W SERIES: WILL IT BE A SUCCESS?
T he launch of W Series – an allfemale racing championship – last October unsurprisingly caused a huge difference of opinion and provoked an enormous reaction on social media from drivers themselves right through to casual fans.
W Series will appear on the DTM support bill for six rounds from May to August this year and aims to provide female racing drivers with an extra stepping stone in their pursuit of top-level drives in motorsport.
It’s also hoped it can raise the profile of its competitors to the outside world with the intention of inspiring a new generation of young girls. It will offer 18 drivers, and two reserves, a fully-funded Formula 3-level drive in Tatuus T-318 machinery and a guaranteed share of a prize fund totalling £1.1 million.
But one of motorsport’s major selling points has always been that it is one of very few sporting disciplines in the world in which women can compete on equal terms with men, even at the highest level. As a result, the cynicism and criticism faced by W Series has been vociferous and at times not without fair reason.
There have been questions over just how damaging it might be to have any future W Series champion struggle upon returning to competing against men, particularly considering just how hard it is for women to break into motorsport in the first place.
There are also concerns that separating male and female competition does more to further gender inequality than it does to improve it.
This criticism is something which W Series CEO and sports lawyer Catherine Bond Muir, who embarked on the project three years ago while on an extended career break, is particularly keen to address.
“I spent six months doing research and initially I was sceptical about the idea, for all of the reasons that have been raised,” she says. “But I’d like to bring up this very emotive word that people are using: segregation.
“We aren’t segregating, what we are doing is creating a new platform for drivers to go on. We’re giving them a free drive to get an experience that otherwise they wouldn’t have had.
“If you look at motorsport at the moment, women are just getting test drives or they’re just a reserve driver. What we’re doing is putting 18 women on the grid, full-time, getting driving and racing experience.
“There is an assumption that our women are stopping competing by joining W Series. To ‘go back’ to competing with men would mean they’d have had to have stopped, and they never have stopped competing with men.”
Porsche Carrera Cup GB driver Esmee Hawkey is among the diverse list of 60 drivers vying for a spot on the grid in the first selection process, which took place in Austria from January 24-28. But Hawkey will still enjoy a full programme on the British Touring Car Championship support bill this year, owing to W Series’ condensed calendar.
“I think this is a great starting point for creating female role models in motorsport,” she says. “We’re not creating a series just like Formula 1 solely for women, for me, that would be segregation. F1 is the top level any driver wants to get to, so to create a top level just for women it would mean there is nothing to aim for.”
Le Mans 24 Hour winner Alex Wurz and 13-time F1 winner David Coulthard – the latter who is also a backer of the series – played a key role in the selection process, alongside former Indycar driver Lyn St James. The same assessment criteria was used in Wurz’s role as part of the FIA Institute Young Driver’s of Excellence Academy from 2011-2015, with focus on roadcar control, driving techniques, simulator exposure, fitness and media ability.
There will be another weekend of selection in southern Europe in the early spring, which will determine the final grid ahead of the first round at Hockenheim on May 3-5.
The initial contest will tell if the W Series can be successful in its aim to boost female participation in motorsport. Considering the inescapable gender imbalance at the moment,it can’t hurt to try something new, even if it has exposed a minefield of opinion. ■