Girl power by Maurice Hamilton
After a successful inaugural season, the women-only W Series is set to gain further traction as the undercard to F1
For a motorsport category unheard of just over a year ago, W Series has gained impressive traction with the announcement it will provide races on the undercard for two F1 World Championship Grands Prix this year.
The women-only championship affords female drivers an opportunity to go racing in a serious and structured manner rather than as some titivating add-on within an existing formula. An elimination process from an oversubscribed entry resulted in
20 drivers taking part in a programme of six events in 2019.
As a supporting programme for the prestigious DTM (German Touring Car Championship), these races were as professionally run as the squad of scrupulously identical single-seaters prepared under the auspices of Dave Ryan, the uncompromising former crew chief with the Mclaren F1 team.
Jamie Chadwick won the championship at the nal round at Brands Hatch, the Englishwoman’s potential impressive enough to earn a development role with Williams F1. That immediately ticked a box on the list of ambitions established by W Series.
Having female drivers associated with the top ight of motorsport is nothing new. Desiré Wilson not only won a non-championship F1 race, but the driver from Brakpan also drove for Tyrrell at Kyalami in 1981 when the South African Grand Prix was not part of the World Championship. There have been others – Lella Lombardi started 12 Grands Prix in 1975 and ‘76 – but there had never been a cohesive series capable of measuring and highlighting female talent.
W Series is bankrolled by a private individual and won support from David Coulthard’s broadcasting company which brought TV rights straightaway. Nonetheless, the unveiling in late 2018 brought predictable scepticism. Would this be another ostensibly creditable motor racing idea due to go the way of, say, A1 Grand Prix, an international series driven by clever ideas and promotion but eventually beaten by politics and greed? Would the media-attractive theme of women-only gradually lose its lustre as the spotlight dimmed and the championship worked its way through Assen in the Netherlands and Zolder in Belgium? Not if Catherine Bond Muir had anything to do with it.
As the driving force behind the series, Bond Muir used a lack of motor racing experience to her advantage as she employed business pragmatism rather than a romantic ideal and brought onboard free-thinking specialists in key areas. Untrammelled by the entrenched view that women could never cut it as top- ight drivers, Bond Muir believed in giving them the chance to prove otherwise.
The impression created by W Series in its rst year was good enough to have Formula One approach Bond Muir – rather than the other way round – about playing a supporting role in the United States and Mexican Grands Prix in October and November. It’s a clever move that suits both sides.
The undercard in Grands Prix beyond Europe has often been laughable – if it exists at all – as some organisers rely totally on F1 and ignore that spectators and their families expect a full day’s entertainment for their substantial admission fee. Being part of the programme in Texas and Mexico will spotlight the series and highlight a unique international opportunity for women.
It’s also useful for W Series to be away from the European GPS, where the support programme usually runs events for GP3 and Formula 2. With the greatest respect to W Series, the racing can be pedestrian when compared with the frantic cut-and-thrust of the junior categories as young GP hopefuls go for it in front of an in uential audience.
The aim of W Series is simply to show what’s possible. It’s true Chadwick and the rest of the eld have been racing only against each other, albeit in a frequently entertaining way. At the end of the day, it was impossible to judge just how good Chadwick and her competitors really were.
But the same observation applies to any formula when assessing the respective champion’s chances of being able to withstand the pressures associated with the next step on the racing ladder. What can be said about W Series is that the rst season, rather than being the predicted failure, pushed aside stereotypes while helping female racers succeed. As the F1 establishment has now recognised, this is long overdue.