F1 boss Ecclestone spews out more sexist exhaust

Move over, Sepp Blatter. There’s a new contender for the title of the least enlightened head of a sports organization.

Bernie Ecclestone, the 85-year-old billionaire who heads up Formula One racing, said that while women have their strengths, they’re not likely to be driving in F1 any time soon.

And it isn’t because their little feet can’t reach the pedals. It’s because, he said at an advertising conference in London, “I don’t know whether a woman would physically be able to drive an F1 car quickly and they wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

This is right up there with a 2004 suggestion by Blatter, the former head of FIFA, that in order to promote a “more female esthetic,” women soccer players “could, for example, have tighter shorts.”

Ecclestone was forgetting that Lewis Hamilton, the three-time F1 world champion, stands 5-foot-9 and weighs about 150 pounds.

Ecclestone did foresee a measure of diversification in the executive ranks because women “are more competent” and “don’t have massive egos.”

Maybe female executives will make a difference in the sport, in which a woman has not attempted to qualify for a race since Giovanni Amati in 1992. Susie Wolff, the most recent woman to give an F1 career a shot, drove for seven years in the German Touring Car Championship and became the first woman to participate in a grand prix weekend in more than 20 years when she drove in practice sessions in 2014 and 2015.

Ecclestone’s remarks drew the attention of Pippa Mann, who has driven four times in the Indianapolis 500. “Perhaps someone should remind him that IndyCar doesn’t have power steering,” she tweeted, “and we’re strong enough to drive those.”

BBC sports presenter Sonja McLaughlan expressed her anger in a tweet: “Wonder if Bernie Ecclestone could drive an F1 car? Seriously could he see over the steering wheel?”

Of course, this latest hot take is one of the milder ones to come from Ecclestone, who praised Adolf Hitler in 2009 as a man “who was able to get things done.” At the conference this week, he said Russian President Vladimir Putin “should be running Europe” and added his support for Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner.

Ecclestone went on to say immigrants have not made contributions to Britain, perhaps also forgetting Hamilton is the child of immigrants from Grenada.