In the great, inclusive era of racing as one, Formula One and its teams have been quick to try to highlight female presence. Although, when surveyed by ESPN a year ago, the numbers of women as staff (and particularly traveling staff) were woefully low across the paddock, there does seem to be considerable energy for change. Six female drivers are signed to F1 teams; Jamie Chadwick is a Williams junior, Abbi Pulling is an Alpine Academy affiliate driver, Jessica Hawkins is a development driver and ambassador for Aston Martin, Maya Weug and Laura Camps Torras reside within the Ferrari Driver Academy, and karter Luna Fluxa is part of the Mercedes junior program.
It has been 30 years since a woman entered a grand prix, however, and with comments like F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali saying he didn't see a woman getting there within the next half-decade, it's clear that the barriers remain high. And the highest thing in motorsport is always the price.
W Series, a female-only junior championship intended as a ladder step within the pyramid of open-wheel racing, didn't have that. It announced Monday that it would not complete the 2022 season, citing a lack of funding.
The idea was to find the fastest, not the richest, drivers and to take the pressure of funding away from them. Drivers who had scrabbled for money to compete suddenly found themselves with fully paid seats -- yes, in a regional F3 series, but the costs to compete in that sort of machinery run into the hundreds of thousands, a hugely prohibitive amount for many female drivers.
Welcomed onto the F1 support bill with a reasonable amount of noise in 2021, W Series has provided moments of progress for an otherwise largely unchanged grand prix platform. Women were highly visible every weekend, a multiracial driver dominated the series and the first openly LGBTQ+ driver stood on a podium during an F1 weekend.
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Due to run at the U.S. and Mexico City grands prix still this year and despite an 11th-hour attempt to continue, W Series has found itself making the same announcement seen from a lot of female drivers throughout the years: its season ends early. Jamie Chadwick is champion for the third time, the seven races already held enough to award a trophy, and the drivers and championship now wait for what happens next.
A sponsor didn't deliver. It's a routine story in motorsport, and particularly something the women of W Series will be familiar with. Pulling entered the series after her sponsor for British F4 failed to pay up, Alice Powell and Emma Kimilainen were out of competing altogether for years through lack of funds, Sarah Moore and Abbie Eaton struggled to find the funds for a full season of racing in Britain before W Series. It would be a challenge to pick a driver in this series for whom financial difficulties wouldn't be painfully familiar.
So it came as no surprise when W Series CEO Catherine Bond-Muir broke the news to them.
"I had a Zoom call this afternoon with the drivers, and it was incredibly similar to the conversation that I had with them about canceling 2020 because of COVID," she said. "They are drivers in their blood, all they want to do is race, and they were incredibly upset. And at the same time as them being upset, they were understanding.
"The feeling that came out of it was, 'Yeah, this is rubbish, but Catherine, this is what we've dealt with for 20 years. We've had promises of money, we've had contractual commitments for money and it hasn't come through. We've had lots of people saying they're going to support us and it doesn't happen.' So it was more of a feeling of, 'Welcome to our world.'"
Bond-Muir was insistent that the series will run in 2023 and that drivers will still be fully funded in it, but the reality is that W Series faces uncertainty -- despite good intentions and determined commitment -- about whether it can pay out prize money or even hold a ceremony to award the top-finishing drivers this year. Staff are not being let go and relationships with suppliers remain the same, but the truth is that W Series' short career in the spotlight is looking painfully similar to many of the drivers' who needed it.
"The majority of W Series drivers find it extremely difficult to get any form of sponsorship," Bond-Muir acknowledged. "We know that's exactly the same on the male side. With the men's side of the sport it's incredibly tough, but I do think that for the women, it's even tougher."
Collectively, motorsport has taken a nature documentary makers' approach to careers failing. Yes, it is sad that the baby elephant will die without water that the team could give it, but intervening would be immoral. That seems, once again, to be the approach of the F1 paddock that has been happy to post W Series to its social media. As anyone in the field of content creation can attest, "exposure" has never paid a single bill.
There's an oddly persistent view that if a female driver looked as though she was talented enough to get to the upper echelons of motorsport, she'd find herself inundated with offers from teams and sponsors. The view is that anyone who isn't, presumably, simply isn't that good. It's a weird theory in a sport where so many talented young drivers full of potential end up in the gravel trap of unpayable bills.
Simona de Silvestro missed out on a Sauber F1 drive because she couldn't get the funding. Tatiana Calderon's IndyCar drive just evaporated due to a backer being unable to pay. As W Series driver Powell once put it, dripping with inflection, her extended career break was caused by a shortage of one thing and "I didn't run out of talent."
W Series, in its three seasons of running, has not managed to get a woman to F1, but frankly, that would be a little unrealistic as a task for any championship at its level. The space W Series fills is one where a lot of female drivers drop off, at the early stage of single-seater careers, and it's a long way from there to the top. It's more disappointing that no driver has seemed to be able to graduate from the series to Formula 3 but not entirely surprising, given the financial barriers.
Bond-Muir is determined that W Series will see start lights again, even if this season ends under a red flag.
"Not that I need any more reason to fight for W Series, because it is my very essence and I have been fighting like hell for it for four years," She said. "And I will continue to do so until I can't."
For years now, though, good intentions and words of encouragement have been what women in motorsport have found themselves offered instead of money. W Series may not be the perfect solution yet -- or maybe ever -- to addressing gender inequality in motorsport, but it would be unfair to suggest it's done nothing or that it hasn't kickstarted other initiatives such as the FIA and Ferrari's one-driver talent search or Formula 3's testing program for female drivers, to find what support they need to get there and succeed.
In a world where the answer to why there aren't any women in the sport is often that there simply aren't any interested in or capable of contending, W Series answered. Look, here are women; you simply haven't picked them, we did.
It would be extremely unfortunate if the people who say "any woman good enough would get sponsored" watch 18 seats disappear passively, as though they don't hold the purse strings that could support them. W Series' financial issues are to the sort of tune that's deemed a "minor overspend" by the Formula One cost cap.
There's no "natural way" in motorsport, it's about engineering and strategy. If the choice is made, in the wider community, not to save W Series, then it will be a decision like many taken over race weekends: a setup.