Jenson's Understeer wrote:
My opinion is still that the biggest issue for female drivers is not a lack of opportunities but a lack of talent to actually warrant those opportunities. We've seen that in recent years, F1 teams are more than happy to completely overlook results when it comes to giving female drivers roles within their teams. Susie Wolff, Maria de Villota, Carmen Jorda, Simona de Silvestro and most recently Tatiana Calderon, none of them had results that warranted any interest from an F1 team. And I'm sure Sophia Floersch will find herself getting a similar role sooner or later, especially as whatever team gives her it can also highlight how she's a survivor after her massive Macau crash. Yet the excuse that gets banded about is that female drivers aren't getting opportunities, and the W Series would have us believe that an entirely new series is required to ensure the best of the best get the chance they're not getting to reach F2. I just don't buy it. I really don't. So in a way I'm actually looking forward to the W Series providing a better opportunity for the best female driver in the series to potentially reach F2, just so that excuse can be removed.
And FWIW, I do believe a female driver will reach F1 in the next 10/15 years. But it will be because of talent and results, not because of a helping hand like this.
I see the problem as being a driver pool based issue. Cutting out completely the argument of
why the female driver pool is so small, we can all agree that it is very small, and that starts at the lowest level. So right now we have a female driver pool that's the equivalent of what existed in maybe the 1950s for men; a few thousand worldwide, of whom most are mediocre and even the best aren't proper F1 level.
The W series - in my opinion - is fatally misguided in several ways, but the most prominent is that it's trying to fix the problem midstream, not at the source. Trying to promote a larger share of the mediocre females currently racing in the feeder series into one series and then promote the winner of that series to F2 is just going to put the best of a mediocre lot into F2. The best female drivers currently racing aren't even interested, making the credibility of the W-series champion low before she's even turned a wheel on track.
What they need to do is the same thing they would need to do if they wanted to increase the number of black drivers: start at the very lowest level, by increasing participation in karting from a young enough age that a genuinely competitive driver could be produced, then perhaps implement some sort of support mechanism to follow the best karters throughout their careers. That's how all of the best racing drivers are produced, and it wouldn't be any different for a female driver.
For the aforementioned example of black drivers, I assume a mix of socioeconomic opportunity and cultural bias towards other sports are the prevailing reason we don't see very many racing. For the females it won't be the socioeconomic factor, but cultural bias towards other activities is certainly a dominant factor.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
