Motorsport News

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The screams of delight can probably be heard from the other side of the neighbouri­ng M2 motorway. And, like Susie, you can’t help but smile at them.

A group of 10 girls are surroundin­g a scaled-down model of an F1 car. Two are perched by the Pirelli-branded front wheels, one is on the front jack, three are lined up in front of each wheel, and one’s on the stopwatch.

“Go, go, go!” comes the shout from the instructor. At which point the jack is rammed under the nose, raised and the girls on the wheels fire up their electric drills – read pit guns – and remove the two tyres as swiftly as possible before they’re passed to the end of each line and back, only to be re-fitted. The model is slammed back to the deck to a chorus of gleeful cheers.

“That one was 10.1 seconds!” comes the update from the timing. They’ve just gone fastest on the leaderboar­d. That prompts those screams.

I’d never been to a D2BD event, and having seen what it’s all about I’d recommend anyone to go.

If you love this sport, it’s always great to get that warm feeling when you get to share the experience with somebody new. Seeing the sheer excitement and joy on the faces of these girls, many of which I’d wager wouldn’t have even thought twice about motorsport without days like this – especially that changing tyres could be a source of fun! What’s happening here is a great thing. And the diversity on offer is brilliant. The scheme isn’t telling them ‘you too can join our sport, all you have to do is get rich to join our elite little club’. Instead it’s throwing open doors to what was before perhaps a very closed industry. As Wolff rightly points out, things won’t change overnight. Most of these girls won’t even start work for another half-decade or so. But knowing schemes like this exist certainly fills you with positivity over the future.

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