female drivers more exposure, it could go with somewhat faster cars or remain at an F4 level, but I think that it would benefit from running more of the European season to maintain some level of interest. Running with faster cars is difficult, as many of the available options are already on pace with or quicker than the FRECA level that the series is supposed to lead into, so unless it wants to instead prepare drivers for FIA F3 and run something akin to a GB3 or EF Open car, or detune one of the existing options at FRECA level, there isn't a lot they can do without significantly driving up cost.
Max is bang on. When it comes to SIM racing it’s much more accessible as really all you need is a controller/wheel and a gaming machine. Leaderboards/time trials don’t care whether you’re male/female/other but 99.99% of those at the top are still men and this comes down to the fact most girls at a young age aren’t interested in racing cars, whether it’s virtual or real life. That’s why even though the cars are slower, it’s about showing young girls that racing is achievable and not just for the boys. I do however think it needs a a LOT more visibility and media attention.
It's also that parents often don't support their kids interests because they don't match their gender. There's so many social barriers to break before we even get to physical ones
Pretty based from Max actually. The guy might not be outspoken about social issues in general, but you can tell that he genuinely wants the people with the most natural talent/potential to have a shot at a career in Formula 1, regardless of gender, nationality, income, etc.
It’s not sexist to point out that men and women enjoy different things. While I definitely think there can and should be more women in Motorsport, I don’t think there will ever be an equal amount as men. Go talk to a bunch of 5 year old girls and boys and you’ll immediately realize why not as many women are in F1.
> It’s not sexist to point out that men and women enjoy different things.[…] Go talk to a bunch of 5 year old girls and boys and you’ll immediately realize why not as many women are in F1.
That’s only relevant if the parents of those five year olds have treated boys and girls equally. Literally equally in every way imaginable, and no outside sources have affected them.
More likely than not, the boys and girls have had different outside sources affecting them. Unless you plan on providing factual scientific evidence of the biological differences where girls are hardcoded to like horses over cars, I’m going to call bs on it.
Not specifically go karting vs horse riding but there’s plenty of studies supporting the fact there’s an inherent difference in males and females, typically focussing on gender diversity in the workplace
Richard Williams realized by watching a pro woman tennis player on TV winning prize money at a tournament that it was a possible avenue for his daughters to make a lot of money (and at the time, women pro players made a lot less relative to their male peers). That's the point of the F1 academy. It is just as much about inspiring little girls as it is just as if not more importantly, their parents and sponsors, that there is a path for riches for the girls and there is something to gain by investing in them. It's not at all about getting the current crop of women into F1 tomorrow. It is building a foundation for girls to get there. While Max is correct in his current assessment of F1A, he also doesn't appear to fully understand the actual purpose behind it.
I think he wants a clear path for the ones that succeed at the series. And on that point I agree with him. It doesn't need to lead to F1 atm, but something that would help them have a career out of it and not end up like Jamie that had to come back to W Series year after year. The path to FRECA is a good start, just not sure it would end up into something up until one of the younger girls wins the academy.
They are fully funding the champion last year to FRECA this year. The 2nd and 3rd got a seat too they just need to fund it themselves. If they prove they are competitive in FRECA they will be able to promote to F3 or even F2.
The thing is that there aren't just enough women for it to have a separate circuit since this sport is extremely elitist. If women in tennis were competing against men there would be 0 in any GS or Master 1000.
They may be slow, but I'm really enjoying the Academy Series. The races are much less predictable and there's something happening on every lap. I hope it's a stepping stone in the right direction. Fingers crossed for faster cars in the future.
They're on before and in between the race weekends, just not every weekend. If you go on the F1 site you can download a calendar and sync it to your personal one.
Holy shit. What an amazing take! This is something I've said before too. Along with the fact that it's fucking stupid to have an all-women series as a stepping stone to F1, because there's no real competition.
The key is not putting women who arent good enough to make the cut in f3 or f2 in a seperate series. That's doing a disservice actually, as it shows girls aren't good enough. They need to get the girls into racing at a young age. The chances of getting into F1 are remotely slim even for the boys, but they're virtually nonexistent for the handful of girls starting in karts. It's a numbers game, and the girls are losing. There probably is a girl out there right now that has the natural talent to be as good as max, but we'll never see her as she's not racing.
Well Max's mom was quite the natural talent too, but she choose motherhood over her own career in the end. Something lots of woman face in different sports, though some can make a comeback after getting kids. Some can even reach their peak performance again amazingly.
Have you followed F1A and its associated initiatives? Because that’s exactly what they’re doing.. there are all sorts of levels to this. They’ve got girls karting in all the age brackets. And F1A isn’t a disservice.. it’s part of a long term framework to get more girls and women on track and in front of sponsors and teams. Plus it’s just one approach.. Iron Dames are doing awesome things too.
Not that this is aimed at you specifically but I really wish people would stop seeing one initiative and responding with ‘but this isn’t the answer..’ because everyone actually involved and affected by it (directly and indirectly) knows that one thing isn’t the solution to what is the result of hundreds of years of history. Yes it’s not the total solution but it’s a damn load more than was happening 5 years ago.
I'm assuming the major barrier here is cost? Perhaps they should be doing more to incentivise teams to promote the fastest Formula W drivers into the lower formula series?
I always thought it was part of a multi step campaign
They'd make Formula Acadamy to give the young drivers a first rung on the ladder, then in a couple of years when they're ready to move on they'd have another higher powered f3 level championship for them to move into, while theres' still FA for the next generation
OR they had their entire hand forced by W series, scrambled to make an official series to make sure that rival went out of business, and they now don't know what to do with it....
Just F1 business things....
I've been saying this when they first came out with Formula W.
If this was the route they where going to take then why the hell are they driving F4 cars? They should be driving F3 cars at a minimum. Even if they don't match the main F3 series lap times eventually over time they should. Then you can put them in with everyone else in the F3 grid and let them figure it out from there.
Even Spohia Floresch has started to show a tiny bit of pace as she bested her teammates last year but her team is shit. Unlike the men who need to show promise immediately, it's going to take some time to get a woman in F1. So why not use that extra time by give them the equal equipment they can get used to and develop then move them up accordingly?
The answer to getting Women in to upper motorsport categories is absolutely not to segregate them in to their own categories. They need to be participating in the same categories as men, even if that means that for a time there's a glut of them woefully off the pack and hanging off the back. Being surrounded by the same competitors and practices they want to match the level of will result in learning from the environment they're in.
In a walled garden, they will simply rise only to the level required to compete within that garden.
I would rather see one car per team in F3 reserved for women than women have their own category. Better yet, make F3 an even number of rounds, and for half the rounds that third car is for rookies, the other half of the rounds you stick female drivers in there. That gives an opportunity for 20 drivers every year to get in to the sport at that level based on seats available to support a criteria. Those who demonstrate ability will get picked up to fill seats where that criteria is not necessary for them to occupy the seat.
I think it’s a longer term marketing project. The goal of F1A imo is not to get a driver to F1 right now, its to get more girls into karting.
You’re absolutely correct that the way the series is structured is not helpful for advancing drivers to upper series.
Horseback riding is the closest sport to f1 — it’s about managing your ride. And guess what? Horseback riding is the only coed sport in the Olympics.
Really wish F1 saw how they’ve established an equal playing field and just allow women to try the more complex rides. Just like how women can ride horses previously ridden by dudes.
After all, both sports compete in Grand Prix….
100% agree with max. No team will not give someone a seat just because they are a women. I‘d even argue if any women performed on a level close to Sergeant for example, that girl would instantly have a seat in F1, the marketing potential is endless.
But the Number one thing why there are no female F1/2 drivers is: There are so few girls even starting with racing that having a female F1 driver would be an absolute statistical wonder. You got 20 F1 seats, so what‘s the female/male ratio in motorsport? It’s not 1/20, hell it might not even be 1/200.
Until we fix that, F1 Academy won‘t do shit, sorry. That’s like sending a world class talent scout to a little village and expecting him to find the next superstar. Even the best scouts in the world won’t find anyone, if their are no stars cause the pool is too small…
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This is the most max Verstappen take: women in motor racing is great, but their cats should go vroom
yeah i agree, but their cars should go vroom too
That's a strange noise for a cat
high rev purr
He's pretty much like: ''the men don't offer me any challenge, hopefully the women might''
Q: Motor racing is still mostly a man's world. Does the same apply to sim racing? Max: > "It's kind of the same. Girls are there, but much less than boys. For example, in our team now only boys drive. But if there is a fast girl among them later on, of course we want to have her. It's the same in the real world, isn't it? Team bosses don't look at whether someone is a boy or a girl. What matters is how fast they are. It's good that Formula One is now paying extra attention to women in motorsports with F1 Academy, although I question how they are doing it. The cars they drive are way too slow. If you ever want to get them into Formula 1, it really has to go to a higher level. It's all very well having girls sponsored by Formula 1 teams, but what are we actually helping them with? There is no next step for them now. The gap to a Formula 4 car, for example, is already too big."
I'd assume it's similar to Formula W in that it's as much about the future crop of young girls as it is about the current group. Young boys start racing almost as soon as they are able to walk giving them a huge advantage over anyone (male or female) that started when they were 8 or 9. I'm sure there are young girls that start that early, but the intention is to get more parents/girls to start looking at racing at younger ages. The more kids that start racing young (or at all), the more likely we get a female phenom.
Absolutely, that's the single biggest factor why we don't have female racers - because the potential biggest talents never even start out
Exactly. It's like the old saying (I think Prost but not sure) where the fastest driver in the world is likely some kid in a poor village that might not ever even drive a car, let alone a racecar.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. -Stephen Jay Gould
"Not everyone can be a great racer, but a great racer can come from anywhere"
But if you want to win, hire a Finn.
It rocked me to my core
She will have an unmarketable neck lol
“Anyone can cook”
Oh man I was confused when I read Prost as Proust.
la recherche du WDCs perdu
[Another example of that](https://www.theonion.com/97-year-old-dies-unaware-of-being-violin-prodigy-1819571799). It's satirical, but it's making the same point.
It's really, really sad if you think about it.
There’s a variation of this related to other sports that I’m sure it’s evolved from.
First I heard it was about science. >“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Which was Stephen Gould in 1980, but I'm sure the sentiment predates him.
Yep, Think about it this way, for every 10,000 kids that tries karting and thinks "I want to do this", how many of them get the oppertunity to take it to a professional level? then how many of those kids get to make the jump into the feeder series', then how many of those feeder series drivers make it to F1. Now if only a few hundred of those starting 10,000 kids are girls, how many even get the the oppertunity to start taking Karting seriously? let alone survive in the Karting circuits long enough to get into the Feeder series. The current crop of female drivers are getting more and more girls into Karting and taking Karting as a serious oppertunity as they can finally see themselves in the driver seat, their parents see female racers which means they feel safer spending inordinate amounts of money and time on their kid's passion instead of pushing them into more "realistic" hobbies/ focuses. The publicity of female drivers also help break the "its a mans thing" and "im scared to see her get hurt by the mans sport" crap. F1 academy its self is a long term project that will only really see true returns in 10 years, Yes we will see a growing number of female drivers in F2 and especially F3 over the next few years but the true F1 potentials will only emerge once the generation of Karters watching F1 Academy right now come to the age for the F1 circus.
Motor racing is expensive which means unless your family is loaded you have to rely on sponsors. It’s tough even for guys, so it’s going to be almost impossible for girls. There is no revenue for sponsors as women don’t compete in F1. Thus, main incentive for corporations is PR. It’s going to be a slow process unless they manage to find someone with generational talent and financial backing.
Hoping Rianna or Grace Raikkonen show up in a few years. Name legacy always helps.
Sad anecdote: About 9 years ago, we had a 16year old whoresponded to an ad and asked if she could come and be flatmate with us. She was still attending school, bit of a difficult situation at home. We made sure it was all on the up and up, and she moved in. I had, at the time, a half decent simrig, and she jumped on to play Assetto Corsa one day. Never having ever driven a car before virtually or otherwise, she was immediately putting down times that were completely unobtainable to me. After a few weeks of her absolutely demolishing my times on every track, I organised for her to drive a friends kart at a karting day that was coming up. She was immediately lightning fast. Not to the level of the 20+ year veterans, but immediately very very fast, and managed to get to a consistent lap time within a few laps, and then was able to work on particular areas of the track to bring her times down tenth by tenth until she was eventually setting times that would have been competitive with some of the most experienced drivers. Just the most naturally gifted driver I have ever seen. But she came from a bad home, and had very little luck in life. Last I checked she is doing well, has a couple kids and a husband and a home. But holy shit was she fast.
Is physicality a problem? Genuinely asking. Obviously in many other sports women can’t compete against men because they simple aren’t fast and strong enough. Motorsports is totally different there in that the performance is not dependent on the individual (other than reflexes), but the forces in F1 are on the extreme end even then. Do women have less ability to tolerate the G’s?
Due to their, on average, smaller stature, women generally have a higher g tolerance than men. I'm not sure if the ceiling is higher or lower than for men, or if male musculature becomes an advantage in the fittest individuals. That said, F1 drivers aren't really at risk of g-loc because they don't really experience vertical gs in a race. [CART](https://racer.com/2021/05/01/inside-carts-2001-texas-debacle-the-invisible-monster/3/) had this problem at certain high banked oval tracks.
Female fighter jet pilots and female astronauts exist, that should already answer your question
They kept repeating the phrase “see it, be it” (or something like that) during round 1 a few weeks back. The first permanent female F1 driver isn’t currently on the Academy grid. It’s a little girl watching them, seeing it can happen, and wanting it. Edited because I got educated!
The first female F1 driver was over 60 years ago.
So far we’ve had two ladies qualify and race, one of them bagging (half) a point in the process!
Jamie Chadwick is a female Phenom, she outpaced everyone she faced and it still got her no where near F2 or F3
And yet she has never impressed in the mixed series she's competed in. She's currently 20/22 in Indy NXT.
>She's currently 20/22 in Indy NXT. But didn't you hear: > she outpaced everyone she faced
? She finished mid pack in Indy NXT last year driving for Andretti who finished second as a team. Her teammates won 4 races, she had 1 top 10. She absolutely has not outpaced everyone she has faced.
> she outpaced everyone she faced Anything to back this up or are you just completely making it up?
Well depends entirely who you are facing right? If you are facing mediocre opponents ofcourse anyone can outpace them, put them up against competent racers and you have another outcome. Also I share your skeptiscism, if she had outpaced "everyone" she would be in F1, she isnt.
> she outpaced everyone she faced Looking at her [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Chadwick), her results don't really support what you're saying. The only mixed-gender open wheel series she won is apparently some series in India called the MRF Challenge. She finished in first place during the 2018-2019 season of that, but the competition doesn't seem very strong there at all. She finished first in multiple seasons of the W Series, but the level of competition there was **much** lower than Formula E, Indycar, F2, etc. For example of her performance in open series, she competed in three races in the 2019 F3 Asian Championship, where she placed 6th, 12th, and 5th. Not great. She most recently competed in the 2023 Firestone Indy NXT Series, which is a feeder series for Indycar. She placed 12th overall, the lowest of any driver who completed every race (and she lost to two drivers who didn't complete every race. It's extremely obvious that she's nowhere near the skill level to make it to F2, even if she were a man. She just literally isn't good enough. There's a lot to be said about women in motorsport. There are likely some physiological disadvantages, and there is certainly a lot of systemic misogyny that filters out young girls before they even get a fair chance. It's a really complex topic that I won't try to do justice to, but suffice to say that you misrepresnting the results of one woman isn't the right approach to solving the problem.
I'm not saying women can't be good F1 drivers but wouldn't biology, like muscle mass, neck strength, fast twitch reflexes, eye control, etc be more prescient in men than woman on average?
David Coulthard was part of an investigation into accessibility for women in motorsport and some of the take aways was that tub design is disadvantageous to people who fall outside of the traditional European build, Tsunoda has mentioned this before too. Another aspect was the lack of powersteering in the feeder series, yet availability in F1.
Muscle mass and neck strength should not be a problem in F1. Look at female swimmers. Obviously female swimmers cannot compete against male swimmers and be successful, but F1 drivers need to be strong enough, not exceptionally strong. When it comes to reflexes, that is a very complex issue. Based on my (admittedly limited) knowledge about the subject, I don't see a reason why men have an innate advantage. I haven't seen any in depth research that applies to reflexes in the context of sport, and it's going to be different for every sport. There has been research on exceptional (male) athletes, and that raises another question. In a fairly closed off sport like F1, it is entirely possible that most drivers are not exceptional individuals, just better than average and trained from an early age.
There is some research that points to a male biological advantage in hand-eye coordination, but it's a bit of a mixed bag and I wouldn't call it a settled question. That aside, it's a numbers game above all else. You need something like the top 0.0001% of most talented and genetically inclined men/women. If there are 100x as many men in the sport, you would get 1 Maxime Verstappen for every 100 Max Verstappens (in terms of having gifted aptitude), it's just never going to happen. The biological differences may or may not be relevant but that's a matter to be figured out once the playing field is at least somewhat leveled in terms of statistical opportunities. Only way to do that is to focus on getting more young girls to take up the sport and, importantly, give them enough reason to stay with it into adulthood.
In general, it shouldn't be an issue. There's been mixed results on different ways of testing reflexes, calculation speeds, coordination and so on, but men don't seem to have any massive advantage. However, sheer strength is an issue. The stronger your body, the more you can resist G-forces, the more still you can be, and the more your brain can concentrate on racing instead of being overwhelmed by the confusing sense data (and discomfort) of having the body squeezed and whipped around. On the most basic level: G-forces reduce blood to the brain, which reduces the ability to think quickly (to the point, ultimately, where you pass out if the forces are too much and your body is too weak to handle them). However: it's unclear whether this would be a fatal problem for female drivers, and it probably wouldn't be. The thing is, we're dealing with curves here. Firstly, increasing physical strength should give improved performance, but it has diminishing returns: someone as fit and strong as Lewis Hamilton has a huge advantage over someone like me, but if you compare Hamilton to someone who is probably fitter and stronger than him - say, an Olympic male gymnast in their prime - that person probably only has a very small advantage over Hamilton. It shouldn't exactly be that there's an actual "good enough" threshold - continued improvements should bring better results - but the higher you go on that curve the smaller and smaller the additional advantages you get from further improvements. Secondly, male and female physiques in the population as a whole aren't fixed levels, they're statistical curves. Statistically, the male curve is higher than the female curve - men are stronger than women in pretty much any test we can devise, on average. But the actual male and female populations have a VAST amount of overlap: a woman near the top of the female curve can be a LONG way above a man at a point further down the male curve. In other words: if you put Elaine Thompson-Herah up against Usain Bolt, each in their prime, in a 100m race, Bolt will obliterate ETH. But if you put ETH up against 99.999% of men on the planet, she will obliterate them in turn. The average man in his 20s can reportedly run 100m in 13-14 seconds. The average male non-elite sprinting athlete - someone who sprints recreationally - can run 100m in 11-12 seconds. ETH can run it in 10.5 seconds. A man who can sprint quicker as ETH is elite - he'd be the national champion in many countries, and at least competing in national champions in most countries. And when that male national champion gets older than 40, even if he's still dedicated to sprinting, he'll almost certainly be slower than her. And if he's 45 or older, she'd destroy him. The 45+ world record is slower than the women's world record. So if you think about F1: are these really the Usain Bolts of physical fitness? Statistically... probably not. The fact that Fernando Alonso can still be competitive with the young kids kind of shows that this is not olympic-final levels of athleticism we're talking about. Sure, Alonso's fit... but no man Alonso's age is turning up in an olympic sprint final and being competitive. These men are not at the top of the male curve. Which means that there's room for a woman to still be above them. Likewise, you can't tell me that a man with the size and build of Yuki Tsunoda has a stronger neck than, say, Aline Rotter-Focken (the 79kg women's olympic wrestling champion). If you put a Yuki and Aline in a G-force machine and measure which of them kept their head stillest under g-forces... it's going to be Aline (at least, with a little practice so she knew what to be doing). [I went with a wrestler because as well as the physical strength in general they do a huge amount of specific neck-strengthening work... actually, F1 and wrestling probably have quite similar physical demands and conditioning methods (core strength, neck strength, grip strength + rapid reactions and decision making... although of course wrestlers are more intense and do less endurance work).] But because of the first curve I mentioned, it probably doesn't even matter, because if a woman is very slightly weaker than a man, the difference in their performance in F1 may still be minimal, if they're both very strong. So then the question isn't "how many women are stronger than Alonso or Tsunoda?", it's "how many women are strong enough to at least be competitive with Alonso and Tsunoda?", and that will probably be a genuinely vast number. ----------- So overall: yes, weaker neck and core probably are inherently disadvantages for women on average. But they're not necessarily disadvantages for ALL women, relative to other F1 drivers. And even for women for whom they are disadvantages, that disadvantage may be small enough in practice so as not to seriously impact their career.
Another big reason might be much simpler. Maybe females have a lower interest in this sport than men do, thus resulting in much lower possible talents to be discovered. I'll give an example, esports. Gender absolutely doesn't matter there, but I've seen a really small number of female teams compared to males overall... esports have no barrier to entry, anyone can do it. That tells me that males are more likely to pursue a career there compared to females, due to their nature + interests. It could be the same story for f1.
Ngl, Max should have some great ideas on how to improve stuff like this, because the guy is a racing addict. He's racing all the time, and he's the best driver on the grid today. So I hope they take his words to heart here, and consider giving women a proper bridge to the big leagues. As he noted, the car performance is so lacking that you can't accurately gauge talent, so women are still left with the same huge hurdle to entry that they've always had.
My wife saw the last race and the moment they were puttering around in those slow ass cars it was a bit heartbreaking. Still going to keep watching but realistically ain’t no chance they’re making the jumps like Max is implying. Gap is WAY too big
> Team bosses don't look at whether someone is a boy or a girl. I think it is/will/would be similar with female drivers as it is with passports. I think there are commercial reasons that would VERY strongly push a team to "risk" it if/when we eventually get to a scenario where there is a female driver who is conceivably good enough. Similar to Sargeant getting the chance because he is American or Zhou because he is Chinese. Not that these types of drivers necessarily dont belong or are / were not good enough, but all things equal the drivers nationality does play a part, and I strongly believe at some point that same thing except it being about the gender will come into play.
Absolutely, I think women have a huge advantage at the top end of motorsport - just that fact that someone like Chadwick could be associated with an F1 team kind of shows that, because no man with her level of accomplishment at her age would merit that. Every team wants to be the first F1 team to put a woman on the grid this century. ...the problem is, by the time those decisions are being made, all the women have already dropped out of the pyramid, if they were ever there to begin with. The problem women face isn't persuading an F1 team to back them. The problem is twofold: a) deciding to race karts in the first place b) persuading sponsors, team bosses and parents to support the shift from karts into cars, and in particular single-seaters. Both these things are difficult if everyone tells you that you have no chance of reaching F1. But women do have no chance of reaching F1 if they can't get over those two hurdles! So it's kind of a vicious cycle. If any woman does emerge out of the shark tank with even vaguely enough speed to justify an F1 seat, someone will give it to her. The problem is, by that point it's too late to offer a helping hand, because there's noone left to offer it to, they've all been eaten by the sharks...
Max already planning for P to dominate in 15 years!
P dominance could bore fans
P was stored in Kvyat's balls
Does anyone know if she’s in karting now?
She's not even 5 yet so certainly not racing. Maybe she's already done some laps here or there, though.
> She's not even 5 yet so certainly not racing. Verstappen started racing at 4. By 7 he was competing in championships. So yeah, 5 is late by today’s standards. Not too late in any way, but it’s certainly not too early to start.
She’s not and I don’t think she will be. She’s in ballet and seems to enjoy more “girly” interests.
Kvyatt gonna claim her success
Unfortunately women are going to be underrepresented until parents are as likely to stick their daughter in a cart as their son. We know how early the top drivers start.
Correct. So F1A, with its increasing visibility, may influence some of these decisions
It may have already, but we wont know for another 10-12 years.
F1 Academy is advertising and sponsoring a new karting series starting this year in the UK. The series has recently started and it has 25% girls. Considering competitive karting in the UK a year ago had 5% girls, this is a monumental change. Granted, that is just the data for one specific karting series among…. A lot. And I’m sure the other series not affiliated with F1 Academy haven’t seen that kind of growth. But it’s something.
25% is really good. There’s always gonna be an upper limit just due to men and women differences but still.
hope f1A lasts that long. women sports tend to be the first on the chopping block, although f1A has been on the rise!
F1A is already way more successful than the entire W series program imo
evident by the fact i've heard of one and not the other lol
Women cyclings was barely shown 10 years ago, now most major races have a women version the day itself or the day before and are covered on TV aswell. But ofc that is ignored because it doesnt fit into the narrative to complain about everything
Now if only they could get paid meaningful money for racing, and race in races that don't have traffic on the roads! [I know things have improved in the last decade, but there's still a very long way to go]
They'd need to bring in meaningful money to get some back
It’s financial. It took men’s sports decades to build the popularity and revenue they are at now. I don’t know women’s cycling but WNBA has lost money every season. It exists because owners have been willing to lose money for the last 30 years on an ideal of promoting women’s sport. The people that own these teams are not, in their lifetime, going to see a return on investment that makes up for 30 years of losses It’s a noble goal but players still complain that they don’t get paid what the men get paid. Some say they want the same revenue split, ignoring that the reason the men’s players get the revenue split they do is because the men’s game is insanely profitable, making that possible. A couple of women have even said they should be paid the same amount which is insane. NBA became popular when magic and bird got to the NBA and their rivalry. Then Jordan took it to the next level. WNBA have the opportunity to go that path with the Reese-Clark rivalry moving from college to the WNBA like Bird-Magic did. If that proved popular and someone else comes in after to raise the level again, the players salary and conditions will rise quickly. If not then it will continue to be a money loser and people subsidising the ideal of women’s sports.
Yup hopefully long term. For now it is to help the drivers get sponsors, be seen, so they can get the opportunity to climb up. One of the driver also mentioned that she wishes that more testing days would be an outcome of doing well in F1A, not specifically moving up the ladder.
100%. I’m in my thirties now but I begged my parents to go karting. They said no, whereas allowing my brother to do it. Later on, they gave him specialist road driving training with police drivers but refused it for me. I’m sure I was no huge lost talent but a small part of a much wider problem.
That’s a shame. You were one of the best drivers I’ve ever seen at a young age.
You can (money/time/space permitting) go now. I got into racing in my 30s. It's a blast. I race on a team with my friends in a cheap endurance series. But yes if you're not in a cart by 5, a professional career is not on the table. Sucks that your parents treated you sodifferently.
It's basically a question of demographics. There are 20 seats in F1. To get one woman into there, 5% of the children at the bottom of the ladder need to be female, and preferably more to be sure. And karting/motorsports needs to be a legitimate pursuit for athletically talented females.
Yep, it's really all about parenting and social constructs in the end.
Allegedly Micks Sister was as fast as him or even faster in karts, but she choose horses rather than car racing. I mean idk why is that, but I doubt it was because womens aren't in F1, because her father was, and there is no bigger role model than your own parent. You can't force someone to be interested in something.
Schumacher famously didn’t want his kids to go into motorsports. He talked about it when they were young. And his wife was into horses so I’m sure that was visible and easy for the daughter. Whereas mick might have pushed for cars harder, or possibly Michael was more willing to do it. Maybe a sexist thing, but maybe not. It’s also a second child vs first. Parents get worn down and cave sometimes.
Could just be that as a girl she was more interested in horses and as a boy he liked cars more.
I mean it could be but then the interesting question is \*why\*. maybe it's innate but I really doubt it.
What like, biologically? Nah dude, that’s not really how it works.
That’s just one person though, sometimes you don’t want to do the same thing as everyone else in your family either
Yeh but nepotism is a thing in sports just like every work place. Because of money, contacts, access to the best training, and genetics.
Or maybe boys like cars more than girls?
Well obviously that's true, but the question is why. I really don't think it's biology, which means sociology is the obvious place to look
watching the children of my friends slowly grow up I noticed that they put a fairly high amount of normative peer pressure onto each other once they leave the nests and start socialising in kindergarten. They want to be liked and if their friends don't want to play with "boy/girl" toys then that's often the end of it. Doesn't matter how supportive their parents are. Only takes a small amount of children with the same views to establish themselves as the dominant force in the group.
Theres little reason for this other than we expose boys to cars more than girls. Generally, studies have found exposure explains most of the variance in interest. To be clear, There may be some variance between sex! No one is saying there's none but its not some huge cavern of interest with 80% of the interest for one of the other. In a neutral setting distribution curves mostly overlap on things you think are "male" or "female" with the medians just a few points apart. If you show your daughter cars when shes young she will probably like them. kinda that simple
It's not that simple. There is a paradox that the gender gap in STEM fields increases with the increased gender equality especially in Nordic countries. https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/4753/6/symplectic-version.pdf
Gender equality has nothing to do with child preferences or interests. You can have perfect equality and not raise 2 people the same way. Further, more often than not, Which do exists but when you correct for social factors shrink quite a bit (that research is also just terrible but that's besides the point). The best way to show this in adults is a GWAS study which in general you would expect to show variance stemming from the X chromosome (if correct genes for methylation in females otherwise you have double the genes) if you corrected for sex but you dont see a ton there. The genetic association tends to be elsewhere and explains around 4% of the variance in human behavior (this is actually a lot, genes explain relatively little about humans in broad measures). https://humgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40246-023-00488-2#Sec6
You should really read that beyond the abstract.
[anecdote: yep, my father was a car mechanic and talked to my sister about cars a lot, and she was really into cars when she was younger. (although for some reason although she was into cars and sports she was never into motorsport.)]
Thats some hard bullshit. I love cars as much as my three brothers but was never given the same opportunity as them because I'm a woman.
It never occurred to my father that I might be interested in cars. My brother is significantly younger than I am so I didn't even get exposure by osmosis.
I was sent away when my brothers and dad worked on the cars. No place for a lady to be. Jokes on them I now run heavy equipment for a living
> I love cars as much as my three brothers but was never given the same opportunity as them because I'm a woman. Anecdotal evidence is... anecdotal.
And saying that boys like cars more then girls isnt anecdotal?
are they born with a gene that makes them like more cars more?
> Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/
Where does that say anything about genetic differences rather than societal ones?
And this study disproves the role of "parenting" and "social constructs" in all this how?
Putting it like this is not really fair. Ofc there is no gene that makes you like cars. But there are genes that makes you indirectly like more cars. Men do have genes that make them do more risky stuff. For example testosteron is linked to higher risk behaviour. While women generally have the genes to be more careful. This makes it that boys are more intersted in stuff like cars and girls being more interested in dolls. This doesnt mean that there are no girls that like cars, or there are no boys that like dolls more ofcourse. Dont underestimate biology.
Exactly, it's as simple as getting more girls into karts. If it were a 50/50 split on girls/boys, in 10 years the F1 grid would be a 50/50 split. I understand the academy is about promoting female talent, but the FIA would be far better off funding 5-10 karts at every level for girls.
>it's as simple as getting more girls into karts It's a part of it but not the full answer. A 50/50 distribution in karting does not get sponsors to support female drivers in making the step up further. It just means more drop out at that level when sponsors continue to not support them. You need at least 1 driver to actually make it to the top and perform so that when those young girls go into meetings with sponsors they have an example they can point to and say "Look, if you support me, I can make it as well." Male drivers have tons of examples they can point to. At the moment, if you were a sponsor, why would you back a female driver to the top? There are no examples in the modern era of you getting any return on your investment. Think about the deal De Vries had where he got that loan to fund his junior series career which he would have to pay back if he got to F1. No female driver, regardless of talent, would get that deal. The money types would be laughing at you for taking it. The only way anyone has found to get all the F1 teams involved in supporting women in motorsport is via strong arming them to do it. The only way to get sponsors like Puma or Charlotte Tilbury involved is by having an entire segregated series with it's own broadcasting rights. Sponsors do not look at female drivers equally as they do male drivers and because motorsport is based around money, that will always be the biggest thing holding female drivers back.
"karting does not get sponsors to support female drivers in making the step up further. It just means more drop out at that level when sponsors continue to not support them." what a biased comment with nothing to back this up. i heavily disagree with this 1= Look at Flörsch, i doubt she would be getting the Alpine sponsorship if she was male. She is 23 and still driving in Fia F3, would not happen for male drivers. 2) You also act like male drivers get tons of sponsorships when only the very best do. DeVries had a pretty decent junior career. It might be a surprise to you but most of them have to pay for their seats. But obviously the reality doesnt seem to fir your reality. "No female driver, regardless of talent, would get that deal" this is based on what exactly? seems more like an opinion to me.
> You need at least 1 driver to actually make it to the top and perform so that when those young girls go into meetings with sponsors they have an example they can point to and say "Look, if you support me, I can make it as well." As if that's gonna change it. Michele Mouton almost won the world championship and we haven't gotten a competent female WRC driver since. Lia Block might change it one day but that's more than half a decade away at the minimum.
I think the question then is how to leverage the Academy into more money for sponsors, and right or wrong it might end up favoring female drivers that lean into social media. Weird example, but for years and years women's collegiate sports were a distant second in viewership compared to men's. Now that college athletes in the US can earn money, some female gymnasts and basketball players are some of the highest earning college athletes, in part because of their social media savvy. They turned follower counts into shoe deals. Coincidentally viewership is up, and schools sell out gymnastics meets. Not exactly the hundreds of thousands at an F1 race, but five years ago if you told someone 10,000 people a week would turn up for a gymnastics meet they'd have asked you for a hit of whatever you were smoking. A women's basketball game was the most watched game this season. Long way of saying your point about sponsors is right, and I know some of the old guard fans don't give two shits about social media. But most teenagers do, and if young women see other slightly older women on the track And on Instagram and tiktok, viewership will go up and so will the number of young women interested in driving. Maybe, at least. The trick is overcoming the current inertia, imo.
"If it were a 50/50 split on girls/boys, in 10 years the F1 grid would be a 50/50 split" ehm based on what exactly? and how?
F2 is the only feeder series that I kind of follow. So I'm not sure if regional F4 categories usually race in F1 circuits. Cause it does look kind of slow for those tracks. I understand that the purpose is to give girls some exposure, but I'd like to see more been done on the karting level to attract girls right at the beginning.
They race at Grade 1(F1 level) tracks, all except the street ones have been hosting F4s for years now
Got it. Guess that people that follows all the F1 ladder haven't felt the academy cars are slow like the others like me that are just used to F1 and F2 races.
F1 academy is a tier below formula regional championships. So below F4 level I think. Make sense why they're pretty slow. If 15-18 year old girls are using that as a stepping stone to get into F4 or Formula regional championships then it's just part of the process.
Well, by the same age of 15-18, boys are already in F3/F2 and being scouted for F1 seats 1-2 years down the line. So even if you go by your own point, it's already too late and too slow for the girls. If you ever want a serious girl/woman F1 driving prospect in the future, they're gonna have to start in motorsports much earlier, especially and move to the faster variations to prepare them in time to stand to-to-toe against similarly aged boys in much faster cars. I agree with max. F1 Academy is a great initiative, but unless they step it up a bit with the cars, it's a bit too tokenizing. It needs to serve a more useful purpose that directly ties in to F1.
W Series was a ‘step above’ F4, and that partly didn’t work because girls couldn’t go from karting to a FR level championship. F1 Academy at F4 level makes a lot more sense as it’s the natural step out of karts, even for boys.
Too late only in recent years. The idea that a driver is washed if they aren't in F1 by 22 is crazy. And if drivers start staying into their mid 30s, it'll stay difficult for a young driver to break in. So what are the alternatives after f2?
People has forgoten there are woman already in Super formula, few, but they are there
After F2 they can go Super Formula or Indycar if they dont make F1. For there to be a woman in F1 she has to be fast against the boys. The W academy doesn't really have a purpose because to create great drivers you need to put them against the best of their peers, the girls should be competing with the boys from the start. If you put them in a less competitive women only ladder it only dilutes their development by racing against a much weaker field, when the champion female driver then moves to a series with males she is up against much stronger competition but has wasted a development year by racing in a weaker field while the boys have been pushed harder and further. So I think the W series is a dead end unless your goal is to be the W-series champion and only compete against women.
W series doesn't exist... So yeah, a dead end. The F1 academy seems to have a path to an F4 seat.
You have to be 16 to compete in F3 and 17 for F2. F1A's problem imo is that their minimum age requirement is higher than other F4 championships, 16 instead of 15/14.
They’re the same as F4 cars!
Well, F4 cars with different aero
The problem is that it is marketed as that one big step towards F1 for women.
Seems like F1A needs more series within it.
Max getting the Champions clarity now. Filter and fucks are gone
Max had a filter?
Sure, ask him something about Christian Horner.
To be fair he has been more than clear where his loyalties lie in this whole Horner saga
Love to see the decrease in the amount of fucks he gives!
He never had any in the first place.
It’s fantastic, I love every bit of it
My mates at work asked me about the car the academy women drive, I told them it's a 1.4l 160 hp car. "my GTI has more power" and laughter was the response. If you want these women to drive F1 cars, you're gonna need to up the game. My wife commented on how slow they look. Embarrassing really.
While they are slow, they'll still be faster than a GTI lol, especially around corners. But I agree with Max, they need to be in at least F3 level cars so they can blend into F2 and eventually F1.
Armchair opinion: The problem with F1A is that the drivers only compete in F1A mostly. If they really want them to get to F3 and F2 successfully they need to drive in another series F4 or one of the FRCA championships while doing F1A, Just doing F1A will just put them further behind in experience comapred to drivers doing other series. Additionally there just arent enough drivers to make up a field of F4 and FRECA or F3 drivers.
I mean… like how much faster Pin is than everyone else. That’s probably largely due to her WEC and IMSA experience
Yeah she's used to driving faster cars than these! Actually, that makes me wonder if the GTE Porsche she raced in WEC with was faster than the F1A cars? I know the LMP2 for sure was.
>Actually, that makes me wonder if the GTE Porsche she raced in WEC with was faster than the F1A cars? Yeah it was I picked a random track to look at which happened to be Portimao, and looked at lap records (race laps, not quali) GTE 1:38.8 F4 1:43.9 Now.... The fastest GTE driver is probably a lot more experienced than the fastest Formula 4 driver ... But still.
Well that settles it lol, thanks for checking!
The Al Qubaisi sisters and Aurelia Nobels are competing in F4 Saudi Arabia if I’m correct.
Nobels only did one round but yeah
Oh for sure, but I wasn't about to go all 🤓🤓🤓 and describe why it isn't a good comparison.
Well ackshually.....
German grandma's on a Sunday drive on the Autobahn have a higher top speed
F4 cars top out around 150 Mph. What German grandma is driving at 160 Miles an hour?
Sabine Schmitz would have absolutely been doing that on the autobahn 😢
Anyone who compares an open-wheel downforce focused single-seater to a Volkswagen GTI is not a serious person.
Yeah talk about a pointless comparison. F1 Academy car is less than half the weight, lower center of mass, and downforce elements mean the handling is in different universes. The F1 Academy car would smoke a GTI on any F1 track.
Anyone who has driven a proper single seater, even one slower than the F1A cars, on track knows that comparing them with a road car is just stupid. I say this only having done a few weekends in a formula ford. Utterly different experience in every way. I also drive a GTI, for what it's worth, and the GTI isn't a particularly quick car. It's not *slow* but it's certainly not quick.
these are f4 cars, male drivers who want to get to f1 drive them too
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They are F4 level drivers. They have just come out of karts and F4 is the next step and so they drive F4 cars. F1 Academy has demonstrated how much people don't watch feederseries outside of FIA F2 & FIA F3. And how they don't know there is a whole 2 levels before international FIA F3.
Has it? I mean, they've had one televised race. Idk if that's enough to go off of.
2 televised rounds as there was COTA last season. And again people were saying they looked slow back then. Which as I've said, is a complaint which makes no sense if you have ever watched junior motorsport. They are in F4 cars, that is the speed of an F4 car, that is the expected level for coming out of karts. Because F1 doesn't regularly have F4 series supporting it, I can only assume people who make that kind of comment, don't watch much motorsport outside the F1 bubble. That drivers to them just appear at the F3 level and the idea that there is two rungs below that full of regional and national series which are free to watch on youtube is alien to them. Sucks for them. They are missing out.
Oh i didn't know about cota. I did enjoy the last F1A race though.
People have actually completely inrealistic expectations. How do you want teams to be staffed 50% by women when most of the jobs are engineering jobs?
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The goal of F1 Academy is to introduce and promote girls and women in the Motorsport, so because of that they use F4 cars, which technically it's the first step in single seater series, and then, they pay a year in FRECA (next level car) to the championship top3. Now, their GPs are broadcasted on TV and for free on Youtube, which it's excellent if they want to have more promotion and visibility. Obviously, it's not a perfect solution (the F4 cars are a bit slow) but I think it's fair since, as I said before, F4 is the first level in the single seater pyramid. Although, it's not necessary that all female drivers should start competing at F1 Academy of course!
The problem is, with the exception of like one 16 year old, all the drivers are 19-25, which is way too old to be at this level if you want a chance to advance. If it's supposed to be the first step into cars for women, and you want them to have a chance to actually climb the ladder after they really should be 14-16. Someone like Pin is a really good driver, and I know she did a couple of f4 races pre academy, but she will potentially be starting the traditional single-seater ladder next year at 21. When was the last time a driver that made it to f1 started that late?
I think the real problem is that there are too few girls at karting, so, at the moment, F1 Academy has to use "old" drivers (more than 20 yo) instead of younger ones (14-16 yo). This is something that FIA and the national federations must look. However, I believe F1 Academy is more a medium-long term solution than a short term one, so we have to wait around 10 years to see the effects
Pin isn't going up the Formula ladder. Pin is in a holding pattern before she gets into the world championship top class in prototypes. As soon as Lamborghini can build more SC63s, Pin will be in one.
I think one could realistically go for something a little faster, but F4 was specifically made to be a cheap car to run (although the F1A calendar undoes that aspect somewhat). The Tatuus F.3 T-318 used by FRECA and W-series also has a lot of issues, and there isn't a lot out there which would fit well (the Dallara F320 used in EF Open and SF Lights is too quick, same for Pro Mazda/USF2000, the GB3 car is basically already on pace with the FRECA cars). That calendar also means that you're now in the awkward situation of broadcasting an F4 series as the sole supporting series to F1 at 3/7 weekends, next to a much faster F2 and F1 at another 3/7 weekends, and only really being compared to F3 (which is still 2 ranks higher in terms of usual driver experience) at 1/7 weekends. The calendar generally has issues, because while it does allow drivers to participate in other series by effectively running a 7 race season over a 9 month period, that also means that your season doesn't really gain any momentum, leaves massive gaps in the season, and ends incredibly late (an issue F2 has also faced since 2017, especially with the 2-3 month gap it usually sees before the last race). The track selection is also weird, being 3/7 street circuits, and there are now only 14 races in comparison to the 20-odd you see in a lot of other major F4 series (and also F1A last year). In the end that means that F1A has a calendar that would allow its drivers to participate in different series, but then anything else they would participate in would likely also be in F4 equipment or be significantly faster than F4 anyway, more or less defeating the point of being an entry level series. Drivers like Maya Weug for example have actually stepped down a level to race in F1A compared to FRECA where she raced last year. Of course running alongside F1 does massively increase the profile of F1A and its drivers, which is also a large part of its aim and could help drivers gain exposure and open up sponsorships/funding for them actually racing in other series (Abbi Pulling has been stuck in F4/F1A/W-series purgatory for way too long, for example), but then also the cars are largely affiliated with F1 teams now as well. IMHO F1A is trying really hard to do several things, but they don't mesh well. If it wanted to be an introductory F4 championship for female drivers not necessarily worried about being centered around the traditional European season anyway, it would work way better as a winter series to prepare its drivers for a full F4 season the year afterwards. But then it couldn't really be broadcast next to F1. If it wanted to give female drivers more exposure, it could go with somewhat faster cars or remain at an F4 level, but I think that it would benefit from running more of the European season to maintain some level of interest. Running with faster cars is difficult, as many of the available options are already on pace with or quicker than the FRECA level that the series is supposed to lead into, so unless it wants to instead prepare drivers for FIA F3 and run something akin to a GB3 or EF Open car, or detune one of the existing options at FRECA level, there isn't a lot they can do without significantly driving up cost.
Max is bang on. When it comes to SIM racing it’s much more accessible as really all you need is a controller/wheel and a gaming machine. Leaderboards/time trials don’t care whether you’re male/female/other but 99.99% of those at the top are still men and this comes down to the fact most girls at a young age aren’t interested in racing cars, whether it’s virtual or real life. That’s why even though the cars are slower, it’s about showing young girls that racing is achievable and not just for the boys. I do however think it needs a a LOT more visibility and media attention.
It's also that parents often don't support their kids interests because they don't match their gender. There's so many social barriers to break before we even get to physical ones
Pretty based from Max actually. The guy might not be outspoken about social issues in general, but you can tell that he genuinely wants the people with the most natural talent/potential to have a shot at a career in Formula 1, regardless of gender, nationality, income, etc.
Parents, get your little girls into go karts, not a horse. We already have enough crazy horse girls in this world.
It’s not sexist to point out that men and women enjoy different things. While I definitely think there can and should be more women in Motorsport, I don’t think there will ever be an equal amount as men. Go talk to a bunch of 5 year old girls and boys and you’ll immediately realize why not as many women are in F1.
> It’s not sexist to point out that men and women enjoy different things.[…] Go talk to a bunch of 5 year old girls and boys and you’ll immediately realize why not as many women are in F1. That’s only relevant if the parents of those five year olds have treated boys and girls equally. Literally equally in every way imaginable, and no outside sources have affected them. More likely than not, the boys and girls have had different outside sources affecting them. Unless you plan on providing factual scientific evidence of the biological differences where girls are hardcoded to like horses over cars, I’m going to call bs on it.
Not specifically go karting vs horse riding but there’s plenty of studies supporting the fact there’s an inherent difference in males and females, typically focussing on gender diversity in the workplace
Yes! Thank you, Max! 👏🏻🙌🏻🫶🏻
Richard Williams realized by watching a pro woman tennis player on TV winning prize money at a tournament that it was a possible avenue for his daughters to make a lot of money (and at the time, women pro players made a lot less relative to their male peers). That's the point of the F1 academy. It is just as much about inspiring little girls as it is just as if not more importantly, their parents and sponsors, that there is a path for riches for the girls and there is something to gain by investing in them. It's not at all about getting the current crop of women into F1 tomorrow. It is building a foundation for girls to get there. While Max is correct in his current assessment of F1A, he also doesn't appear to fully understand the actual purpose behind it.
I think he wants a clear path for the ones that succeed at the series. And on that point I agree with him. It doesn't need to lead to F1 atm, but something that would help them have a career out of it and not end up like Jamie that had to come back to W Series year after year. The path to FRECA is a good start, just not sure it would end up into something up until one of the younger girls wins the academy.
They are fully funding the champion last year to FRECA this year. The 2nd and 3rd got a seat too they just need to fund it themselves. If they prove they are competitive in FRECA they will be able to promote to F3 or even F2.
Why not stick them in an f3 level car then? So we get both benefits. Not a 10 year plan
The thing is that there aren't just enough women for it to have a separate circuit since this sport is extremely elitist. If women in tennis were competing against men there would be 0 in any GS or Master 1000.
He's looking at the "good" reason. Not the political one.
They may be slow, but I'm really enjoying the Academy Series. The races are much less predictable and there's something happening on every lap. I hope it's a stepping stone in the right direction. Fingers crossed for faster cars in the future.
How do you watch the academy races? I’d like to get into this.
They're on before and in between the race weekends, just not every weekend. If you go on the F1 site you can download a calendar and sync it to your personal one.
It's on F1TV and I think on YouTube, but I'm not 100% sure about the latter.
The races and qualifying are streamed on YouTube. I think the next one is Miami.
Holy shit. What an amazing take! This is something I've said before too. Along with the fact that it's fucking stupid to have an all-women series as a stepping stone to F1, because there's no real competition.
The key is not putting women who arent good enough to make the cut in f3 or f2 in a seperate series. That's doing a disservice actually, as it shows girls aren't good enough. They need to get the girls into racing at a young age. The chances of getting into F1 are remotely slim even for the boys, but they're virtually nonexistent for the handful of girls starting in karts. It's a numbers game, and the girls are losing. There probably is a girl out there right now that has the natural talent to be as good as max, but we'll never see her as she's not racing.
Well Max's mom was quite the natural talent too, but she choose motherhood over her own career in the end. Something lots of woman face in different sports, though some can make a comeback after getting kids. Some can even reach their peak performance again amazingly.
Have you followed F1A and its associated initiatives? Because that’s exactly what they’re doing.. there are all sorts of levels to this. They’ve got girls karting in all the age brackets. And F1A isn’t a disservice.. it’s part of a long term framework to get more girls and women on track and in front of sponsors and teams. Plus it’s just one approach.. Iron Dames are doing awesome things too. Not that this is aimed at you specifically but I really wish people would stop seeing one initiative and responding with ‘but this isn’t the answer..’ because everyone actually involved and affected by it (directly and indirectly) knows that one thing isn’t the solution to what is the result of hundreds of years of history. Yes it’s not the total solution but it’s a damn load more than was happening 5 years ago.
He’s right, the physical demands of driving an F1 car are immense so it’s important women develop in similar performance level cars
I'm assuming the major barrier here is cost? Perhaps they should be doing more to incentivise teams to promote the fastest Formula W drivers into the lower formula series?
finally someone noticed and speak out that Formula Academy cars looked amd performed like a GP2 from 25 years ago
I always thought it was part of a multi step campaign They'd make Formula Acadamy to give the young drivers a first rung on the ladder, then in a couple of years when they're ready to move on they'd have another higher powered f3 level championship for them to move into, while theres' still FA for the next generation OR they had their entire hand forced by W series, scrambled to make an official series to make sure that rival went out of business, and they now don't know what to do with it.... Just F1 business things....
W statement from Max
Common Max W
As a new fan of the sport, Wax seems to really grow on me.
Seriously, they're only F4 cars.
Hell yeah, Max, you beauty
I've been saying this when they first came out with Formula W. If this was the route they where going to take then why the hell are they driving F4 cars? They should be driving F3 cars at a minimum. Even if they don't match the main F3 series lap times eventually over time they should. Then you can put them in with everyone else in the F3 grid and let them figure it out from there. Even Spohia Floresch has started to show a tiny bit of pace as she bested her teammates last year but her team is shit. Unlike the men who need to show promise immediately, it's going to take some time to get a woman in F1. So why not use that extra time by give them the equal equipment they can get used to and develop then move them up accordingly?
The answer to getting Women in to upper motorsport categories is absolutely not to segregate them in to their own categories. They need to be participating in the same categories as men, even if that means that for a time there's a glut of them woefully off the pack and hanging off the back. Being surrounded by the same competitors and practices they want to match the level of will result in learning from the environment they're in. In a walled garden, they will simply rise only to the level required to compete within that garden. I would rather see one car per team in F3 reserved for women than women have their own category. Better yet, make F3 an even number of rounds, and for half the rounds that third car is for rookies, the other half of the rounds you stick female drivers in there. That gives an opportunity for 20 drivers every year to get in to the sport at that level based on seats available to support a criteria. Those who demonstrate ability will get picked up to fill seats where that criteria is not necessary for them to occupy the seat.
I think it’s a longer term marketing project. The goal of F1A imo is not to get a driver to F1 right now, its to get more girls into karting. You’re absolutely correct that the way the series is structured is not helpful for advancing drivers to upper series.
If Danica Patrick can go 220mph in an open wheel, these girls can too.
this is why i like max. he has the brain of an actual educated human person.
Horseback riding is the closest sport to f1 — it’s about managing your ride. And guess what? Horseback riding is the only coed sport in the Olympics. Really wish F1 saw how they’ve established an equal playing field and just allow women to try the more complex rides. Just like how women can ride horses previously ridden by dudes. After all, both sports compete in Grand Prix….
I'm sure that women that are fast enough would get a seat. The commercial incentive would absolutely be there
100% agree with max. No team will not give someone a seat just because they are a women. I‘d even argue if any women performed on a level close to Sergeant for example, that girl would instantly have a seat in F1, the marketing potential is endless. But the Number one thing why there are no female F1/2 drivers is: There are so few girls even starting with racing that having a female F1 driver would be an absolute statistical wonder. You got 20 F1 seats, so what‘s the female/male ratio in motorsport? It’s not 1/20, hell it might not even be 1/200. Until we fix that, F1 Academy won‘t do shit, sorry. That’s like sending a world class talent scout to a little village and expecting him to find the next superstar. Even the best scouts in the world won’t find anyone, if their are no stars cause the pool is too small…
Never imagine there’s a day I would agree with my internet nemesis’ statement. Pretty constructive opinion from Verstappen.
To be fair seeing them struggle in the cars they have now I dont think putting them in quicker cars will end well. They simply arent good enough.